New Fodder for War Critics

WASHINGTON - The leaking of a trove of U.S. documents about the Afghanistan war has put the Obama administration on the defensive and may deepen doubts in Congress about prospects for turning around the faltering conflict.

The 76,000 reports made public late Sunday by the website WikiLeaks included dozens of new disclosures about Pakistani intelligence agencies' assistance to Afghan insurgents, corruption in the U.S.-backed Kabul government, and numerous incidents of U.S. troops accidentally killing civilians.

There were few bombshells in the material, which was written by military and civilian officials in Afghanistan from 2004 to late 2009 and covers numerous subjects, from daily casualty notifications and routine descriptions of attacks to sensitive intelligence tips and accounts of meetings.

Most of the material covers events during the Bush administration and before President Obama ordered more than 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and instituted a new strategy aimed at turning around the war.

But the sheer volume of previously undisclosed information and the attention the leaks focused on the conduct of the war were likely to provide new fodder for critics and new pressure on Obama to show results by the end of the year, when he said he will review the strategy.

"These documents don't offer fundamentally new information," said Kristin Lord, the vice president of the Center for a New American Security, "but they do provide specific stories that could help opponents make a strong political case against the war. I do think there could be some political fallout, purely because it will put the administration on the defensive."

A $37 billion war-funding bill, which has yet to pass Congress, could be a target for lawmakers whose doubts about the effort have deepened with the leaked documents.

Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D., Wis.), an opponent of Obama's decision to commit more troops last year, said Monday that "the disclosures make it clear that there is no military solution in Afghanistan."

Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat who chairs a Homeland Security intelligence subcommittee and is more skeptical about the current state of the war, said the documents "reinforce the view that the war in Afghanistan is not going well."

Republicans reacted with outrage over the leak. Sen. John McCain of Arizona called the revelations in the documents "old news."

WikiLeaks orchestrated the disclosure for maximum effect, providing the database of documents to the New York Times, the German magazine Der Spiegel, and Britain's Guardian newspaper a month in advance before releasing them publicly on the website Sunday.

"I'd like to see this material taken seriously and investigated, and new policies, if not prosecutions, result from it," Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.org, said Monday.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs insisted that the leaks uncovered no important issues that had not already been brought to light. "There weren't any revelations," he said.

But the Obama administration did not try to dismiss the information, since it came from the U.S. government's own unfiltered files. Instead, administration officials criticized WikiLeaks for disclosing classified information and attacked its motives.

The secretive whistle-blower site "is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes U.S. policy in Afghanistan," said a White House official, who insisted on anonymity.

Officials said the Pentagon was investigating whether the source of the leak was Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old Army private who was charged in July with leaking information to WikiLeaks, including video showing an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq that killed two Reuters news agency employees and 10 other civilians.

Manning was charged with transmitting classified information and could face up to 52 years in prison. Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned Manning in to authorities in May, told Good Morning America on Monday that he suspected Manning was the source of the Afghanistan documents.

But Lamo said he did not think Manning had the technical expertise to pull off such a large removal of classified documents by himself.

Although experts saw little surprising in the reports, the documents offered vivid illustrations of corruption, waste, and apparent duplicity that may resonate with average Americans. Even without new revelations, the reports have the potential to further undermine public support.

Several reports showed that U.S. commanders had specific information that Pakistan's spy service was helping Afghan insurgents. For example, on June 19, 2006, one report said, operatives of the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's secretive military intelligence agency, met with Taliban leaders in Quetta, a southern Pakistani city, and pressed them to mount attacks on Maruf, a district of Kandahar.

The allegations drew angry denials from officials in Islamabad, who dismissed the charges as baseless.

U.S. officials have long privately acknowledged their concerns that ISI personnel had ties to extremists, and a delegation headed by National Security Adviser James Jones went to Islamabad in May in part to pressure Pakistan officials to sever ISI ties with insurgents.

The leaked reports also reveal new information about insurgents' capabilities and U.S. military problems.

In May 2007, one said, an American CH-47 transport helicopter was hit by what witnesses described as a heat-seeking surface-to-air missile, killing five Americans, a Briton, and a Canadian. The Pentagon did not disclose in its public release about the incident that the helicopter may have been downed in an apparent surface-to-air missiles strike.

The reports showed militia leaders skimming from the wages of their men, Pakistani officials helping the Taliban prepare attacks, and Afghan authorities stealing U.S. aid to an orphanage. In October 2009, a police commander raped a 16-year-old girl, then shot a bodyguard who refused to shoot a civilian complaining about it, one report says.

Such disclosures may deepen doubts about the war strategy that already have been growing. "Those policies are at a critical stage, and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent," said Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

The WikiLeaks documents also suggest Iran has given far stronger support to Afghan insurgents than has been officially acknowledged - arming, training, and paying the groups to undermine the Afghan government.

U.S. officials have given varying assessments about Iran's support for Afghan extremists. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in March that, "so far, as best we can tell, [support] has been pretty limited" and "not a major problem for us."

What WikiLeaks is, how

it operates, and the legal implications of its work.

The U.S. and Pakistan say documents paint an incomplete portrait of their partnership.

Afghan government says 52 civilians killed by NATO rocket - which the coalition disputes.