Leaks Add to Pressure on White House Over Strategy
By ERIC SCHMITT and HELENE COOPER
Published: July 26, 2010
WASHINGTON — The White House sought to reassert control over the public debate on the Afghanistan war on Monday as political reaction to the disclosure of a six-year archive of classified military documents increased the pressure on President Obama to defend his war strategy.
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs discussed leaked military documents on Monday.
Readers’ Comments and Reaction
Share your thoughts about the classified documents on the At War blog, which is following the reaction to the War Logs report.
Post a CommentTalk to the Newsroom
Editors and reporters who worked on these articles will be answering questions about the coverage of the material.
- E-Mail Your Questions to askthetimes@nytimes.com
Room for Debate
Fallout from the Afghanistan War Files
What 92,000 classified documents reveal about the Taliban's strength and American security.
The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, struck a similar tone on Monday. “We are in this region of the world because of what happened on 9/11,” Mr. Gibbs said. “Ensuring that there is not a safe haven in Afghanistan by which attacks against this country and countries around the world can be planned. That’s why we’re there, and that’s why we’re going to continue to make progress on this relationship.”
On Capitol Hill, leading Democratic lawmakers said the documents, with their fine-grain portrayal of a war faring even more poorly than two administrations have previously portrayed, would intensify congressional scrutiny of Mr. Obama’s policy.
“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,” Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat who heads the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement.
The House this week takes up a critical war-financing bill and a Senate panel is expected to hold a hearing on Mr. Obama’s choice to head the military’s Central Command, Gen. James N. Mattis, who would oversee military operations in Afghanistan.
While Congressional and administration officials said the disclosure of the documents probably would not jeopardize the financing bill or General Mattis’s expected confirmation, it could complicate how the White House tries to achieves its goals in Afghanistan.
In recent weeks, Obama administration officials have been stressing the importance of Afghanistan to the United States. Richard Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said the war effort came down to a matter of American national security, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, struck a similar tone on Monday.
“We are in this region of the world because of what happened on 9/11,” Mr. Gibbs said. “Ensuring that there is not a safe haven in Afghanistan by which attacks against this country and countries around the world can be planned. That’s why we’re there, and that’s why we’re going to continue to make progress on this relationship.”
The White House appeared to be focusing most of its ire toward Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.org, the Web site that provided access to some 92,000 secret military reports to The New York Times and two other news organizations, Der Spiegel in Germany and The Guardian in Britain. The documents span the period from January 2004 through December 2009.
White House officials e-mailed select transcripts of an interview Mr. Assange conducted with Der Spiegel, underlining the quote the White House apparently found most offensive. Among them was Mr. Assange’s assertion, “I enjoy crushing bastards.”
Mr. Obama was already facing an uphill battle on the way to a scheduled review of his Afghanistan war strategy in December, and administration officials have been bracing for a political fight as they try to defend the strategy at a time when gains seem limited.
At a news conference in London on Monday, Mr. Assange defended the release of the documents.
“I’d like to see this material taken seriously and investigated, and new policies, if not prosecutions result from it,” he said.
The Times and the two other news organizations agreed not to disclose anything that was likely to put lives at risk or jeopardize military or antiterrorist operations, and The Times redacted the names of Afghan informants and other sensitive information from the documents it published. WikiLeaks said it withheld posting some 15,000 documents for the same reason. Pakistan strongly denied the suggestions in the leaked United States military records that its military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency.
A senior ISI official, speaking on condition of anonymity under standard practice, sharply condemned the reports as “part of the malicious campaign to malign the spy organization” and said the ISI would “continue to eradicate the menace of terrorism with or without the help of the West.”
Expressing dismay over the reports, the official said the Pakistan military and its spy organization had suffered tremendously while leading the forefront of the war against terror.
“Pakistan is the biggest victim of terrorism,” he said. “Why then are we still targeted?” he asked.
Calling the reports raw, uncorroborated and unverified, the official said: “In the field of intelligence, any piece of data has to be corroborated, analyzed and substantiated by multiple sources. Until then it remains raw data, and it can be anything.”
Farhatullah Babar, the spokesman for President Asif Ali Zardari, dismissed the reports and said that Pakistan remained “a part of a strategic alliance of the United States in the fight against terrorism.”
He added: “Such allegations have been regurgitated in the past. Also, these represent low-level intelligence reports and do not represent a convincing smoking gun. I do not see any convincing evidence.”
Mr. Babar questioned how Pakistan could possibly have the kind of connections to the Taliban that some of the reports suggest, asking if “those who are alleging that Pakistan is playing a double game are also asserting that President Zardari is presiding over an apparatus that is coordinating attacks on the general headquarters, mosques, shrines, schools and killing Pakistani citizens?”
He continued, “There was a time when many people believed that former President Musharraf was running with the hare and hunting with the hound,” suggesting that any such double-dealing lay with the president’s predecessor and nemesis. “We believe that era is over.”
Pakistani television news channels did not report on the content of the documents but carried brief reports that noted the American government’s condemnation of the leak and perhaps a clip of the news conference by Mr. Assange. One editor of a major news channel, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was pressure not to cover the topic.
Most of Pakistan’s news coverage on Monday focused on a suicide bomb aimed at the house of a provincial minister of information.
The web portal of Dawn, the country’s most prestigious daily, carried an Associated Press report in which an ISI official dismissed the reports..
The Express Tribune, a daily newspaper from Karachi, noted that American officials had held long-standing concerns about ISI links to the Taliban, though its report led with the government’s condemnation of the leak.
Popular Pakistani blogs had nothing on the WikiLeaks trove by Monday afternoon.
Bina Shah, a novelist based in Karachi, wrote on Twitter: “Why is nobody in Pakistan discussing the WikiLeaks story? It’s sensational.”
While Pakistani officials protested, a spokesman for the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said Mr. Karzai was not upset by the documents and did not believe the picture they painted was unfair.
The Karzai government offered no pushback to accounts in the reports that describe how the war effort has been hurt by corruption and the questionable loyalty and competence of the Afghan government, police and army. Instead, they focused on other problems outlined in the documents, including civilian deaths caused by the American and NATO militaries and Pakistani complicity with militants.
On Monday, Mr. Karzai said a NATO strike had killed 52 civilians in a remote village in Helmand Province three days earlier.
Speaking after a news conference in Kabul, Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Waheed Omar, was asked whether there was anything in the leaked documents that angered Mr. Karzai or that he thought unfair.
“No, I don’t think so,” Mr. Omar replied.
He described the documents as being mainly “about civilian casualties and efforts to hide civilian casualties, and the role of a certain intelligence agency in Afghanistan,” a reference to the ISI.
“The president’s initial reaction was, ‘Look, this is nothing new,’ ” he said.
Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr. from Kabul, Afghanistan; Adam B. Ellick and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan; and Caroline Crampton from London.
Talk to the Newsroom
The War Logs Articles
Published: July 25, 2010
The New York Times on Sunday published highlights of a six-year archive of classified military documents that was obtained by an organization called WikiLeaks. The documents cover the period from 2004 to 2009, and portray American forces as being starved for resources and battling an insurgency that was getter larger and better coordinated year by year. The Times, along with The Guardian newspaper in London and the German magazine Der Spiegel, was given access to the material several weeks ago, and The Times has spent a month examining the data for disclosures and patterns and verifying the information for the articles that it published Sunday.
Editors and reporters who worked on the articles are available to answer questions from readers about The Times’s coverage of the material. E-mail your questions to askthetimes@nytimes.com. To read the most recent answer, click here.
WikiLeaks, the White House and The Times
Q. Your note to readers stated “at the request of the White House, the Times also urged Wikileaks to withhold any harmful material from its website.”
Please define harmful material, and who specifically at the White House made this request. Wikileaks, according to the Times, has agreed to withhold documents for a few days to redact individual names. Is the so-called harmful material just related to protecting individuals, or was the government broadening its request beyond this? Did the government try to pressure your newspaper in any way in an attempt to stop publication of the article(s)? If so, what was your response? — Karen Garcia
Q. First, let me say I admire your journalistic courage in publishing this story. I also have a few questions: Have you contacted the White House and gave them access to the logs you were given access to by Wikileaks before you published the story? Did any of the editors or journalists meet with officials regarding these logs? Did they ask you not to publish these logs or some specific logs concerning certain aspects? What about the legal aspect of having leaked classified material at your possession? Would that put you at risk?
Were you afraid of the public response to this NYTimes-Wikileaks joint project? (publishing classified information, the possible damage to national security etc.). Was there any person inside the NYTimes that thought you should not be a part of this and just cover the story after Wikileaks publish the logs? Were you surprised at the White House’s condemnation? — Yael Golan
Answer from Bill Keller, executive editor: First, The Times has no control over WikiLeaks — where it gets its material, what it releases and in what form. To say that it is an independent organization is a monumental understatement. The decision to post this secret military archive on a Web site accessible to the public was WikiLeaks’, not ours. WikiLeaks was going to post the material even if The Times decided to ignore it. We, along with the Guardian newspaper in London and the German magazine Der Spiegel, were offered access to the material for about a month before its release; that was the extent of our connection.
We used that month to study the material, try to assess its value and credibility, weigh it against our own reporters’ experience of the war and against other sources, and then tell our readers what it all meant. In doing so, we took great care both to put the information in context and to excise anything that would put lives at risk or jeopardize ongoing military missions.
What does that mean in practice? Obviously we did not disclose the names of Afghans, except for public officials, who have cooperated with the war effort, either in our articles or in the selection of documents we posted on our own Web site. We did not disclose anything that would compromise intelligence-gathering methods. We erred, if at all, on the side of prudence. For example, when a document reported that a certain aircraft left a certain place at a certain time and arrived at another place at a certain time, we omitted those details on the off chance that an enemy could gain some small tactical advantage by knowing the response time of military aircraft.
The administration, while strongly condemning WikiLeaks for making these documents public, did not suggest that The Times should not write about them. On the contrary, in our discussions prior to the publication of our articles, White House officials, while challenging some of the conclusions we drew from the material, thanked us for handling the documents with care, and asked us to urge WikiLeaks to withhold information that could cost lives. We did pass along that message.
We don’t discuss our internal editorial and legal deliberations, but the decision to publish was a subject of extensive discussion over the past four weeks, involving a variety of viewpoints, as you would expect for a subject this complex.
Lives at Risk?
Q. You said that: “The Times has taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests. The Times and the other news organizations agreed at the outset that we would not disclose — either in our articles or any of our online supplementary material — anything that was likely to put lives at risk or jeopardize military or antiterrorist operations.”
But, our National Security Advisor said last night that: “The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.”
Do you agree with Gen. Jones that publishing the material “could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security” — or is he wrong? — R. Healing
Answer from Bill Keller: Does the WikiLeaks’ release put lives at risk? In the end, WikiLeaks temporarily withheld about 15,000 of the approximately 92,000 documents for what it described as a “harm minimization process.” It’s too early to tell how much that reduced the potential threat. In their raw form, we believe the documents could put lives at risk — especially Afghans who are identified as having cooperated with the NATO force, but also Americans and NATO allies, by providing information about tactics and intelligence-gathering. That is why we took great pains to eliminate such references from our coverage.
Regarding Pakistan
Q. The article was very informative and memorable. I have always been skeptical of Pakistan’s support for the USA and thought that it was a double play attitude. I am not an expert in these matters but it is abundantly obvious that there must be a connection of support or else this war would have finished a while back.
The point I don’t quite understand is this: what is the benefit for the USA to support Pakistan as well as Afghanistan? Why must the US Administration feel they owe it to those countries thir support, military, financial and in human costs and sacrifices? Why can’t they be left to their own destiny? Have you considered writing a report in which these issues are more openly discussed and the public made aware of? — Al Grasso
Q. Do you believe that one of the primary reasons we are still in Afghanistan is because Pakistan has nukes? — MC, Texas
Answer from Susan Chira, Foreign editor: The United States has poured so much money and diplomatic effort into courting Pakistan precisely because it needs its help for the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan quietly allows the C.I.A. to fly drones that target and kill militants in the tribal areas of Pakistan, mostly off limits to American soldiers, and the American military says Pakistani intelligence has cooperated in providing information to guide the drones. Pakistan is also now a nuclear state, and the United States does not want it to become a failed or rogue one, with the danger that its nuclear arsenal would seep out or fall into the wrong hands.
The United States needs Pakistani cooperation to keep supply lines that transit Pakistan to Afghanistan open. On the other hand, militants clearly use the tribal areas that span the two countries as a safe haven; Osama bin Laden has long been believed to be hiding there. As the documents suggest, Americans have long suspected Pakistan’s spy agency of helping the Afghan Taliban, precisely so that Pakistan can play a strong role in Afghanistan after the Americans leave. American officials have confronted Pakistan outside the public eye to push for more action, and the Obama administration’s statement about our article suggests that the United States is not fully satisfied with Pakistani cooperation in this area and is pushing for more.
As to why the Americans are fighting in Afghanistan, the rationale has been that the Taliban harbored Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan, allowing them to plot and direct terrorist attacks against the United States and Europe, so that there is a direct national security interest. There is an ongoing debate about how best to do that — with troops on the ground or with an increasing reliance on remotely-operated drones to kill militants.
Is This a Big Deal?
Q. This is juicy stuff, but anytime there is a major leak of classified info, it appears juicy to those of us on the outside. I just don't see, however, the compelling freedom of the press, or journalistic responsibility, etc., that compels the NYT and others to make such a big deal of the specific intel. — Stephen Templeton, Pooler, Ga.
Answer from Bill Keller: We gave this secret archive a great deal of effort and space because it is important on its merits, because it is complicated, and because the fact that such secrets were obtained and published by WikiLeaks is newsworthy in itself.
There are few issues as important to our readers as a war that has now gone on for nine years at tremendous cost. These documents are an extraordinary window on that war from the vantage point of the people who are fighting it. But this archive is not easily reduced to a headline. While there are some interesting eye-openers — such as the disclosure that the insurgents have been employing heat-seeking missiles — most of the insights are matters of degree. Our reporters have written a lot about corruption and internecine conflict within the Afghan security forces, but these documents bring that to light in a new way. We've reported several times the suspicions about the relationship between Pakistani intelligence and the insurgents, but we have not before seen such vivid evidence of it. In a nutshell, we have known the war was an extraordinarily difficult undertaking, but we now understand that it is even more difficult than most of us knew.
Finally, we wanted to give readers an intimate sense of what this war looks like and feels like to the soldiers in the field. To do that, and to render the often cryptic language of military communications in a way that is understandable, takes room. Chris Chivers, one of our most experienced war correspondents, who has written harrowing firsthand accounts of combat in Afghanistan, had the idea of pulling together the incident reports from a single lonely outpost over the course of its three years — from optimistic beginnings to devastating end. There is nothing in that account that amounts to a scoop, but I came away from it feeling I had been given an education.
Coverage of Civilian Deaths?
Q. The difference between the Guardian and NY Times reporting of the Afghanistan War Logs documents is absolutely astounding. The issues with Pakistan's support for the Taliban are newsworthy, but the information in the documents relating to civilian deaths are hardly mentioned in the NY Times reporting, and this is shameful. These details have not surfaced until now, whereas speculation about Pakistani support for the Taliban has been reported on before. I implore you to publish an article highlighting these aspects of the reports. I respect the NY Times editorial decisions immensely; we're counting on you! — Aaron Strong
Answer from Bill Keller: I can't speak for the Guardian, but all of the major episodes of civilian deaths described in the War Logs had been previously reported in The Times, often on the front page. I'll link to a long roster of our coverage at the end of this answer. (One of our reporters, Stephen Farrell, was kidnapped by the Taliban while reporting on the deaths of civilians in Kunduz.) That is why we did not treat the incident reports on civilian casualties as new revelations. What did strike us in the leaked documents, and was highlighted in our War Log articles, was the frequency of incidents where civilians died by ones or twos. Those episodes sometimes go undisclosed and rarely get the same level of public attention as the bigger ones, but they, too, contribute to Afghan resentment.
Here are our reports on civilian deaths in the early part of the war:
- Flaw in U.S. Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead
- October Strike on Taliban Hit Civilians, Survivors Say
- Shocked Afghans Criticize U.S. Strike; Toll Is Some 40 Dead and 100 Wounded
- Coalition Strike in Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
- U.S. to Investigate Deaths Related to 2 Battles in Afghanistan
Here are accounts of the Azizabad airstrike:
- Afghan Leader Assails Airstrike He Says Killed 95
- U.S. Killed 90, Including 60 Children, in Afghan Village, U.N. Finds
- Evidence Points to Civilian Toll in Afghan Raid
- U.S. Admits Civilians Died in Afghan Raids
Here is reporting on the Kunduz airstrike.
Roundups of civilian casualties in the later war are here:
Some articles on recent checkpoint killings are here:
- Shootings of Afghans on Rise at Checkpoints
- Tighter Rules Fail to Stem Deaths of Innocent Afghans at Checkpoints
- NATO Apologizes for Killing Unarmed Afghans in Car
And today we reported on a NATO strike that Afghan officials say killed 52 civilians.
Three Publications, Three Analyses?
Q. I was wondering whether the Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel cooperated in their analysis of the WikiLeaks' documents. — Sami
Q. The account in the Guardian, which received the WikiLeaks material at the same time as the New York Times, was much more skeptical about the involvement of the Pakistan intelligence service than the Times account, especially with regard to some of the more far-out schemes such as the poisoned beer. How does the Times decide how much credence to lend the reported material? — Jhurwi
Q. It has been pointed out by other news sources that the NY Times and The Guardian came up with different amounts of involvement by the Pakistan’s ISI and Taliban insurgents. The Times seems to give the ISI a larger role in working with insurgents while The Guardian appears to dismiss the claims that the ISI and Taliban were working together. Is there any definitive proof that the ISI is working with the Taliban or other insurgents and if so, what would that mean for Pakistani-U.S. Relations considering the U.S. has given Pakistan millions of dollars to fight terrorism? — Jason Betzner
Answer from Mark Mazzetti, national security correspondent: Although the three news outlets had access to the same material, each publication worked independently to analyze and draw its own conclusions from the documents.
In some cases, as you point out, The Times came to somewhat different conclusions than either The Guardian or Der Spiegel. The ISI data buttresses past reporting in The Times and elsewhere that Pakistan’s spy agency is aiding Afghan militants, but we also showed the documents to American officials to get their take on the validity of some of the intelligence reports.
The officials we spoke to said that they couldn’t vouch for each individual report, but said that revelations about the ISI in the documents were consistent with other classified American intelligence about the operations of Pakistani spies.
Actually, I think that both The Guardian and The Times found the report about the poisoned beer to be pretty far-fetched and presented it that way.
Inside the American government, for years there has been a search for “smoking gun” proof about ISI activities inside Afghanistan. Such definitive proof is usually hard to come by. In July 2008, after militants bombed the Indian embassy in Kabul, the deputy director of the C.I.A. traveled to Islamabad to show Pakistani officials what the Americans purported to be definitive proof — in the form of electronic intercepts —of ISI complicity in the bombing.
That was a particularly rocky period in American-Pakistani relations, but neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration has ever seriously considered cutting off American military aid to Pakistan.