The Afghan War documents leak, also called the Afghan War Diary, is a collection of internal U.S. military logs of the war in Afghanistan published by WikiLeaks on 2010. The logs consist of over 91,000 Afghan war documents covering the period between January 2004 and December 2009. Most of the documents are classified secret. As of 28 July 2010, only 75,000 have been released to the public, a move WikiLeaks said was "part of a harm minimization process demanded by [the] source". Prior to releasing the initial 75,000 documents, WikiLeaks made the logs available to The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel in its German and English online edition, which published reports in line with an agreement made earlier the same day, 25 July 2010.
The leak, one of the largest in U.S. military history, revealed information on the deaths of civilians, increased Taliban attacks, and involvement by Pakistan and Iran in the insurgency. WikiLeaks did not review all of the records before release because of the volume of material. A WikiLeaks spokesman said they "just can't imagine that someone could go through 76,000 documents." WikiLeaks says it does not know the source of the leaked data. The three outlets which had received the documents in advance, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, compared them with independent reports and found them to be authentic.
The New York Times described the leak as "a six-year archive of classified military documents [that] offers an unvarnished and grim picture of the Afghan war". The Guardian called the material "one of the biggest leaks in U.S. military history ... a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency". Der Spiegel wrote that "the editors in chief of Spiegel, The New York Times and The Guardian were 'unanimous in their belief that there is a justified public interest in the material'."
Some time after the first dissemination by WikiLeaks, the U.S. Justice Department considered using the Espionage Act of 1917 to prevent WikiLeaks from posting the remaining 15,000 secret war documents it claimed to possess.
Background In June 2010, The Guardian journalist Nick Davies and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange established that the U.S. Army had built a huge database with six years of sensitive military intelligence material. WikiLeaks wanted to release the material immediately, but Davies convinced him to let The Guardian examine it first. In an interview with the UK's Channel 4, Assange said that "we have a stated commitment... to get censored material out and never to take it down". He contrasted the group with other media outlets by saying that "other journalists try to verify sources. We don't do that, we verify documents." He denied that the group has an inherent bias against the Afghanistan war, saying that "We don't have a view about whether the war should continue or stop – we do have a view that it should be prosecuted as humanely as possible." However, he also said that he believed the leaked information would cause global public opinion to view the war negatively.
In August 2010, Assange announced that they had received word the Pentagon wanted to discuss harm minimisation and sanitizing the Afghan war documents, and that "contact has been established." Geoff Morrell, press secretary for the Pentagon, alleged WikiLeaks "misrepresented both the level of engagement we have had as well as our position on this matter." Bryan Whitman, spokesman for the Pentagon, denied they were willing to collaborate with the group and said they'd scheduled a call with a WikiLeaks lawyer, Timothy Matusheski, who missed the call. Matusheski denied making an appointment but said he had missed a call from them. Matusheski said that when he'd previously spoken with the US government, he mentioned that Assange had told him about a network where the government could access all of the documents and make comments and suggest redactions. Jeh Charles Johnson, general counsel for the Pentagon, sent Matusheski a letter about the missed call and stated the US government's position was that "WikiLeaks is holding the property of the U.S. Government, including classified documents and sensitive national security information that has not been authorized for release. Further, it is the view of the Department of Defense that WikiLeaks obtained this material in circumstances that constitute a violation of United States law, and that as long as WikiLeaks holds this material, the violation of the law is ongoing." WikiLeaks only reviewed about 2,000 documents in detail and used a tagging and keyword system. Assange said that a court might decide some things were crimes, but added that "army personnel are basically engineers, who build roads and fire guns. They are frank and direct, and the top people mostly won't lie to you unless they're repeating a lie that someone else told them".
An Obama administration statement disputed the self-reported status of WikiLeaks, stating that it "is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes U.S. policy in Afghanistan". Will Heaven of The Daily Telegraph said that WikiLeaks had not been politically neutral when it fed information to left-leaning newspapers (The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel) instead of releasing the data openly. He said that the selectivity of the leak "contravene[d] its own mission statement – that crowdsourcing and open data are paramount". The Toronto Sun has referred to Assange's statements "This material shines light on the everyday brutality and squalor of war" and "The archive will change public opinion and it will change the opinion of people in positions of political and diplomatic influence" as evidence that he has an anti-war mission.
According to Daniel Domscheit-Berg, four days before the release, Assange hadn't told the WikiLeaks staff members preparing it that he had agreed to redact all the names. Since WikiLeaks couldn't redact the files in time, its media partners agreed to withholding 14,000 documents that contained most of the names.
Issues raised
Allegations of foreign support for the Taliban
Pakistan According to Der Spiegel, "the documents clearly show that the Pakistani intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence (usually known as the ISI) is the most important accomplice the Taliban has outside of Afghanistan". The New York Times was especially alarmed by the level of collusion with the Taliban, having concluded that Pakistan "allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders". The Guardian, however, did not think there was "a convincing smoking gun" for complicity between Pakistan intelligence services and the Taliban.
In particular, the leaks discuss an alleged incident in which former ISI spy chief Hamid Gul met with Afghan insurgents in January 2009, occurring right after alleged Pakistani al-Qaeda figure Osama al-Kini's death by a CIA drone attack. "The meeting attendees were saddened by the news of Zamarai's death and discussed plans to complete Zamarai's last mission by facilitating the movement of a suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device from Pakistan to Afghanistan through the Khan Pass", leaked reports said. The New York Times stated that it could not confirm whether or not the attack ever took place.
The initial web article in The New York Times on the subject, appearing 25 July was written by Mark Mazzetti, Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt, and Andrew Lehren, and titled "Pakistan Spy Service Aids Insurgents, Reports Assert". It was the lead article in 26 July print edition of the Times. The article provided a wide range of excerpts from the paper, at some points focusing on coalition successes, and at other times excerpting sections that highlighted coalition failures. Many of the excerpts illustrated American frustration with local involvement, quoting the sources, noting that "glimpses of what appear to be Pakistani skullduggery contrast sharply with the frequently rosy public pronouncements of Pakistan as an ally by American officials".
The Guardian had a very different take. Its Sunday, 25 July 2010 article by Declan Walsh states:
But for all their eye-popping details, the intelligence files, which are mostly collated by junior officers relying on informants and Afghan officials, fail to provide a convincing smoking gun for ISI complicity. Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated. The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials – and scenarios repeatedly pop up. And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred. A retired senior American officer said ground-level reports were considered to be a mixture of "rumours, bullshit and second-hand information" and were weeded out as they passed up the chain of command.
The Obama administration, in response to the leaks, re-expressed their long-held doubts about links between Pakistan intelligence agents and Afghan insurgents. An anonymous official said to Al Arabiya, "I don't think anyone who follows this issue will find it surprising that there are concerns about ISI and safe havens in Pakistan".
Iran Evidence that Iran provided extensive assistance to the Taliban was also revealed. Coming from sources such as Afghan spies and paid informants, Iranian involvement in Afghanistan steadily widened from 2004 to today and constituted armaments, money, and physical deployment of anti-NATO militants. The government of Iran denied supporting the militants.
North Korea The documents, wrote journalist Jeff Stein of The Washington Post, stated that Hezb-e-Islami party leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Amin al-Haq, a financial advisor to Osama bin Laden, both flew to North Korea on 19 November 2005, and purchased remote-controlled rockets to be used against American and coalition aircraft. Stein cautioned that he found no corroborating reports of North Korean involvement in Taliban armaments dealing.
Civilian casualties
Hundreds of civilians have been wounded or killed by coalition forces in several instances that were not previously revealed. The press listed several examples of such previously unreported incidents of civilian injuries and deaths. David Leigh of The Guardian wrote:
In one incident, a U.S. patrol fired 43 rounds at a bus, wounding 13 and killing two of its passengers. The bus was approaching a stopped convoy in foul weather, swerving in and out of the median and did not stop in response to warning shots and flashbangs. After more concentrated fire, the bus crashed into the rear of one of the convoy vehicles. Most of the wounded were taken in for medical treatment.
On 4 March 2007, in the Shinwar shooting, U.S. Marines opened fire on civilians after witnessing a suicide bombing and supposedly coming under small arms fire. The Guardian reported their actions:
The marines made a frenzied escape [from the scene of the bombing], opening fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way – teenage girls in the fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded.
The military report of the incident (written by the same soldiers involved in it) later failed to make any reference to the deaths and injuries and none of the soldiers involved were charged or disciplined.