Unsolicited advice

4 Comments

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  Elizabeth July 27, 2010 at 5:07 pm

  Agreed. After the dust settles, I don’t think that the public is going to have much more information than we had before WikiLeakGate (think that will catch on?). It’s more about what the incident says about the state of the USG’s transparency and AfPak strategy–namely, that both are in tenuous shape–than what the documents themselves actually say.
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  David July 27, 2010 at 5:16 pm

  Completely agree, I’m still not sure what is actually new information here, and I’m puzzled that any of this constitutes a threat to our security. The only thing that seemed remotely interesting was that the Taliban had acquired surface to air missiles, although seeing as we flooded the country with those things in the 80s, I don’t thinks this is terribly surprising.
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  elizabeth July 27, 2010 at 11:06 pm

  Adam Weinstein has an insightful (and rather entertaining) analysis of the documents’ overall point and impact over at Mother Jones:
  http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/07/wikileaks-afghan-documents-and-me-source

  He closes by saying that these documents don’t do much for those who have already been following the wars and for those who were not, perhaps the leak is a “good thing.” Maybe that’s the takeaway from this whole incident: a broadened awareness that no, nearly a decade in, we don’t have it all figured out–in fact we seem to have even less figured out than it seemed before and that’s the problem, not the individual less-than-shocking pieces of information in the documents.
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  Barak July 29, 2010 at 3:23 am

  I think its a good thing. We have not had enough debate about the merits of the war compared to how much money we are throwing at it. Since 9/11, our assumption has been that the Taliban is a threat to our national security. To me this is a hypothesis, not a fact.