Digesting the Wikileaks document dump

Posted By Stephen M. Walt Monday, July 26, 2010 - 12:43 PM Share

I'm just starting to digest the Wikileaks material on Afghanistan, but suffice it to say that it confirms all my misgivings about our current commitment there. As I've said since I started blogging, the stakes in Afghanistan are not worth the current level of cost and effort, and the prerequisites for a meaningful "victory" are lacking. Obama made a basic error when he escalated the war effort (not once but twice), and our best hope now is to shift from a largely military strategy towards one that reduces our military footprint, emphasizes power-sharing, political reconciliation, and broader diplomatic engagement with other regional stake-holders. If you want a quick survey of other reactions, look at the digest offered by Andrew Sullivan here.

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MARTY MARTEL

7:28 PM ET

July 26, 2010

US deserves Pakistan's duplicity

After having poured billions of dollars in aid, US deserves to be treated with such contempt by Pakistani establishment (Pakistani Army, ISI and Government) since US has intentionally ignored Pakistani complicity in Afghan insurgency until now.

Files leaked by Wikileaks more or less corroborate ‘The sun in the sky’ report published by Harvard Professor Matt Waldman from London School of Economics on 6/13/2010.

That report states that “support for the Afghan Taliban is ‘official Pakistani ISI policy’ and is backed at the highest levels of Pakistan’s civilian administration. Pakistan appears to be playing a double game of astonishing magnitude. There is thus a strong case that the ISI orchestrates, sustains and shapes the overall insurgent campaign in Afghanistan.”

According to Afghan Taliban commanders’ interviews with Matt Waldman, the Pakistani ISI orchestrates, sustains and strongly influences the Taliban insurgency movement. The Afghan Taliban commanders also say that ISI gives sanctuary to both Taliban and Haqqani groups, and provides huge support in terms of training, funding, munitions, and supplies. In the words of these Afghan Taliban commanders, this is ‘as clear as the sun in the sky’.

The ISI is said to compensate families of suicide bombers to the tune of 200,000 Pakistani rupees, claims the report. Thus US AID TO BANKRUPT PAKISTAN FINANCES THE DEATH OF US/NATO SOLDIERS in Afghanistan. So in a way, US is financing the death of its OWN troops in Afghanistan.

Pakistani government issued its usual denials just as it had denied umpteen times the existence of Mullah Mohammed Omar’s ‘Quetta Shura Taliban (QST)’ in the provincial capital Quetta of Baluchistan. But General Stanley McChrystal called QST as the biggest threat to US Afghan mission in his report to President Obama in August, 2009.

Pakistan has denied presence of Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil umpteen times and just yesterday Adm Mike Mullen repeated in Islamabad that Osama is hiding in a very secure place in Pakistan.

The most breath-taking part of this sordid saga is that US is NOT holding Pakistan responsible for sheltering, protecting and supporting Haqqani’s HQN network and Mullah Omar’s QST network all these years while those networks have been causing daily deaths of US/NATO soldiers ever since 2002 even though Pakistan was SUPPOSED to have joined US fight against same Taliban back in 2001!

Can American CIA not know what Matt Waldman knows? How come Obama administration is continuing Bush’s mollycoddling of Pakistan with such incriminating evidence against Pakistan’s double game? How can US mission in Afghanistan succeed if Obama administration continues to ignore such Pakistani duplicity like Bush had done it before Obama? How long will US continue to evade what is as obvious as a ’bright sun’ in the sky on a summer day?