It may seem strange that a historian would argue that Wikileaks publication of the Afghan War Logs was a waste of time, but it was, and it was possibly harmful. Todays followup, the posting of a huge encrypted “insurance” file on the Wikileaks site, looks like a juvenile stunt , copied from a cheap novel.
Reading the media coverage of the Afghan war logs last week, I had to ask myself “So what?”. The logs, which need a glossary to make sense to the layman, tell us nothing we didn’t already know. Sure, they provide us with more facts, but they hardly change our interpretation of the Afghan War. We already knew it was a mess, and we already knew there were civilian casualties, and that the fighting has concentrated in a few areas, and the Pakistani ISI was playing both sides of the game, and that the training and performance of the Afghan army was not meeting expectations. There is nothing, as far as I can see, in the Afghan War logs that will change any of those interpretations, which I think are so widely accepted as to be a reasonable consensus.
What we got were more facts, and I have no doubt those will be of value to some people. The media didn’t report every firefight, every airstrike or every civilian death, and for those who lost loved ones on both sides, the extra details gleamed from the logs may well help the process of grieving – or open old wounds. But when you step back and look at the overview, we knew how the game was going out there. Wikileaks added more details, and in some cases showed that a great many needless deaths were unreported, but didn’t provide us with anything to make us drastically revise our views about the war.
History is about making sense of the past with fragmentary evidence. You don’t know every detail, and you don’t need to – it is like a fractal pattern in maths – once you have enough to see the shape, you can fairly sketch out the missing bits. You can also make a reasonable assessment of how likely it is that the missing evidence will overturn your interpretation. For the Afghan war from 2004-9; we pretty much had that.
Now, there is talk about how the Taliban are sifting through the logs to locate informers; and I’m sure they are. They have supporters in the west with the tools to work through this data quickly, and they have local knowledge which they can marry up to that to locate possible informers. Details which might seem insignificant to a western analyst will help identify where and when informants operated. It is possible that specific civilians who helped western troops will be identified and shot as a result, and that is a bad thing. It is also true, of course, that in any guerrilla war, a great many suspected “informers” are shot, often on the basis of the most scanty rumour. Many Afghan civilians may already but under suspicion of collaborating with the Western troops, and in the long run, it may be impossible to say who would have been shot by the Taliban anyway.
The Taliban trawl of the documents looking for informers does immense damage to Western information gathering, or even peacebuilding, for the future. Who is going to provide information to Western troops about Taliban terror plots if they know there is risk their identity may be splashed around the internet? Who, in an Afghan hill village, will risk even working on non-military programmes to build health centres and schools without wondering about the risk of exposure to the terrorists? In the long term, this is, I think, the real damage the logs will do. Even if they didn’t contain that sort of information in easily discoverable form, their release will be manipulated to create fear. Knowledge is power – let’s not forget that the Holocaust in WWII was made possible because the Nazis had access to detailed census records which allowed them to round up their victims.
The suggestion therefore that today’s posting of an “insurance” file contains even more detailed and damning data is disturbing. More data is unlikely to add to our understanding of the conflict – especially if that data all comes from the same sources. However, it may put more lives at risk in Afghanistan simply to prevent the owner of Wikileaks from disappearing. Wikileaks has done a great deal of good in the past, a huge amount of good, but now Assange is getting out of his depth. If you chose to swim with the sharks, you need to accept that risk of being eaten. Otherwise stay on the beach and don’t ask the lifegaurd to risk his life to pull you out.
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