War and Wikileaks

Sometimes even a smoking gun can fire blanks. Critics of Pakistan (and they are legion) have pounced on the field reports sent by US forces in Afghanistan, recently released by Wikileaks, to prove that Pakistan is a duplicitous partner in the fight against the Taliban. The leaked reports indicate that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which in western media parlance always has the prefix “shadowy” attached to it, has been materially aiding the Afghan Taliban. At first glance, the evidence is damning – 180 of the 90,000 reports refer to ISI perfidy – but they need to be read with a jaundiced eye and a healthy dose of scepticism.

The chequered history of US intelligence-gathering should be kept in mind when considering the leaks. Before the first Gulf War the US was completely unaware that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons programme was at an advanced stage; before the second war they considerably over-estimated the danger. Similarly, US intelligence had plenty of suspicions but little actionable intelligence of al Qaeda activities before 9/11. Even with its massive presence in Afghanistan, there is scant evidence that the US has been able to infiltrate the Taliban and al Qaeda.

As such, the US relied heavily on the intelligence service of the Karzai government for human intelligence and paid informants. The Afghan government’s mistrust and even hostility towards Pakistan is understandable given that we have used the country as a personal playground for our larger battle against India. But it also means Afghan motives could be less than pure in blaming the ISI for arming and financing the Taliban. Paid informants are notoriously unreliable as they are willing to say what they think their paymasters want to hear. It is telling, then, that the name of former ISI chief Hamid Gul keeps popping up in the reports. In Pakistan, Gul is now known mainly for his ability to simultaneously appear on half a dozen talk-shows at the same time, but his inflammatory rhetoric has made him a bogeyman in the US.

Some of the allegations levelled against the ISI are too fantastic too be believed. Reports that the ISI offered Sirajuddin Haqqani between $15-30,000 per Indian killed and was planning to poison the beer supply of Isaf troops sound like the idle musings of junior officials who dream of a second career as Bond movie screenwriters. This is not to deny that the ISI, and by extension the military, has been supporting the Taliban. Enough other circumstantial evidence, including the military’s refusal to take action against the Haqqani network, exists to reach that conclusion. However, American reliance on Afghan intelligence should result in a slightly lower-pitched tenor from the “I told you so” crowd.

Those on the opposite side of the ideological debate should also be cautious. The report that repeats almost word-for-word the accusations against Pakistan’s cause celebre Aafia Siddiqui does not prove that the US was telling the truth about her all along. Since the report was written by a junior official, it only shows that the US government was not acting in bad faith when it detained and pressed charges against Siddiqui. It is still possible, if unlikely, that the junior official in questioned wrote a false report to cover up what actually happened.

Journalists and historians will spend years matching the reports with what the US government said at the time. The ultimate legacy of what Wikileaks has done lies not in the individual snippets of information. Far more important, it shows that war is an essentially dehumanising enterprise that reduces the thousands of human lives lost to acronyms like CIVCAS (civilian casualties) and NC (non-combatant). And that is what is truly FUBAR (‘f***** up beyond all recognition’)

Published in The Express Tribune, July 29^th, 2010.