Fighting a Post-WikiLeaks War in Afghanistan
Last Updated 10:22 a.m. ET
The White House and Pentagon have tried to downplay as "old news" the substance of the classified documents released by WikiLeaks.org.
But both have said that the 90,000-plus documents relating to the war in Afghanistan, dating from 2004 to 2009, could potentially harm U.S. forces there.
Intelligence officials, past and present, are also raising concerns that the revelations could endanger U.S. counterterror networks in the Afghan region, and damage information-sharing with U.S. allies who may ask whether they can trust America to keep secrets.
People in Afghanistan or Pakistan who have worked with American intelligence agents or the military against the Taliban or al Qaeda may be at risk following the disclosure of thousands of once-secret U.S. military documents, former and current officials said.
The material could reinforce the view put forth by the war's opponents in Congress that one of the United States' longest conflicts is hopelessly stalemated.
"With the Obama administration seeking Congressional support for a troop surge, the WikiLeak story added fuel to skepticism about the war to the already-grim U.N. reports on increased insurgent roadside bombs and drug trafficking," said CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk.
Congress has so far backed the war, and at Tuesday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on reconciliation efforts in Afghanistan, Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., said, "I think it's important not to overhype or get excessively excited about the meaning of those documents.
"Certainly to those of us who lived through the Pentagon Papers in a different period, there is no relationship whatsoever to that event and those documents. In fact these documents in many cases reflect a very different pattern of involvement by the U.S. government from that period in time."
Kerry also emphasized that information within the documents (such as ties between extremists and elements of Pakistan's intelligence agency) is not new, and that it predates President Obama's new Afghan strategy which was designed to address many of these issues. "We have been wrestling with these allegations, and we have made some progress," he said.
Kerry also said that the release of any classified information is unacceptable: "It breaks the law, and equally importantly it compromises the efforts of our troops potentially in the field, and has the potential of putting people in harm's way."
Appearing at the hearing, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said that "Impatience is on the rise in this country" about progress in Afghanistan, but warned that withdrawing from the country without it being capable of securing itself against militants would have terrible consequences for the U.S. and for the Afghan people.
"That is what our adversaries are counting on right now, and what our allies fear," he said.
Foreign Relations Committee Hearing on Afghan War
Appearing on CBS' "The Early Show," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Tuesday while the military doesn't know who was behind the leaks, it has launched
Morrell complained that too much was being made of the documents, of which even the most recent is at least six months old.
Speaking about questions the material raises about the reliability of Pakistan in the war on terror, he said statements about a dubious partnership are "clearly out of step with where this relationship is now, and has been heading for some time."
Still, the leaks are not expected to affect passage of a $60 billion war funding bill. Despite strong opposition among liberals who see Afghanistan as an unwinnable quagmire, House Democrats must either approve the bill before leaving at the end of this week for a six-week vacation, or commit political suicide by leaving troops in the lurch in war zones overseas.
As that political battle plays out, U.S. analysts are in a speed-reading battle against their adversaries.
They are trying to limit the damage to the military's human intelligence network that has been built up over a decade inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. Such figures range from Afghan village elders who have worked behind the scenes with U.S. troops to militants who have become double-agents.
Col. Dave Lapan, a Defense Department spokesman, said the military may need weeks to review all the records to determine "the potential damage to the lives of our service members and coalition partners."
WikiLeaks insists it has behaved responsibly, even withholding some 15,000 records that are believed to include names of specific Afghans or Pakistanis who helped U.S. troops on the ground.
But former CIA director Michael Hayden denounced the leak Monday as incredibly damaging to the U.S. - and a gift to its enemies.
"If I had gotten this trove on the Taliban or al Qaeda, I would have called it priceless," he said. "I would love to know what al Qaeda or the Taliban was thinking about a specific subject in 2007, for instance, because I could say they got that right and they got that wrong."
Hayden predicted the Taliban would take anything that described a U.S. strike and the intelligence behind it "and figure out who was in the room when that particular operation, say in 2008, was planned, and in whose home." Then the militants would probably punish the traitor who'd worked with the Americans, he said.
"It's possible that someone could get killed in the next few days," said former senior intelligence officer Robert Riegle. He recalled what happened when the U.S. arrested the Soviet double agent, Robert Hanssen: "When people found out what we knew, people died."
Another casualty may be the U.S. attempts to forge cooperation with Pakistan's secretive intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence.
Multiple American cables complain about ISI complicity with the Taliban. And they also tell the Pakistanis "how much we know about them," said Riegle, who now runs Mission Concepts Inc., a private intelligence firm.
"You're not going to see any cooperation," he said. "People are going to freeze."
The raw data released Sunday may also prove useful in a wider way to America's "frenemies" - the intelligence services of countries like China and Russia, who have the resources to process and make sense of such vast vaults of data, said Ellen McCarthy, former intelligence officer and president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.
Former CIA chief Hayden added: "If I'm head of the Russian intelligence, I'm getting my best English speakers and saying: 'Read every document, and I want you to tell me, how good are these guys? What are their approaches, their strengths, their weaknesses and their blind spots?'"
Former CIA official Paul Pillar described what he called the coming chill in the U.S. intelligence community, which had been pushed into sharing information across agencies in the aftermath of the intelligence failures that led to 9/11.
"The pendulum will now swing back," he said. Pillar, who now teaches at Georgetown University, said the community would shift from "need to know" back to "need to protect."
Complete Coverage of WikiLeaks' Afghan War Documents:
Pentagon: "Very Robust" Probe of WikiLeak Source
Leaked Docs Expose Afghan Failings, Plague Military
WikiLeaks vs. the Pentagon Papers
WikiLeaks Changing Whistleblower Rules
Docs May Dent U.S.-Pakistani Relations
Washington Unplugged: WikiLeaks Paint Grim Afghan Picture
Did WikiLeaks Leaker Access Top Secret "Intelpedia?"
Hotsheet: White House Tries to Kill the Messenger
White House: "No Blank Check" for Pakistan
WikiLeaks Founder: Many More Documents to Come
WikiLeaks: Evidence of War Crimes in Afghan Docs
Afghan Gov't "Shocked" by Leak of War Documents
Pakistani Officials: WikiLeaks Claims "Outrageous"
WikiLeaks: Evidence of War Crimes in Afghan Docs
Afghan Gov't "Shocked" by Leak of War Documents
Pakistani Officials: WikiLeaks Claims "Outrageous"
Analyst: WikiLeaks Report Fuels War Debate
WikiLeaks Reveals Grim Afghan War Realities
Report: Pakistan Aiding Afghan Insurgency
Papers: Leaks Show Unreported Afghan Deaths