Afghanistan: What Did Wikileaks Reveal? What I Wrote in Kabul in 2005 (Shahryar)

Editor's Note: Josh Shahryar has promised more not-so-new revelations later in the week:

Nine years, hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of casualties later, the reality of the war in Afghanistan suddenly gets revealed...by Wikileaks.

Afghanistan: Why Wikileaks Should Not Be Plugged (Dissected News)
Afghanistan: After the Wikileaks “Petraeus to Stop Corruption” (Partlow)
Afghanistan & US Politics: National Interests and Ending the War (Mull)

Or so it seems if you were to believe all the major newspapers and broadcasters. There are steamy headlines, loud news analysts, and even louder pundits talking about these revelations. And what are these revelations? We have apparently just found out that:

*Pakistan is helping the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan;

*There have been more civilian casualties than announced;

*The Afghan government is corrupt and impossible to deal with;

*Afghans are slowly favoring the Taliban over the Karzai Government;

*And most importantly, the war is being lost.

The number of documents released by Wikileaks to support these points is staggering --- more than 90,000. Yet the most surprising fact is not that all these things are true, but that they have never been mysteries that needed to be revealed. Everyone apparently "knew" but had bigger fish to fry --- like Iraq (which by the way wasn’t helping al-Qaeda), Iran and its pursuit of nukes, and North Korea, minutes from unleashing doom upon us all.

But Afghanistan then, as now, was very important to one person at least. Me.

It was late November of 2005. In a dusty little office, covered in cigarette ash and alcohol stains, I was sitting behind an three-year-old laptop handed down to me by a colleague, writing at 3 a.m. I was in Kabul, Afghanistan. My country; my homeland.

I used to be a senior editor at Kabul Weekly, the nation’s largest newspaper, that attempted to cover events inside Afghanistan but rarely got any traction outside the country because the media in the "West" always thought it could rely on itself.

I churned out a story that was read by a few colleagues and some expatriates and I got a few pats on the back. A story that covered every single point that the Wikileaks documents supposedly brought to light.

Yes, we knew about Pakistan’s spy agency, InterServices Intelligence, helping Taliban and Al Qa'eda. Yes, we did know that civilians, far too many civilians, were being killed in air raids and in street shootouts. And yes, we knew of the government’s corruption, and we knew that ordinary Afghans favored the Taliban over that government. I added a couple of extra points on flaws that needed to be remedied, such as the spread of poppy cultivation and the lack of capability of the Afghan security forces.

Sadly, my editor edited out the part on government corruption because we didn’t want to be shut down. We ended up alluding to it vaguely, and I later remedied that by writing several articles on the issue, the last one published in December on EA. But everything else is there in 2005. Have a read.

Now I’d be a fool to think I’m the greatest investigative journalist in history. I don’t have any magical powers either. And Wikileaks did not send me a copy of its report 4 1/2 years in advance.

So how does someone like me come into possession of knowledge this important? Because it is right there in front of everyone to see. Then why didn’t anyone say this before? Well, they did –-- most people just chose to ignore it because Iraq was "more important".

That’s what the politicians talked about. That’s what the media covered. And yes, that’s what the general populace in the "West" cared about five years ago. If you don’t believe me, then just follow the money.

The war in Iraq has been raging for seven years: total cost $735 billion. Now, Iraq has oil and Afghanistan has no means of supporting itself except for illegal drugs. The war in Afghanistan has been raging for two years longer than the war in Iraq. So more than $735 billion invested in Afghanistan, right?

Wrong. The Afghan War has cost the US taxpayers $286 billion, a 3-to-1 inferiority v. Iraq. Less coverage and less money means one thing: less importance.

However, this does not mean that the issues I brought up weren’t brought up before. They were. Mostly by Afghan journalists, but also by some Westerners who were crazy enough to not only cover Iraq but the story in Central Asia. However, the politicians kept quiet, the media gave little air time, and, finally, the taxpayer was less informed.

Then, as if from nowhere, Wikileaks comes up with these documents and the US media has something to cover amidst the coverage of the Gulf Oil Spill, which frankly had become less than exciting.

The media wants something sensational. What better than this? The politicians are suddenly forced to answer hard questions and the taxpayers are suddenly interested.

You know what? It’s a little too late for that.

I can’t really fix what the US government does. And honestly, my attempts at publishing analyses on the situation in my own country are gently ignored by the US media most of the time in favor of American analysts who spend a few days drinking tea with Afghan warlords and lounging about the bazaars.

So if you’re a taxpayer and stumble upon me in this corner of the Web, hear me out: the war is going nowhere. A radical policy shift is needed immediately.

Pakistan has to be harshly rebuked and stopped from helping the terrorists. The Afghan government has to be replaced with a less corrupt elected government or dictator or king or something –-- something that’s better than the Taliban. And someone needs to stop the army from killing civilians. If you can force your politicians to pull that off, then you can win this war. If not, there’s another very obvious truth lying right in front of you. I’ll let you figure that one out.