Yostivanich

Almost imme­di­ately, a con­sen­sus emerged that lit­tle in the files was actu­ally secret or new. There is some­thing to that. We did know, in a gen­eral sense, much of what they doc­u­ment: that the regime of Pres­i­dent Hamid Karzai is cor­rupt and unpop­u­lar, that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intel­li­gence agency has ties to the Tal­iban, that too many civil­ians are dying. There had been reports, includ­ing some in this mag­a­zine, of tar­geted killings. And we knew that the Afghan secu­rity forces were a dis­as­ter, even after we had spent twenty-seven bil­lion dol­lars to train them. But know­ing specif­i­cally what hap­pened to a sixteen-year-old girl and to the man who stood up to her alleged rapist—and know­ing that her attacker may have been in a posi­tion to do what he did because he was backed by our troops and our money—is different.

via The New Yorker – Wik­iLeaks and the war in Afghanistan. More analy­sis into the Wik­iLeaks release of doc­u­ments regard­ing the Afghanistan war.