HAMID GUL ON WIKILEAKS

Hamid Gul, a former Pakistan general accused of helping the Taliban, says United States orchestrated the mass leak of war files to scapegoat him for its imminent withdrawal from Afghanistan.

GARETH PORTER: LEAKS MAKE WAR POLICY VULNERABLE

WikiLeaks offer no major revelations as did the Pentagon Papers

they increase the political pressure on a war policy by highlighting contradictions between the official assumptions of the strategy and the realities shown in the documents - especially in regard to Pakistan's role in the war.

Pentagon Papers chronicle the policymaking process leading up to the Vietnam War

WikiLeaks documents thousands of incidents that illustrate severe problems Among the themes
casual killing of civilians
night raids by special forces based on bad intelligence
absence of legal constraints on Afghan police
deeply rooted corruption among Afghan officials.
Pakistan's political and material support for the Taliban insurgency

There are many intelligence reports about Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, director of
(ISI) during the 1980s, and he is continuing to work with the Taliban commanders loyal to Mullah Omar as well as the Jalaluddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar insurgent networks

reports reflect anti-Pakistan bias of the Afghan intelligence service under former Northern Alliance intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh. Nevertheless the impression is credible.

New York Times led with Pakistani-Taliban issue. It said the documents reflect "deep suspicions among American officials that Pakistan's military spy service has for years guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than US$1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants."

Pakistani "double-dealing" is administration's greatest political vulnerabilities, national security elite are worried about any hope for success.

Senator Russ Feingold, "highlight a fundamental strategic problem, which is that elements of the Pakistani security services have been complicit in the insurgency"

Hamid Karzai pointing to Pakistani sanctuaries as the primary problem

Last February, then director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said: Disrupting the "safe havens" "won't be sufficient but it is a "necessary condition"

White House issued a compilation of statements showing that they had been tough with Pakistan But none admitted the reality: Pakistan's policy of supporting the Taliban insurgency firmly fixed and is not going to change

Admitting that Pakistan's fundamental interests in Afghanistan conflict with US war strategy would be a serious - and possibly fatal - blow to the credibility of the Obama administration's strategy of using force to "reverse the momentum" of the Taliban. this contradiction and others could accelerate the process that political support among the foreign policy and political elite continues to diminish. loss of this support has accelerated. prominent national security elite have signaled war strategy cannot succeed, paralleling 2006 in regard to the Iraq War

WIKILEAKS TARGET PAKISTAN

Not long after Wikileaks dumped tens of thousands of classified Afghanistan “war” documents into the public arena for consumption, the corporate media zoomed in on Pakistan. “WikiLeaks documents released Sunday shine a spotlight on Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, a spy agency that has been accused for years of having links to terrorist groups,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

Plus Al-Jazeera is underwhelmed, see here and here. and here,

The all-time classic 2001 de Borchgrave-Gul interview is here,