THE Pentagon has launched the hunt for the source of the huge leak of documents about the Afghanistan war, amid fears over the risk to US-led forces and funding for the conflict.
The White House also warned yesterday that billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan could be at risk if the leaked intelligence reports proved its security forces were colluding with the Taliban.
US Defence Secretary Robert Gates backed an inquiry into how the whistleblower website WikiLeaks came into possession of 92,000 documents that date from 2004 to last year. They contain allegations that Pakistani intelligence has been double-dealing by offering co-operation to the US while secretly working with insurgents near the border with Afghanistan.
According to the papers released by WikiLeaks, Pakistani agents regularly met Taliban fighters to help them organise attacks on US soldiers in Afghanistan and to plot against the country’s US-supported leaders.
The documents provide detail of civilian deaths during the eight-year war based on field reports that embarrass NATO forces.
A spokesman for Dr Gates told Fox News yesterday that the Pentagon’s first priority was to judge whether the released documents included anything that could endanger US troops.
Senior Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate’s intelligence committee, claims the leaks were a serious breach of national security.
The founder of WikiLeaks, Australian Julian Assange, defended the decision to release the information, claiming the documents showed thousands of war crimes may have been committed, possibly by military and CIA operations in Afghanistan.
Referring to one missile strike that killed seven children in a house, Mr Assange said: “It is up to a court to decide clearly whether something is in the end a crime . . . there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material.”
President Barack Obama’s spokesman ruled out a “blank cheque” to Islamabad yesterday.
Teams of analysts were assigned to comb the documents — the biggest intelligence leak in US history — released by the website, looking for potential risks to coalition forces, and for clues about who released them.
The single most damaging theme from the “war logs” — their detailed claims of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency helping the Taliban — was met head on by White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.
He repeated a statement first made by Mr Obama last year that the US “will not and cannot provide a blank cheque” to Pakistan if it fails to rein in extremists. “I am not going to stand here and tell you all is well,” he added.
The documents contain allegations of ISI involvement in plots to assassinate Afghan President Hamid Karzai, to supply children and motorcycles for suicide bombings in Afghanistan and even to poison allied troops’ beer. Some analysts warned, however, that much of the intelligence was of questionable value.
General Hamid Gul, a former ISI director frequently mentioned in the documents, said “the report of my physical involvement with al-Qa’ida or Taliban in planning attacks on American forces” was “completely baseless”.
Washington’s relations with a vital but unreliable ally are under scrutiny less than a week after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged $US7.5 billion ($8.3bn) in aid to Islamabad.
Washington and its allies closed ranks to limit the damage to a war effort that a growing number of US voters and senior Democrats fear may be unravelling even as the White House prepares for a review that will decide if troops can start to withdraw next year.
Members of congress heightened the push for a vote on a war-financing bill yesterday, amid concerns over growing opposition to the war, The New York Times reported.
John Kerry, chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, warned that a bleak record of botched special forces attacks and hitherto unreported civilian casualties raised “serious questions” about US policy.
Mr Assange said he had no reason to believe the source was Bradley Manning, 22, a US army intelligence expert in custody in Kuwait, where he is accused of leaking gun-camera footage of a US helicopter strafing unarmed civilians in Baghdad.
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