Dirty open secrets

Liat Collins
My Word/JPost
01 August '10

War is hell. It didn’t take WikiLeaks to tell us that. Nonetheless, the on-line publication of some 91,000 classified US military records – including previously unreported incidents of Afghan civilians killed by coalition forces, covert operations against Taliban terrorists and cooperation between Pakistan and the Taliban leadership – has put the spotlight on just how desperate warfare can be.

Dead children, slain guests at weddings, blown-up buses. Your heart has to go out to the Afghanis, who, as Robin Shepherd noted in an analysis in The Jerusalem Post last week, were “ordinary people going about their daily business who tragically found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

All is fair in love and war, goes the saying from long, long before Israelis became familiar with the name Richard Goldstone.


But, of course, not everything goes. No decent person wants to think of soldiers – even accidentally – killing innocent farmers and kids. Just how to avoid such deaths when the Taliban, like their close allies in Gaza and Lebanon, deliberately use the civilian population as a human shield is not clear, however.

As Shepherd pointed out, the recent exposure that the Taliban has been using the same tactics as Hamas, with the same results, might boomerang on the British and other coalition countries who cheered the Goldstone report through the UN. No wonder the UK’s new prime minister, David Cameron, seems to be serious about changing the universal jurisdiction law. He is as likely to find himself in the dock as, say, Israel’s opposition leader and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni.

There is something ironic about a guerrilla war being waged simultaneously from hideouts in caves and in cyberspace. Israelis over the last few years have frequently sighed that wars are now fought as much in the virtual world as on the battlefield. The WikiLeaks exposure reinforces that idea.

While attention was focused primarily on the details of the reports, among the questions which should be asked are: Just who is waging the war via WikiLeaks and why? President Barack Obama said last week that the documents could endanger soldiers serving in Afghanistan. He’s right. But only up to a point. These documents weren’t published to describe the whereabouts of coalition forces or even their mode of operation (not much of a secret to the Taliban in any case). They are not even particularly up-to-date.

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