Afghan war-logs leak embarrasses US

A whistleblower Monday leaked tens of thousands of secret military files on the Afghan war, documenting the deaths of innocent civilians and how Pakistan's spy agency secretly supports the Taliban movement.

In all, some 92,000 documents, dating from 2004 to 2009, were released by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks to The New York Times, Britain's The Guardian newspaper and Germany's Der Spiegel news weekly.

The documents, described as "one of the biggest leaks in US military history," provide "a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan," The Guardian said on its website.

The war logs detail how coalition forces in Afghanistan have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency, according to The Guardian.

The White House issued a condemnation shortly before the leaks were posted online, saying the information could endanger American lives.

A Downing Street spokeswoman also said Monday that Britain "laments the unauthorized releases of classified material" about the Afghanistan war that have thrown the spotlight on civilian deaths there.

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, said the reactions vindicated his organization's mission.

"It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abuses, and when powerful abuses are taken on, there is always a back reaction," Assange told The Guardian.

The New York Times focused on the collaboration between Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the country's spy agency, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, underlining that Islamabad receives more than $1 billion in aid a year from Washington.

The accusations against the ISI range from spectacular to lurid. Reports describe covert ISI plots to train legions of suicide bombers, smuggle surface-to-air missiles into Afghanistan, assassinate Afghan President Hamid Karzai and poison Western troops' beer supplies, The Guardian said.

"That's a totally false report," Captain Mobin Ashraf Bajwa, the spokesman for Pakistan's navy, told the Global Times. "If we support the Taliban, why did we lose and are still losing so many lives of our soldiers and civilians?"

Meanwhile, Karzai's office said Monday that NATO troops had fired a rocket that killed 52 "innocent" villagers in southern Afghanistan.

"The president consoled via phone with the mourning families and called on NATO troops to put into practice every possible measure to avoid harming civilians during military operations," Karzai's office said in a statement, adding that the president was "deeply saddened by the heartbreaking incident, which is both morally and humanly unacceptable."

The statement came three days after Friday's attack on Regey village, and followed repeated denials by officials of the International Security Assistance Force that their forces were involved in the incident.

According to witnesses' accounts, men, women and children fled to Regey village and were fired on by helicopter gunships as they took cover.

Agencies - Global Times