WikiLeaks Throws Obama Off Message (Once Again) on Afghanistan « tamborlane

That, in essence, was the message that White House spokesman Robert Gibbs offered Monday when asked about the 91,000 secret U.S. military Afghanistan battlefield reports that had been published online by the website WikiLeaks. "There weren't any new revelations in the material," Gibbs said. He repeated that phrase four times, with slight modifications, to drive home his point.

But for those like Gibbs, charged with maintaining the faltering political support for the war in Afghanistan, the revelations were hardly immaterial. Rather, they carried with them a familiar sense of déjà vu. From the beginning of the Obama Administration, White House staff have tried their best to handle Afghanistan with a sense of order and structure, a system of policy reviews and major public addresses. But events keep interceding to complicate the effort: an Afghan presidential election marred by fraud; an Afghan leadership that refuses to root out corruption; a commanding U.S. general whose carping to Rolling Stone forced a leadership shuffle; and now a major leak of secret cables showing all the warts of the war effort, from the specific botched operations that caused civilian casualties to the detailed concerns over Pakistani spies working with U.S. enemies. (See pictures of the presidential election in Afghanistan.)

The result, when combined with mounting monthly U.S. death tolls, has been rising discontent, both within Congress and the general public. A recent national Bloomberg poll found that 58% of Americans considered the war effort a "lost cause," while Gallup has tracked a steady increase in the percentage of Americans who believe sending U.S. forces to Afghanistan in 2001 was a mistake, from 30% when Obama took office to 38% today.

In the Senate, a key White House ally on the Foreign Relations Committee, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, embraced the released documents as anything but immaterial to the ongoing debate over U.S. policy. "However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan," Kerry announced in a statement. (Watch TIME's video "Where Should Pakistan's Army Aim Its Guns?")

In the House, where Democratic leadership planned a final vote this week on a bill to fund the war in Afghanistan and on a resolution calling for withdrawal, liberals similarly voiced alarm in the wake of the documents' release, using the moment to restate their desire for a quicker withdrawal of troops. "These documents are heartbreaking but not surprising and show us once again that the Afghanistan war is using up our troops in an unwinnable war," said California Democrat Lynn Woolsey in a statement to TIME. "Civilian casualties, covert death squads and cover-ups undermine rather than advance our national security objectives."

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WikiLeaks Throws Obama Off Message (Once Again) on Afghanistan

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