WikiLeaks release reveals embarrassing diplomatic details

By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The first batch of newly leaked U.S. diplomatic cables Sunday documented that the king of Saudi Arabia, echoed by other Arab leaders, have urged the United States to "cut off the head of the snake" and destroy Iran's nuclear facilities.

They also revealed a U.S. State Department instruction to U.S. diplomats to spy on United Nations officials — and collect their personal data, and they contained unflattering portraits of a number of world leaders.

Further releases in coming days will outline U.S. fears over the security of Pakistan's nuclear program, U.S. and South Korean discussions of Korean reunification and alleged Chinese cyber sabotage, according to the five media organizations given advance access to the materials.

The first tranche of documents, released by WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website, didn't contain any explosive revelations, although a cable outlining U.S. efforts to convince China to stop commercial air shipments of North Korean missile parts to Iran via Beijing appeared to divulge a top-secret U.S. intelligence operation.

However, the cables' blunt language and their unvarnished statements of U.S. positions on a wide range of issues as well as internal U.S. assessments of world leaders could prove highly embarrassing, hurt ties with allies and other countries and diminish trust in Washington's ability to safeguard secrets.

"These cables could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement. "When the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers across the world, it can deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends."

"We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information," he said.

One awkward leak was a January cable describing a meeting between Army Gen. David Petraeus, then head of U.S. Central Command, and President Ali Abdullah Saleh in which Saleh said he would cover up U.S. air strikes against local al Qaida members by continuing to say "the bombs are ours, not yours."

At that, Saleh's deputy prime minister joked that "he had just 'lied' by telling Parliament" that Yemeni forces had launched the strikes.

Richard Fontaine, a senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security and a past foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the release of the cables has the potential to be "a very big deal" not because of any one individual revelation so much as the overall chilling effect on U.S. diplomatic relations.

"I'm sure there are now tens of thousands of people who feel totally burned because they provided either their take or information to U.S. diplomats with the idea this was going to be protected," Fontaine said. "Now it's out there for the whole world to see."

As it did with earlier leaks of thousands of U.S. reports on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, WikiLeaks provided more than 250,000 diplomatic cables in advance to the New York Times, Germany's Der Spiegel newsmagazine and the Guardian of Great Britain. It expanded the group to include Spanish newspaper El Pais and French newspaper Le Monde.

WikiLeaks is reported to have received the documents from a U.S. Army intelligence analyst who was based in Iraq and had access to SIPRNET, the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network — a Pentagon-run computer system that also carries State Department cable traffic classified up to secret. The system does not carry material rated top secret, the most highly classified level.

The analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, was arrested earlier this year and charged with the unauthorized use and disclosure of U.S. classified information.

The cables released Sunday drive home the preoccupation by President Barack Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, with Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program, terrorism and nuclear proliferation, and the depth of international concern.

An April 20, 2008, cable recalled repeated entreaties by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia for a U.S. attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, which are widely believed to be part of a secret nuclear weapons development program, an allegation denied by Tehran.

Abdullah frequently urged the U.S. "to cut off the head of the snake," said the cable, the summary of a meeting the king and other senior Saudi leaders held with then-U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and Petraeus.

At the same meeting, however, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal urged tighter U.S. and international sanctions on Iran, the course Obama adopted.

A November 2009 cable quoted King Hamad ibn Isa al Khalifa of Bahrain, the home of the U.S. 5th Fleet, as arguing "forcefully for taking action to terminate (Iran's) nuclear program by whatever means necessary." That same month, a cable reported a senior State Department official as telling his Israeli counterparts that U.S. diplomatic efforts to resolve the Iranian standoff weren't "open-ended."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates was quoted in a February cable as telling Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini that, "It will be a different world in five years' time" if Iran acquires a nuclear warhead.

"Without progress in the next few months, we risk nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, war prompted by an Israeli strike (on Iran's nuclear facilities), or both," Gates said.

The cables dealt with other alleged Iranian misconduct. They included a December 2008 warning by then-Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte to Armenia that it risked being hit with U.S. sanctions if it didn't stop selling arms to Tehran that were used by Iranian-backed militias to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

One lengthy cable that could prove deeply embarrassing outlined new instructions to U.S. diplomats "around the world and at U.N. headquarters" on collecting intelligence on senior U.N. officials. The information included credit card numbers and frequent flyer miles, e-mail accounts and work schedules.

The State Department also wanted "detailed technical information, including passwords and personal encryption keys for communications networks used by U.N. officials. It also wanted to know about potential links between U.N. organizations and terrorists and any corruption in the U.N.," said the July 31, 2009, cable.

The Guardian said that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued the new intelligence-gathering instructions, and that the targets included U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the representatives of the permanent veto-wielding U.N. Security Council members — China, France, Russia, France and Britain.

The New York Times described the instructions as expanding the role of U.S. diplomats in collecting intelligence, a depiction disputed by State Department spokesman Phillip J. Crowley. "Our diplomats are just that, diplomats," Crowley said. "They . . . engage openly and transparently with representatives of foreign governments and civil society, Through this process, they collect information that shapes our policies and actions. This is what diplomats, from our country and other countries, have done for hundreds of years."

Other revelations:

• U.S. officials expressed "shock at the rude behavior" of Britain's Prince Andrew when he was abroad.
• Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is always accompanied by a "voluptuous blonde Ukrainian nurse."
• Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has developed an "extraordinarily close relationship" with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, complete with gifts, "lucrative energy" contracts and the use of a "shadowy" Russian-speaking Italian as a go-between.

How Can you Still do it....

N THE ARENA

Beyond the Leaks: Our Pakistan Problem

 JOE KLEIN Thursday, Jul. 29, 2010 (TIME MAGZINE)

The release of 91,000 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan by WikiLeaks turned out to be your classic media bang-fizzle. The first-day bang was caused by the spectacular breach of security and the promise of devastating revelations, especially about Pakistan's clandestine support for the Taliban. The second-day fizzle was caused by the absence of much that was new in the documents. By the third day, it was pretty much over. But the war goes on, futilely at the moment. Indeed, the actual situation on the ground is worse than the secret documents describe — a fact that was made plain in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the third day of the story by David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert close to General David Petraeus.

"We need to kill a lot of Taliban," Kilcullen said, a statement that stands well outside the humanitarian spirit of counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. But then, Kilcullen admitted, the Afghan government is too unstable for COIN to work very well — a major concession from a charter member of the Petraeus camp and a signal, perhaps, of a change in U.S. tactics. As for the Taliban, he said, there was no question that they were being supported by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Kilcullen recommended that the committee members read a recent paper by Matt Waldman of Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy called "The Sun in the Sky."(See the Matt Waldman paper.)

The paper is astonishing. From February to May this year, the author conducted separate interviews with nine active Taliban field commanders in Afghanistan and 10 former Taliban officials. The commanders are unanimous in their belief that the ISI is running the show. It is a field-level view of the hierarchy and probably an exaggeration, but even at half-strength, the commanders' accounts of direct ISI involvement are entirely convincing. Some of them received training and protection in Pakistani camps run by the ISI. "[The ISI has] specific groups under their control, for burning schools and such like," one commander says. "The ISI [also] has people working for it within the Taliban movement. It is clearer than the sun in the sky." The commanders insist the ISI is opposed to any negotiations between the Taliban and Hamid Karzai's government; several cite as proof the February arrest by Pakistani operatives of Taliban second-in-command Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was involved in informal peace talks with the Afghans.(See the top 10 leaks.)

Why on earth are elements of the Pakistani military supporting the Taliban? In a word, India. India is, first and last, the strategic obsession of the Pakistani military. The U.S. has come and gone from the region in the past; the perceived Indian threat is eternal. With the defeat of the Taliban by U.S. forces in 2001, there was fear that the new government in Kabul would be sympathetic to India and provide a strategic base for anti-Pakistan intelligence operations. And so, despite professions of alliance with the U.S. by Pakistan's then dictator Pervez Musharraf, a decision was made to keep the Taliban alive. A spigot of untargeted military aid from the George W. Bush Administration helped fund the effort. A commander of the vicious Haqqani Taliban network tells Waldman that their funding comes from "the Americans — from them to the Pakistani military, and then to us." Waldman reports that the commander receives from the Pakistanis "a reward for killing foreign soldiers, usually $4,000 to $5,000 for each soldier killed."

This is devastating and outrageous, but slightly outdated — and decidedly incomplete. In the months since Waldman completed his research, the relationship between Pakistan and the Karzai government has warmed considerably. Karzai removed his intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, whom the Pakistanis considered an Indian agent. There is talk of a reconciliation deal in which the Haqqani network will stand down militarily. Most important, the Pakistanis' sense of the perceived threat has changed dramatically over the past 18 months. After a series of spectacular terrorist attacks, the army launched a major campaign against the indigenous Pakistani Taliban. More Pakistani army personnel have been killed in this fight than U.S. forces in Afghanistan by the Taliban.(See pictures of Pakistan's vulnerable North-West Frontier Province.)

Are you confused yet? Let me make things more complicated: Afghanistan is really a sideshow here. Pakistan is the primary U.S. national-security concern in the region. It has a nuclear stockpile, and lives under the threat of an Islamist coup by some of the very elements in its military who created and support the Taliban. The one thing the U.S. can do to reduce that threat is to convince the Pakistanis that we will be a reliable friend for the long haul — providing aid, mediating the tensions with India; that we will help stabilize Afghanistan; that we will support the primacy of Pakistan's civilian government. Over time, this could reduce the extremist influence in the military and Pakistan's use of Islamist guerrillas against its neighbors. If it does not — well, the alternative is unthinkable.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2007243,00.html#ixzz16f2x9n8k

Shocking report on Pakistan Flood Relief Efforts - BBC

The flood waters along the southern reaches of the Indus River are starting to recede. But with 20 percent of Pakistan still underwater, some of the lessons of Haiti for civilian-military coordination look like washouts. In Haiti, the U.S. military, civilian agencies and non-governmental organizations made innovative use of information technology and social media, partnering in ways that were closer than in previous disaster-relief efforts — and certainly closer than the military has ever worked with civilians in such a context.

But it’s not putting those lessons to use in Pakistan. “No one has spoken to us,” says an officer with the U.S. Southern Command, the regional command in charge of Haiti’s earthquake relief, somewhat surprised by the lack of interest in learning how the military in Haiti opened up its reconnaissance and data-sorting tools to civilian partners.

The Pakistan floods didn’t kill nearly as many people — 1600 fatalities is the current estimated death toll — as the Haiti earthquake’s estimated 230,000 fatalities. But the floods’ impact is still huge. Six million Pakistanis are now homeless, and about 17 million people are in some way affected. Judging from this innovative mapping tool the BBC developed, a similar natural disaster in the United States would stretch from the southern Minnesota border down to central Texas. And the flooding continues, bringing with it the prospect of water-borne illnesses like cholera.

In other words, the flood may define an epoch in Pakistani history. And as Pakistan goes, so too does America’s fortunes against al-Qaeda and its allies. Pakistan is a nuclear power with a schizophrenic attitude toward violent Islamic extremists, hunting the Pakistani Taliban while continuing to sponsor the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network, and very-slowly-possibly-maybe warming to the idea that its army ought to assault al-Qaeda’s remaining safe haven. Already, terrorist-linked charities are delivering assistance to people in need, undermining a year and a half of painful confrontations with extremists. And the government’s relationship with the United States is deeply unpopular. According to Pew, the last time U.S. approval ratings jumped in Pakistan was after the United States pitched in to help with earthquake relief efforts in 2005. That underscores the opportunities for the United States — and the danger of missing them.

But according to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, a month after the flooding started, the United States has provided an aggregated $200 million for Pakistan. That’s less than half of what it gave Haiti’s much, much smaller population. (Nine million Haitians; 166 million Pakistanis.) With military operations supporting an embassy-led relief effort, the United States set to work rebuilding washed-out bridges, providing plastic sheeting for temporary shelter for over 150,000 people, and getting 13 water-filtration units into the country.

The Air Force has been flying C-130s filled with two million pounds of food and medicine from nearby Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan. (Two weeks ago, I was told the planes took the 90-minute trip to Pakistani military bases once or twice daily.) And not just the Air Force: On Saturday, a Marine C-130 got 11,000 pounds worth of supplies into Gilgit, a mountainous area in the Pakistani north that hadn’t previously seen non-Pakistani aid arrive.

In fairness, flood relief isn’t like earthquake relief. An earthquake is a one-time disaster; the floods continue. Getting access to flooded areas is harder than getting access to collapsed ones. The already-unpopular government has a political need to direct the aid effort. And Pakistan’s traditional uneasiness with U.S. troops on its territory have rendered a Haiti-style ground force unfeasible.

So the U.S. military is helping in other — notably smaller — ways. On Friday, the Defense Departmentannounced that by mid-September, its fleet of 15 helicopters at work on Pakistan relief, including evacuating over 9,000 people so far, will be augmented by 10 Chinooks and Black Hawk helicopters from the Army. The U.S.S. Kearsarge,carrying the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, left Norfolk for Pakistan on Friday, about a month ahead of schedule.

But the access problems in flooded Pakistan make it all the more conspicuous that the United States isn’t using a lot of innovative technology that it put to work in Haiti.

After the Haiti earthquake, the military took the unprecedented step of letting civilian aid organizations log in to its All Partners Access Network, a web-based communication tool for uploading and sharing situation reports, maps and basic text messages. All of a sudden, the Red Cross and other NGOs had the kind of situational awareness that the military previously hoarded: The iteration of APAN used in Haitiacquired 1,700 members. Some within U.S. Southern Command considered APAN access a big leap forward for civil-military disaster relief cooperation. “I think we’ve stepped through the door, I don’t know if we’ve fully gone inside the room yet,” SOUTHCOM tech expert Ricardo Arias told Danger Room in January.

In Pakistan, we’re not even in the building. SOUTHCOM hasn’t been consulted by anyone working with the flood relief efforts for its lessons-learned. Several public-affairs officers for commands dealing with Pakistan didn’t respond to questions about the use of APAN. Linton Wells, a former Pentagon chief information officer who’s long advocated for the military to work more closely with civilians in disaster relief, worked with SOUTHCOM in the days after the Haitian earthquake. While he cautions that he doesn’t have the same visibility into U.S. Central Command than he had into SOUTHCOM, he doesn’t see the same kinds of tech-based coordination from CENTCOM to aid workers — which, in fairness, has the other gargantuan tasks of running two wars shortly after a command change.

After the earthquake-relief experience, Wells, now at National Defense University, proposed that regional military commands create standing IT infrastructure for coordination with aid groups when disasters hit. “SOUTHCOM used APAN and set up an open-technology team who got the information out of the cloud and applied it to the situation,” he observes. Wells argues that that model, which he calls “bridge-filter-channel,” should govern how commands sync up the disparate efforts of aid groups in post-disaster environments. “It’s an organizational design issue,” he says. “SOUTHCOM built the bridge-filter-channel. As far as I can tell, CENTCOM hasn’t.”

That’s not to say that there isn’t military-civilian coordination in the flood relief effort. It’s just notably 1.0. that U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson works with her Defense representative, Vice Admiral Mike LeFever; the USAID representative in Pakistan, Bob Wilson; and USAID’s Disaster Assistance Response Team chief, Bill Berger. NGO outreach is through USAID. And everything runs through the Pakistani government. It might work, but it doesn’t build on the earthquake relief effort’s panoply of wikis and distributed satellite images.

It’s probably not a direct response to the lack of APAN, but the State Department is nevertheless pushing crowdsourced flood news — something it put to use in Haiti as well. The Islamabad embassy encouragespeople to share flood information through texting FLOODS to 7111 through a network called Humari Awaz, which also carries news of “valuable NGO grant and business opportunities.” On the support side, celebrities like Tom Cruise and Alicia Keys have been tweeting information about SMS-driven relief donations, something the State Department’s tech-tweeter (cautiously) endorsed.

More broadly, there’s at least one huge exogenous difference between the U.S.’s ability to help Haiti and Pakistan: sovereignty. In Haiti, the beleaguered and overwhelmed government of Rene Preval had no problem accepting help from its nearby American neighbor. Not so in Pakistan.

In Haiti, “We took over the landing strips. We took over completely the provision of assistance. There was not even a fig leaf of Haitian sovereignty,” observes Christine Fair, a South Asia expert at Georgetown University who just returned to D.C. from three months in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “The Pakistani military in particular is walking a very thin line. They do not want to take responsibility for this fiasco, nor be seen as overridden by American demands and further dependent on a country that a lot of people hate.”

What’s more, Pakistan’s endemic corruption makes it unreasonable to presume that a dollar sent in aid is a dollar spent on aid. “Going into this you had a governance disaster,” Fair continues, since Pakistan’s ministries are staffed by dollar-shearing bureaucrats under normal circumstances. That’s led government officials to try and avoid prying eyes, making it problematic for the United States to ramp up its aid packages. “The Pakistanis have been denying visas to U.S. personnel to execute and oversee the distribution of those [aid] resources … the Pakistanis are kind of reaping the whirlwind of their demurrals to allow the U.S. to expand its personnel presence to execute [the aid bill known as] Kerry-Lugar-Berman with the appropriate oversight that Congress is demanding.”

That’s not to say that U.S. aid is the only difference between disaster and renewal in Pakistan, nor that objective constraints on the U.S.’s ability to help can simply be waved away. But from the perspective of U.S. security interests Pakistan trumps Haiti by far. It’s a nuclear power in a crucial strategic location that serves as an inadvertent (mostly) epicenter for al-Qaeda to export terror, as well as a major frenemy thatmay have the power to broker an end to the Afghanistan war through compelling its insurgent proxies to negotiate. Maybe it’s time to at least bring in more APIs?