US lawmakers challenge Obama after Afghan leak
WASHINGTON (July 27, 2010): US lawmakers opposed to the Afghan war, emboldened by a huge leak of military files on the conflict, pushed Tuesday for pulling US forces from Pakistan in a blunt challenge to President Barack Obama.
The House of Representatives was expected to vote on both an emergency spending bill to pay for Obama's strategy to turn around the faltering Afghan campaign and on a measure calling for a withdrawal under a Vietnam-era law.
"Wake Up America. WikiLeaks' release of secret war documents gave us 92,000 reasons to end the wars. Pick one," Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich, author of the Pakistan measure, said as debate began.
But as the US Army announced it had launched a criminal investigation into the affair Tuesday, Representative Buck McKeon, top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, invoked US forces on the frontlines.
McKeon warned "cutting off their funding in the middle of that fight is tantamount to abandonment."
He said he was "confident" US forces "will succeed in Afghanistan if given the time, space, and resources they need to complete their mission."
US officials were grappling with the possible impact of the WikiLeaks disclosures, which appeared to pack no reliable blockbuster revelations but put fresh media focus on the unpopular conflict.
Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said an Army Criminal Investigation Division would be taking a "broad look" at the leaks of the military reports from 2004 to 2009 that paint an unsettling picture of a troubled war effort.
With November elections fast approaching, Kucinich charged the United States was shortchanging Americans struggling to make ends meet in a sour economy while Congress approved "unlimited money for war."
Foes of the war, now in its ninth year, were drawing strength from the massive leak of Pentagon documents by the whistleblower's website, which seemed to buttress criticisms of the governments in Kabul and Islamabad.
Kucinich, who has called for US forces to leave Afghanistan and Pakistan before, said US money went to "a corrupt government in Afghanistan," or to "a corrupt government in Pakistan which helps the Taliban in Afghanistan kill our troops."
Democratic leaders hoped to have the "magic number" of votes to pass the war spending measure and predicted defeat of the so-called War Powers Resolution on Pakistan -- named after a 1973 law aimed at boosting congressional authority over US war-fighting, a leadership aide said on condition of anonymity.
In Kabul, the Afghan government said Tuesday the leaked documents showed Pakistan helped insurgents who target Afghans and that the country's Western allies had an incoherent approach to the insurgency.
But Admiral Mike Mullen, the US military's top officer, Tuesday denied the leaks raised questions over US strategy or relations with Pakistan, where US forces are trying to hunt down top Al-Qaeda leaders believed to be hiding in the border area with Afghanistan.
Mullen said the information had been taken into account during a strategy review last year and that Washington made clear to Islamabad its concerns about possible links to militant groups.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, denied in an interview with the US television network CBS that his government provided support to Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.
"We do not support any group," Ahmadinejad said. "We just and only support the Afghan people. We support and we want to strengthen security in Afghanistan."
The Obama administration and its allies in the US Congress -- many of whom have expressed grave doubts about the conflict -- sought to play down the impact of the leak and denied any shift in policy on Pakistan.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry said it was important not to "overhype" raw intelligence field reports, some of them "completely dismissable," others "unreliable."
"People need to be very careful in evaluating what they read there," the Democrat said, insisting Washington had "made some progress" in addressing the issue of Pakistan.
ARMY OPENS CRIMINAL PROBE
The US Army opened a criminal probe Tuesday into the leak of some 90,000 classified military files on the Afghan war, the Pentagon said, naming a jailed soldier as a "person of interest."
Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old private charged in an earlier leak to WikiLeaks, was under renewed scrutiny in the latest release to the same whistleblowers' website, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said.
"He is obviously a person of interest with regards to this leak but we don't know at this point," Morrell told MSNBC, referring to Manning.
The investigation was assigned to the same Army Criminal Investigation Division that has been investigating Manning, who was arrested in May for leaking a video of a Baghdad air strike to WikiLeaks.
Colonel Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said the agency would be taking a "broad look" at the latest leaks, a trove of 92,000 military reports from 2004 to 2009 that together paint an unsettling picture of a troubled war effort.
"The current investigation into the release of the documents to WikiLeaks, this recent release, isn't focused on any particular individual. It is a broader look," he said.
The Pentagon is conducting a separate assessment into the potential damage to security caused by the latest Wikileaks expose, Lapan said.
Manning, who is in a military prison in Kuwait, has been charged with transferring classified information onto a computer, adding unauthorized software to a classified computer system, and passing defense information to an unauthorized source.
A former intelligence analyst, Manning allegedly told a former hacker, Adrian Lamo, that he had passed 260,000 diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks in addition to videos of two air strikes in Iraq.
KABUL URGES WEST TO REVIEW PAKISTAN POLICY
Afghanistan's national security adviser called on the West Tuesday to review policy towards Pakistan after leaked Pentagon documents pointed to Pakistani double-dealing in the Afghan war.
Kabul has consistently accused Pakistan's intelligence agency of supporting Taliban insurgents -- including masterminding attacks against Afghan and US-led targets in the country. Islamabad denies the claims.
Kabul said information contained in documents released on whistleblowing website WikiLeaks on Sunday backed its long-held position.
Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, President Hamid Karzai's national security advisor, took issue with US aid to Pakistan, which last year secured a 7.5 billion-dollar non-military package from Congress spread over the next five years.
"It's not justifiable for Afghans to see a country given 11 billion dollars in reconstruction aid and to support its security forces, and then see those same forces training terrorists," said Spanta.
"At least we Afghan politicians are not able to explain this to the Afghan people," he said, calling on US and NATO troops to deal with insurgents before they infiltrated Afghanistan from their sanctuaries in Pakistan.
LEAKS REVEAL NO NEW ISSUES IN AFGHANISTAN: OBAMA
President Barack Obama vowed Tuesday to see his Afghan plan through to conclusion, and said a trove of leaked documents on the war proved he was right to overhaul a failed US strategy.
Obama said the documents, which included snapshots of chaos, suggestions of Afghan corruption, revealed civilian casualties and accused Pakistani agents of cooperating with the Taliban, did not contain much new information.
"While I am concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations, the fact is these documents don't reveal any issues that haven't already informed our public debate on Afghanistan," Obama said.
"Indeed they point to the same challenges that led me to conduct an extensive review of our policy last fall," added Obama, in his first public reaction to the release of the documents on Sunday.
"For seven years, we failed to implement a strategy adequate to the challenge in this region," Obama said, noting the area was the origin of the September 11 attacks in 2001 and other planned extremist actions.
"That's why we have substantially increased our commitment there, insisted upon greater accountability from Afghanistan and Pakistan, developed a new strategy that can work," he said.
"Now we have to see that strategy through."
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