The media is buzzing over whether the WikiLeaks Afghanistan leaks are equivalent to the Vietnam War era’s Pentagon Papers. There are certain similarities, as this Wall Street Journal blog points out:
“A trove of classified Pentagon materials about a troubled war was made public with a splash. Much of the information was dated—even outdated—and illuminated tactics and strategies that already had been changed. Still, the documents had an immediate impact, serving to crystallize underlying public doubts about the war.
That may sound like a description of the big story that broke late Sunday, when some 76,000 internal military documents spanning six years of fighting in Afghanistan were made public by the WikiLeaks website. In fact, it’s a description of a strangely similar release of classified military documents 39 years earlier—the publication of the so-called Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.”
Of course they also point out the differences, such as this observation at cbsnews.com:
“More fundamentally, the Wikileaks documents do not radically alter our understanding of the war. They document what we've known for years - not enough troops, too many civilian casualties, a corrupt and inefficient Afghan government and an uncertain ally in Pakistan. The Pentagon Papers revealed that much of what the public had been told about the war in Vietnam was flat wrong and in many cases deliberately so.”
Ultimately, the greatest determining factor in whether the WikiLeaks will have an impact similar to the Pentagon Papers is pointed out by Glen Greenwald: the Afghan war does not employ a draft, and a relatively small portion of our population actually knows someone who is a soldier. As Greenwald states in his Salon.com column:
“It's relatively easy to support and/or acquiesce to a war when neither you nor your loved ones are risking their lives to fight it.”
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