Official comment on the Afghanistan battlefield reports released by Wikileaks would have us believe that they contain nothing new. But, many important facts never made it into the official reports, writes Noah Shachtman, who witnessed one of the battles. The reports, often providing little more than place, date and the number of enemies killed, leave out details that, Schactman acknowledges, include the most disturbing and important. He surmises, generously, that the lack of detail was unintentional.

In fact, from the early days of the Iraq war to the present battles in Afghanistan, war reports have whitewashed and manipulated the truth in order to better serve official US propaganda. Looking farther back, to the Vietnam war, we see reports, similar to these, that emphasized casualty figures--an emphasis that was intentional, high-level, and led to mass murder in Vietnam.

Herodotus records a Delphic oracle warning the early Spartans against trying to subdue Arcadia “where men eat acorns”. When the Spartan military marched into Arcadia anyway, they met disaster. Acorn-foraging became a by-word for the ruggedness of the famously indomitable population in that remote mountainous region.

So I took notice when I came across this SIGACT among the nearly 92,000 Afghan war documents published yesterday. It’s a report of September 2007 from the remote province of Nuristan, along the Pakistan border. This region was the setting for Kipling’s “The man who would be king”. Here’s the part of the report that caught my attention:

There is a feud/civil conflict developing between 3 villages (Nanglam, Mashpah, and Malel) over pine nut foraging rights. 1 Afghan national has been killed, and 2 injured. Waliswol Muhammad Ali is attempting to mediate.

So how does anybody imagine that coalition forces can ever impose their will upon a population that is willing to fight to the death over pine nut foraging rights?

The nearly 92,000 secret documents from 6 years of US military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan, obtained by Wikileaks and published simultaneously today by the New York Times, Guardian, and Der Spiegel, bring to mind nothing so much as the Pentagon Papers published in 1971. They’re a very different kind of dossier, of course. The latter was an official Defense Dept. study of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The current dossier is more random – and thus in many ways more enlightening - a trove of on-the-ground reports from military and intelligence operations.

But what it shares in common with the Pentagon Papers is this: It provides a devastating portrait of

• a disastrous guerilla war that the public had already turned decisively against
• military operations that both tactically and strategically are a mess beyond any reasonable hope of repair
• intelligence operations that are acquiring almost no accurate, much less actionable, information about anything
• American officials who appear to have no answers to the daily intractable problems they face in an increasingly unpopular occupation
• an Afghan population that has huge and legitimate grievances against heavy-handed US attacks
• an Afghan government that is corrupt, incompetent, and mistrusted in more ways than most of us could have imagined
• grossly untrustworthy Afghan army and police forces
• obscenely fraught relations with our untrustworthy “allies” in the region
• an enemy that is better armed and more adaptable and successful than the public has been told
• the history of a war that went to pieces far earlier than the US government had told the public
• specific details about military operations that contradict what the US public had been told in the past

In short, just as with the Pentagon Papers, it is nearly impossible to read through the current dossier and conclude that this occupation is winnable; that the US military ever has had a coherent plan; that the government that American lives are being sacrificed for is solid, trustworthy, or has integrity; that our forces really know what is going on in the country they’re bogged down in; or that the US government has been honest about what we face there.

So the publication of these documents could prove to be a turning point in US involvement in Afghanistan. The Pentagon Papers proved to Americans, even to people who hadn’t been paying close attention to policy debates about the Vietnam War, that they’d been deceived for years by their own government’s grossly misleading public assessments of the situation there. The publication of these New Pentagon Papers ought to produce the same result.

Today Gen. David Petraeus was being questioned by the Senate Armed Services Committee about the quagmire in Afghanistan. As John McCain bemoaned that the US was planning not to extend indefinitely the surge Petraeus had wanted (on which subject see yesterday’s PR blitz by the Pentagon about vast Afghan mineral wealth), the general suddenly gawped and fainted. The hearing was suspended for a day to allow Petraeus to recover. He claimed afterwards that he was simply dehydrated…as if there were no beakers of water around.

With this public relations catastrophe, it’s now much less likely that Petraeus will be able to convert his apparent presidential ambitions into reality. For one thing, it raises further concerns about Petraeus’ physical fitness. Anyhow it’s simply not presidential to faint when you’re being asked difficult questions about your job performance, especially for a general. And, yes, Petraeus is painfully aware that his failure to stem the tide in Afghanistan is going to be a huge obstacle in his further ambitions.

I’ve never bought the hype about Petraeus’ supposed military genius and capabilities.