THE release of more than 92,000 classified documents relating to the war in Afghanistan by the muckraking Web site WikiLeaks has left the US administration and its war partners trying to defend the indefensible.

Along with making the documents available on the Internet on July 25, WikiLeaks took the further step of providing the archive of material to the New York Times, Britain's Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel several weeks prior to the wider release--so these media outlets were ready with in-depth articles about what the documents revealed.

The WikiLeaks documents vividly expose the disastrous state of the U.S. war on Afghanistan.

They provide indisputable proof that the Taliban insurgency is stronger than at any point since 2001, and they reveal the scope of U.S. war crimes committed against the civilian population of Afghanistan--one of the key factors driving resistance to the U.S.--and how those war crimes have been systematically downplayed by the U.S. military.

One incident highlighted by the Guardian [1] provides a graphic illustration of how damaging the WikiLeaks documents are.
In 2007, near the city of Jalalabad, a convoy of U.S. Marines was struck by a minivan rigged with explosives. As they raced the six miles back to their base, the Marines opened fire with automatic weapons, spraying bullets at anything in their path, including "teenage girls in fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road," the Guardian described. "Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded" in what the paper called a "bloodbath."

But the WikiLeaks documents show that an initial military account didn't state that unarmed civilians were killed. Instead, the report "simply says that, simultaneous to the suicide explosion, 'the patrol received small arms fire from three directions,'" the Guardian wrote.

The six-mile rampage back to the base--which the Guardian notes was later the subject of a 17-day military inquiry and 12,000-page report--was at first described as simply, "The patrol returned to JAF [Jalalabad air field]."

The documents also illustrate how the massacre and initial cover-up sparked public fury among Afghan civilians at their American occupiers in the following hours and days. The Guardian wrote:
The logs report that nine hours after the shooting, the governor of Nangarhar province appealed to the Marines to stay at home. "He did not want more CF [coalition forces] in the area due to public hostility." At about the same time, the Americans stopped issuing internal reports. "Event closed at 1349Z," it read. But that was not the end of the affair.
Demonstrations ran through the streets of Jalalabad over the following days, the logs report, in which protesters broke windows and blocked roads.
A month later, in April 2007, the Afghan Human Rights Commission published a report into the shooting which said the victims included a 16-year-old newlywed girl carrying a bundle of grass and a 75-year-old man walking back from the shops. The report said the Marines may have come under fire from one source straight after the suicide bomb, but challenged the assertion they suffered a "complex ambush from several directions."
By then, a U.S. Army colonel had admitted to the Afghans that the shootings were a "terrible, terrible mistake" and "a stain on our honor." He paid $2,000 to the families of each victim.
Yet all of the Marines involved in the incident were later exonerated by the military of any wrongdoing.

The massacre near Jalalabad is only one war crime among many revealed in WikiLeaks' 92,000 pages of documents. According to the Guardian, the documents show at least 144 separate instances of the killing of innocent Afghan civilians [2]--ranging from individual shootings at the hands of CIA paramilitaries to massive, mistaken air strikes that wiped out entire families and villages at a stroke.
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Many people have compared the release of the WikiLeaks documents to the release of the Pentagon Papers--a classified 1968 Pentagon study on the Vietnam War that was leaked to the media by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg in 1971.

It's too soon to judge the impact of the WikiLeaks documents, especially with thousands more reportedly to be released soon. But it is certain that this new window into a failing war comes as the percentage of Americans who support it has reached an all-time low.

According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in mid-July [5], the number of Americans who say the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting has declined from 52 percent in December to 43 percent now. Obama's approval rating for handling the war, which was 56 percent in April, is now down to 45 percent.

But a few days after the WikiLeaks release, the House approved a $33 billion war-funding increase to pay for Obama's latest troop surge.