The hot news today was the presentation on wikileaks of a vast quantity of government reports that supposedly reveal the "truth" about the war in Afghanistan, that things are "much worse than thought."
From what I hear about these documents without reading them (and I'm not going to read them, for reasons I'm about to state), the "damage" they could do to the war effort is probably nil. They're mostly reports by mid-level officers, which may or may not reveal "truth" (or the truth as one person sees it).
But the bigger problem is what they "reveal" -- The Taliban is strong in the provinces, the Afghan government is corrupt, the Pakistani secret service is working against the U.S. in Pakistan and Afghanistan.... duh. I have to assume the guys at Wikileaks live somewhere in an isolated hamlet in western Kansas, one that doesn't have internet or newspapers, if they think this stuff is news. (Actually, Wikileaks central these days appears to be in Iceland.) Certainly, anybody who gives a fig about the war, or who has read one or two articles about it, already knows all this. These facts are givens in the strategic planning that led up to the hard decision to add more troops, and no one has made any secret of them.
These wiggy "leaks" have to be seen as either a publicity stunt (shamelessly imitating the Ellsberg papers) for Wikileaks, which is getting increasing attention from media these days, but perhaps running the risk of irrelevance, as a political stunt ginned up by the mysterious private who supposedly submitted them to embarrass the administration, or as a combination of both. Either way, they're a stunt, and not worth much of anyone's time.
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