Officials: No news from leaks

White House officials and their allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan sought yesterday to play down the political and military impact of the unauthorized release of thousands of classified Afghan war documents, saying they portray a reality on the ground that is already largely known.

The secret documents released by the group WikiLeaks.org reveal, in often excruciating detail, the struggles U.S. troops have faced in battling an increasingly potent Taliban force and in working with Pakistani allies who also appear to be helping the Afghan insurgency.

The more than 91,000 classified documents - most of which consist of low-level field reports - represent one of the largest single disclosures of such information in U.S. history. WikiLeaks gave the material to the New York Times, the British newspaper the Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel several weeks ago on the condition that they not be published before Sunday night, when the group released them publicly.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs condemned the leak of the documents, calling their publication "a concerning development in operational security" that "poses a very real and potential threat to those that are working hard every day to keep us safe."

But Gibbs rejected the idea that the documents reveal anything fundamentally new about the war effort, or that the leak is causing any political dilemma for the administration as it pushes ahead with the war policy the president settled on last December.

"What is known about our relationship and our efforts in both Afghanistan and Pakistan are not markedly changed by what is in these documents," Gibbs said. "There's no broad new revelations in this."

President Obama did not respond to questions about the leak of the documents after appearing in the Rose Garden to make an unrelated statement to the press.

Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said officials are conducting a review of the documents "to try to determine the potential damage to lives of our service members and our coalition partners, whether they reveal sources and methods and any potential damage to national security." The probe, he told reporters yesterday, will take "days, if not weeks."

Gibbs chided the people who run the Wikileaks site for failing to give the administration the chance to purge the documents of names or operational details that might put people in danger.

"There are ways in which one can disapprove a policy without breaking the law and putting in potential danger those who are there to keep us safe," Gibbs said.

In Afghanistan, officials expressed dismay and alarm over the unauthorized release of information. In Pakistan, officials disputed claims made in the documents that the Pakistani intelligence agency had collaborated with the Taliban.

"These allegations are always repeated," said Pakistan's ambassador to Afghanistan, Mohammad Sadiq. "I don't see anything new."

Wahid Omar, a spokesman for Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, told reporters in Kabul that "the president's immediate reaction was that most of this is not new."

The revelations have the potential of complicating final negotiations in Congress over a $33 billion war funding bill that that would finance the U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan. The package has cleared the Senate but stalled in the House when liberal Democrats, some of whom oppose the troop buildup, attached unrelated economic recovery assistance, including aid to states to prevent teacher layoffs.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, is working to resolve the funding conflict by the end of the week, when the House is scheduled to depart on the August recess.

Covering the period from January 2004 through December 2009, when the Obama administration began to deploy more than 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan and announced a new strategy, the documents provide new insights into a period in which the Taliban was gaining strength, Afghan civilians were growing increasingly disillusioned with their government and U.S. troops in the field often expressed frustration at having to fight a war without sufficient resources. (next page »)