Reacting to the WikiLeaks Dump

It will be some time before we learn all there is to know from WikiLeaks’ dump of almost 92,000 classified documents about Afghanistan, but what have we learned so far? Joe Klein at Time says that the documents remind him of the Tet offensive—“the overall impact of this event is likely to make clear to a public, which has not been paying much attention, how futile the situation in Afghanistan is—and how utterly duplicitous our Pakistani ‘ally’ has been.” Amy Davidson at The New Yorker writes, “WikiLeaks has given us research materials for a history of the war in Afghanistan. To make full use of them, we will, again, have to think hard about what we are trying to learn: Is it what we are doing, day to day, on the ground in Afghanistan, and how we could do it better? Or what we are doing in Afghanistan at all?”