Will Wikileaks help end the Afghan war? No

The brave hope of the soldier who sent 92,000 secret documents to Wikileaks was that the disclosure of willful, casual slaughter of civilians by coalition personnel (with ensuing cover-ups), the utter failure of 'nation-building', the venality and corruption of the coalition's Afghan allies, and the complicity of Pakistan's intelligence services with the Taliban, would cause a wave of revulsion in the United States and among its coalition allies against the war.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (above) skillfully arranged simultaneous publication of the secret material in the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. The story broke on the eve of a war funding vote in the US Congress.

But on Tuesday evening, the US House of Representatives said Aye to a bill already passed by the Senate that funds a $33 billion, 30,000-troop escalation in Afghanistan. The vote was 308 to 114.

To be sure, more congressmen voted against escalation than a year ago when the Noes totted up to only 35. That's a crumb of comfort, but the cruel truth is that within 24 hours the White House and the Pentagon, with the help of influential papers like the Washington Post, had successfully finessed the salvoes from Wikileaks.

'Wikileaks disclosures unlikely to change course of Afghanistan war' was the Post's Tuesday morning headline. Beneath this headline the news story said the leaks had been discussed for only 90 seconds at a meeting of senior commanders in the Pentagon. "Senior officials" in the White House even brazenly claimed that that it was precisely his reading of these same raw intelligence reports a year ago that prompted President Obama "to pour more troops and money into a war effort that had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush administration".

There's some truth in the claim that, long before Wikileaks, the overall rottenness and futility of the Afghan war had been graphically reported in the press. Earlier this year, for example, reporting by Jerome Starkey of the London Times blew open the US military's cover-up after special forces troops killed two pregnant Afghan women and a girl in a February 2010 raid, in which two Afghan government officials were also killed.

It's oversell to describe the Wikileaks package as a latter-day Pentagon Papers. But it's undersell to dismiss the revelations as "old stories" as detractors have been doing. The Wikileaks file is a damning series of snapshots of a disastrous enterprise.

The sad truth is that wars are not often ended by disclosures of their horrors and futility in the press, with consequent public uproar. After Ron Ridenhour and then Seymour Hersh broke the My Lai massacre in