Leaked US archive fuels doubts on Afghan war

The Obama administration scrambled on Monday to manage the explosive leak of secret military records which paint a grim picture of the US-led war in Afghanistan and raise new doubts about key ally Pakistan.

The unprecedented release of some 91,000 classified military documents was likely to fuel mounting uncertainty in Congress about the unpopular war as president Barack Obama sends 30,000 more soldiers into the faltering drive to break the Taliban insurgency.

The documents detail allegations that US forces sought to cover up civilian deaths in the conflict as well as US concern that Pakistan secretly aided the Taliban even as it took billions of dollars in US aid.

The White House condemned the leak, saying it could threaten national security and endanger American lives, while the Pentagon called the release a "criminal act" and said it was reviewing the documents to determine the potential damage to both US and coalition troops.

The leaked documents, a collection of field intelligence and threat reports from before Obama ordered the troop surge in December, graphically illustrate the Pentagon's own bleak assessment of the war amid deteriorating security and a strengthening Taliban.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website behind the release, told a London news conference on Monday that his group had held back 15,000 of the documents as it decides whether their publication had security implications.

The archive leak came as the Taliban said they were holding captive one of two US servicemen who strayed into insurgent territory, and that the other had been killed.

The reported capture could further erode domestic US support for the war ahead of pivotal congressional elections in November.

Pakistan, which came in for particular scrutiny in the archive, said leaking unprocessed reports from the battlefield was irresponsible, while a spokesperson for Afghanistan's president Hamid Karzai said the documents underscored longstanding concern about both Pakistan's involvement in the country and the civilian death toll.

The documents suggest that representatives from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directly met the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organise militant networks fighting US soldiers.

Senator Jeff Sessions, a conservative Republican on the Senate armed services committee, said suggestions that even rogue elements of the ISI were seeking to confound the US war effort were troubling.

"That would be very disturbing if they were participating in strategies to fight US soldiers. It would be unacceptable," Sessions told reporters.

Pakistan foreign ministry spokesperson Abdul Basit dismissed the reports as "far-fetched and skewed".

"If anything, these betray the lack of understanding of the complexities involved," Basit claimed. "Pakistan's constructive and positive role in Afghanistan cannot be blighted by such self-serving and baseless reports."

Colonel Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesperson, on Monday declined to discuss the relationship with Pakistan or any of the specific documents, saying that despite their release on the internet the reports remain classified.

Along with doubts about Pakistan, the documents said the coalition troops have killed hundreds of Afghan civilians in unreported incidents, and that they often sought to cover up the mistakes which have shaken confidence in the war effort among many Afghans.

At least 45 civilians, many of them women and children, were killed in a rocket attack by the NATO-led foreign force last week during fighting with Taliban insurgents in the southern province of Helmand, an Afghan government spokesperson said.

"Over the years, we have raised the issue of civilian casualties and how harmful civilian casualties or collateral damage could be to achieving our joint objective of defeating terrorism in Afghanistan," spokesperson Waheed Omer said.

He said there have been reductions in civilian deaths over the past year and a half and that there was a common understanding about the negative impact such incidents have caused and the role of the ISI in supporting the militants.

US national security adviser Jim Jones said the leak would not affect "our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan".

Violence in Afghanistan is at its highest since the war began as thousands of extra US troops crank up a campaign to oust insurgents from their traditional heartland in the south.

The United States has repeatedly urged Pakistan to hunt down militant groups, including some believed to have been nurtured by the ISI as 'strategic assets' in Afghanistan and against arch-rival India.

Islamabad says it is doing all it can to fight the militancy, claiming that it is itself a victim of terrorism.

Under the heading 'Afghan War Diary', the 91,000 documents collected from across the US military in Afghanistan cover the war from 2004 to 2010, WikiLeaks said in a summary.

The documents were provided first to The New York Times, Britain's The Guardian newspaper, and German weekly Der Spiegel.

Last month was the deadliest for foreign troops since 2001, with more than 100 killed, and civilian deaths have also risen as ordinary Afghans are increasingly caught in the crossfire.