Whenever a set of documents is either leaked or declassified, it invariably generates tremendous interest and excitement. This is natural for it fills in the gaps and caters to the curiosity of an overwhelming number that takes keen interest in the events and incidents and also the people involved and their thinking.
There however is dissimilarity between the stuff that is declassified and that which is leaked. The declassified papers more often belong to a period that may be near-history but are in most cases not contemporary. So, while these shed some light, occasionally correct a fallacy or add to the already available information on events in the past, these do not have that intense a bearing on the present. The leaked material though often falls in the contemporary category, and is often of the incendiary variety.
What makes WikiLeaks the mother of all leaks is because it is not just its contemporariness but indeed its sheer volume and sweep. And given the eminences from around the world involved, both sharing their candid opinions with the US diplomats and those on the receiving end, this is not to mention its combustibility!
No wonder it has created such a great stir around the world and in the bargain achieved the rarest of feats of making US diplomats look embarrassed.
It is no ordinary discomfiture, for it has indeed stirred up such a hornets nest that one European foreign minister has branded the WikiLeaks as the 9/11 of American diplomacy. And he is not far off the mark, as with the leaks stands exposed the inner most thinking and strategy of the US before its friends and allies and its foes and rivals.
This also presents the US State Department and its legion of diplomats spread in all continents with a few dilemmas. One: would they, at least in the near future, be trusted with opinions so frank and candid? Second, how would they tackle with those prominent friends of long standing whom the revelations have embarrassed in the extreme, such as the King of Saudi Arabia (who according to the cables not only called President Zardari names, whose support for the military dictator Pervez Musharraf was unstinted and who for good measure also exhorted the US to launch an attack on Iran in order to stop it from becoming a nuclear power)?
There are myriad other colourful observations about, among others, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hamid Karzai that make a delightful read but are not going to endear American diplomats to these people in power.
Closer to home, other than statements and opinions that mention President Zardari in terms that are unflattering, reflect on the army chief wielding real power behind-the-scenes, there are other disclosures that paint us as villains in the piece on the U.S war on terror. But most of them were already in the public domain, and not just through conjecture and innuendo but in enunciation of the US policy. So there is hardly a surprise there.
The latest disclosure that David Camerons remarks in India in June [about Pakistan looking both ways in War on Terror] that spawned such angst in Islamabad was inspired by the senior US diplomats, should not shock us either for that is a stance that we are well aware of.
The US chagrin aside, this was always likely to happen. The question is: When 250,000 secret documents that a reasonably large number of officials across various US departments have access to, what took the whistleblower so long to find WikiLeaks? [Quote from a US website: SIPRNET was meant to solve the problem of inter-agency communication. No doubt it does help break down what those in the culture call stovepipes or information silos which keep information sealed from other agencies. More and more U.S. embassies are plugged into SIPRNET. In 2002, already 125 agencies were linked to the net and by 2005 there were 180.]
That must be intriguing to the powers-that-be in the United States (and one likely consequence would be that from now on information would be available only on need-to-know basis), but still more perplexing must be the question of how to stop the publication of the so far unreleased part of the unprecedented cache.
How is the US going to react to this? There are no easy answers to that, for the electronic information may already be in multiple hands. But on the pretext that it has put lives and operations at risk, the hunt for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is on.
The writer is Sports and Magazines Editor, Pakistan Today.
