Afghan Bloggers on Wikileaks War Logs

Earlier this week Global Voices launched a liveblog of global reactions to Wikileaks Afghanistan war logs. Now let's take a look at what Afghan bloggers have been writing on this story.

Among the 50 Dari-writing Afghan bloggers in my blogroll (one of two official languages in Afghanistan) I've seen very little commentary on the Wikileaks story. If you have links to Dari or Pashtun Afghan blogs we should read or translate from please add the link below or contact us to volunteer to write for Global Voices.

In the meantime, here are two reactions from Afghan bloggers who did write:

Syed Akramoldin Taheri, writing the blog Isteqlal (meaning ‘independence’) has chosen as the title for his post “Wikileaks reveals all roads end in Pakistan”. He says [fa]:

One of the main issues revealed in these 90,000 pages of documents is the clear support of Pakistan for the Taliban. According to these documents Pakistan has very close ties with the Taliban and supports extremist groups such as Jalaluddin Haqqani's. The leaked documents mention that Pakistan's intelligence service provided 1000 motorcycles for Haqqani's group in April 2007. The report also talks about Iran's support for the Taliban and the death of civilians that were not reported.

The blogger concludes that while the United States was angry to see the documents leaked, they show that Afghanistan's neighbors are intervening in internal politics and that actions could be taken to stop them.

Writing in his blog Tabarghanak, Mahmoud Hakimi of the Afghanistan Journal, writes “Finally everything is revealed” [fa]. The blogger says:

The 90,000 pages of leaked reports that show Pakistan's support for the Taliban, the murder of civilians, and conspiracies to kill Afghan leaders, is probably one of the most unique security/political events in recent history. It seems that beyond the political and military theater in Afghanistan, other scenarios have been written… Afghan people have struggled with such scenarios for the last three decades, and the outcome has been the death and homelessness of millions of people.

Update: By email, Nasim Fekrat, the journalist and blogger behind AfghanLord, says in response to a question about why Afghan bloggers have been silent:

All the stuff on Wikileaks is such an overt issue here [in Afghanistan] and people are dealing with it every day. They know what is happening on the ground. It does not seem like covert intelligence gathering for them as it does for the West. It doesn't make sense to them.

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