U.S. officials rebut WikiLeaks and defend the Afghan war. Are they right?

WikiLeaks has struck the White House, releasing more than 90,000 raw reports and other documents from inside the Afghan war effort, mostly from troops and intelligence officers. Several themes in the documents are embarrassing: civilian casualties, Afghan corruption, Pakistani collusion with the Taliban. Now the White House is striking back. In a coordinated operation, National Security Adviser James Jones, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, and State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley have dismissed the leaked documents as old news that shouldn't alter U.S. policy. Are their rebuttals persuasive? Let's take a look.

1. There's nothing new here. This is the administration's main argument. At his press briefing yesterday, Gibbs repeatedly said there were no "broad new revelations" in the documents. Crowley said there were "no grand new revelations." This is true, as Slate's Fred Kaplan explains. But it's also a dodge. Reports don't have to be broad or grand to be sobering.

Gibbs compared the WikiLeaks documents unfavorably to the Pentagon Papers, noting that the former are "just on-the-ground reporting," a bunch of "one-off documents about an operation here or an instance there." That's an odd way to belittle them in front of the press. On-the-ground reporting about an operation here and an instance there is how good journalists compile evidence of a war gone wrong.

Gibbs argued that in enumerating "our concerns in our relationship with Pakistan" and "the challenges that we face in Afghanistan, I do not know that you would list one thing differently today as a result of what we've read in these documents." But so what? Reports on the ground seldom reveal a whole new category of trouble. They're damning enough when they show that a known category of trouble is worse or more persistent than our government admits.

Consider a couple of the leaked documents. One describes a January 2009 meeting at which Gen. Hamid Gul, a former director of Pakistan's intelligence service, reportedly helped al-Qaida operatives plan a suicide attack in Afghanistan and pledged a Pakistani "blind eye" to the operatives' presence in Pakistan. Another describes a deadly December 2009 shootout between Afghan soldiers and police, prompted by "an altercation over a car accident." Broad new revelations? No. Disturbing signs of treachery and chaos? You bet.

2. Things have changed since 2009. In Sunday's statement, Jones argued:

The documents posted by Wikileaks reportedly cover a period of time from January 2004 to December 2009. On December 1, 2009, President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on al Qaeda and Taliban safe-havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years.

Gibbs reinforced this point:

The documents purportedly cover from, I think, January of 2004 to December 2009. … When the President came into office in 2009, he, in the first few months, ordered an increase in the number of our troops … and then, as you well know, conducted a fairly comprehensive and painstaking review of our policy, which resulted in December 1, 2009's speech about a new direction in Afghanistan. … The President was clear back in March of 2009 that there was no blank check for Pakistan, that Pakistan had to change the way it dealt with us, it had to make progress on safe havens. … On March 27, 2009, the President said, "After years of mixed results we will not and cannot provide a blank check.  Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders."