America's Pakistan Problem

The release of 91,000 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan by WikiLeaks turned out to be your classic media bang-fizzle. The first-day bang was caused by the spectacular breach of security and the promise of devastating revelations, especially about Pakistan's clandestine support for the Taliban. The second-day fizzle was caused by the absence of much that was new in the documents. By the third day, it was pretty much over. But the war goes on, futilely at the moment. Indeed, the actual situation on the ground is worse than the secret documents describe — a fact that was made plain in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the third day of the story by David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert close to General David Petraeus.