Wikileaks and diplomacy

[Lahore_Real_Estate]

Contrary to how our conspiracy theorists demonise Wikileaks, it is neither a conspiracy to target Pakistan or to spread disarray in the Muslim world. Nor is it a venom-secreting hydra-headed monster. It is no Frankenstein either. We are a nation in a trance. Our leaders turn out to be the whirling dervishes swirling to the tunes of their foreign masters.

No foreign conspiracies are needed where corrupt and self-serving rulers are themselves inflicting every material loss and moral indignity upon their nation. What, in fact, is revealed in Wikileaks is a matter of utmost shame for us. The leaked diplomatic dispatches from Islamabad about our leaders are self-explanatory. American diplomats in Pakistan had free and unhindered access to our rulers and other political and non-political elite, in clear breach of the rules of business and procedures of protocol. For this the entire blame rests with our own leaders and our faulty enforcement system.

In order to understand the reality of Wikileaks, one must have a holistic worldview rising above all prejudices rooted in our xenophobic mindsets and narrowly-conditioned responses. At the onset of this century, we found ourselves dying to one world, and not yet being able to be born into another. We are today adrift in a more uncertain, more chaotic world, burdened with the same old problems, perhaps in their acutest form. Wars of aggression and attrition, invasions in the name of self-defence, military occupations, human tragedies and a culture of extremism and violence continue to define the “new world disorder”.

As President Ronald Reagan orated against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, he often used to quote from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense with Paine’s vision of a United States great enough “to begin the world over again”. Indeed, one of Reagan’s Republican successors did it. President George W Bush did begin the world all over again, by turning it upside down.

Against this dismal global backdrop, Wikileaks’ emergence in 2006 as a web-based whistle-blowing campaigner for “truth and openness” should have been no surprise. Its founding mission, as outlined in 2007, is to “expose oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East”, and also to be of assistance to peoples of all regions by revealing unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations. It is a dead-letter box open to would-be leakers for any revealing material on issues of public interest and relevance.

Operated by the Australian-origin Swedish national Julian Assange, Wikileaks accepts only “classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance”. It does not take “rumour, opinion or other kinds of firsthand reporting or material that is already publicly available”. In essence, it upholds the principle of freedom of information while baring the truth behind today’s wicked wars and exposing the ugly faces of self-serving, corrupt and deceitful rulers of the world.

Its early targets included high-level corruption in Kenya; alleged illegal activities in an offshore operation of the Swiss-based bank Julius Baer; the American prison camp at the US Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba; the 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s personal email account; the membership list of the far-right British National Party; and a toxic-waste scandal in Africa. Since then, the United States alone has been the target of Wikileaks, with other countries suffering the collateral damage of coming into focus.

In April this year, a video was posted on its website showing a US Apache helicopter randomly killing at least 12 Iraqi civilians, including two journalists working for Reuters, during an attack in Baghdad in 2007. In October this year, Wikileaks posted online almost 400,000 documents detailing events in Iraq after the US invasion of that country in March 2003. In July this year, some 90,000 secret records of US military incidents and intelligence reports about the war in Afghanistan were leaked. A US military analyst is already awaiting trial on charges of leaking these documents and other sensitive military and diplomatic material.

Last week, Wikileaks came out with more than 250,000 cables from US diplomats giving their candid assessments on the governments of their accreditation and their leaders. For the US this has been no less than an avalanche of exposure of its diplomatic secrecy. This huge cache of diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an interesting insight into the intrusive activity by 270 US diplomatic and consular missions across the world.

Many of the cables in the first lot of leaked documents pertain to our leaders, portraying them as corrupt, opportunistic, double-crossing and slimy characters. Wikileaks are not just Pakistan-specific, as some of its Pakistani critics have been saying. It covers diplomatic conversations between US diplomats and leaders from almost every country in the world and provides an interesting insight into the subtleties of the United States’ foreign policy and its art of dealing with different personalities and governments around the world.

The cables contain specific allegations of corruption against politicians in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, Italy and the Central Asian states, as well as harsh criticism by US diplomats of their host governments, from the Caribbean countries to China and Russia. The material includes a reference to Russian leader Vladimir Putin as an “alpha-dog” and Afghan president Hamid Karzai as being “driven by paranoia,” while Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany “avoids risk and is rarely creative.” They are a great read as a secret chronicle of America’s relations with the world in this age of the war and terror, and reveal how Washington uses corrupt and oppressive regimes across the world, like that in Pakistan, for its own purposes.

However, whatever their intent or content, the leaked papers shed no new light on American foreign policy. It is an open secret and the whole world knows which superpower turned the world upside down. But let us be fair to US diplomats. They were just doing their job with utmost professional finesse. It is their interlocutors who forgot that every word they did not speak remains their slave, and the word they have spoken is their master.

This latest mega-dump from Wikileaks has no doubt embarrassed the United States by virtually putting the State Department through something like an airport body scan. It has not only exposed the insecurity in Washington’s security through blatant compromise of its cyber strong room where all the data in question was stored. This security breach of the highest order will certainly have a serious fallout on the future credibility and conduct of US diplomacy, and the United States will from now on have to adopt a new working procedure.

The only thing that will not change, perhaps, is the reality of the diplomatic adage that “an ambassador is an honest person sent abroad to lie for the good of his or her country.” It would be an exaggeration to say that diplomacy will never be the same again. Self-interest means that countries will still send and receive private messages. Diplomats will continue to function as they have done for centuries.

Meanwhile, one hopes, Wikileaks will continue to gain strength to challenge a global system based on injustice, oppression and exploitation.