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Julian Assange's fatal mistake was
the interview he gave last month to a journalist. In this, he
claimed to have information about a major American bank that would
cause a scandal to rival the one about Enron. Assange had already
taken on the establishment; now he was daring the big business as
well.
But if governments vacillate in face of a challenge, big business
is unforgiving.
For the latter, every threat has an existential dimension. Still,
locking up Assange has not stemmed the flood; the leaks continue,
like the American television series "Dallas" to give us our daily
dose of surprises.
Perhaps at some point the general public may tire of the cables,
but professional diplomats across the world would be delighted by
the abundance of material that this flood from Wikileaks has
provided to them. Never before was it so easy to get first hand
and candid information about people, places and policies in such
enormous quantities.
Once, not too long back, spies would stake their lives to get just
a single secret document concerning a foreign state, especially a
hostile one. They would trawl the waste-paper bins outside an
embassy for the shredded and discarded documents to get just one
tiny link that could lead them to a whole chain. Spies stopped at
nothing; from money to honey traps, all this was fair game in this
battle for illicit information. Nor is it a matter of remote past,
in fact the trade craft is alive and thriving even now.
Just a few weeks back the Americans discovered to their horror
that a Russian spy ring, inclusive of a femme fatale, had been
operating for years on the American soil. And the British are just
beginning to discover that their bearded black-cab driver is
actually an off duty Taliban marking his time till he makes his
next bombing run on behalf of Taliban/ ISI. And why just the West,
we ourselves were duped by a reverse honey trap when a female
staffer at our mission in Islamabad finally confessed to being run
by the Pakistanis for years.
It is true that intelligence agencies around the world continue to
regard human intelligence as invaluable. But look at what the
internet has done. America's contribution to the world is now
threatening to turn its own world upside down. With just a single
effortless click of the mouse, anyone, and that includes the
Chinese hackers as well, will be able to access close to a quarter
million diplomatic cables. Some of them trash the leaders they are
commenting on; from the obvious ones like Berlusconi the stallion
and arrogant Sarkozy to mercurial Gadaffi who prefers being nursed
by a blonde bombshell from Ukraine.
All this is delightful stuff of course. Much of it was already
public knowledge to a greater or lesser extent; yet when one reads
it in communications marked secret, the voyeuristic pleasure
multiplies, and there is also the stamp of authenticity that comes
with it being diplomatic stuff. But the cable traffic wasn't just
about proving that the leaders of men have feet of clay, and that
much else in their bodies was made of common stuff. These cables
were meant to serve a purpose; despite their low intelligence
potential, they provided a valuable psychological profile of the
person.
There is a large quantity of other dispatches that concern the
more serious affairs of state. It is another matter that many of
them end up substantiating what is increasingly being whispered
around the globe - that America is no longer the omnipotent power
that it has long pretended to be.
As a matter of fact, a quick sampling of some of the cables only
proves the point:
- Since 2007, the United States has mounted a highly secret
effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research
reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could
be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device.
- Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant
groups like Al Qaeda, and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a
generous host to the American military for years, was the "worst
in the region" in counter-terrorism efforts, according to a State
Department cable last December. Qatar's security service was
"hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for
appearing to be aligned with the US and provoking reprisals", the
cable said.
- Cables describe the United States' failing struggle to prevent
Syria from supplying arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has
amassed a huge stockpile since its 2006 war with Israel. One week
after President Bashar al-Assad promised a top State Department
official that he would not send "new" arms to Hezbollah, the
United States complained that it had information that Syria was
providing increasingly sophisticated weapons to the group.
These instances serve to prove the point that America is no longer
feared; that chancelleries sometimes listen to American diplomats
only to defy them. But the variety of problems that they detail
also point to the complex, often deceitful and dangerous world
that we are living in. The issue therefore is twofold; whether the
publication of these cables will make the world a less dangerous
place, and second whether the sanctity of sharing information with
the foreign diplomats in general, and the Americans in particular,
has been compromised forever?
The answer to the first derives from the age old battle between
the censors and those who believe that societies can truly flower
in an atmosphere free from fear and censorship. To the latter,
freedom of expression means axiomatically the ability to share all
that becomes available. And a main quality of internet is
availability of information in large dollops.
The second issue concerns the confidentiality of diplomatic
communication. There is no doubt that people will be on their
guard at first. Some leaders may be hesitant to open up. But in
the end, need overcomes all obstacles, even the risk of exposure
to public scrutiny.
The loss of credibility, if any, suffered by American diplomats
after these leaks will be temporary. America is still enormously
powerful, and leaders around the world need it, and its
representatives, not just as their sounding boards but often also
as their confidants and advisers. But long after the cables have
been read by the curious, they will continue to serve as
instruction material to succeeding generations of new diplomats
because they are a fine example of brevity and a uniformly high
standard in the information they convey. It is just too bad if in
the process some dramatis personae appear sans clothes.
(The writer is
a former Indian ambassador. He can be contacted at ambraja@gmail.com)
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