The Internet publication and release of 92,000 classified documents on the Afghan war by WikiLeaks.org raises questions and may create problems for the Obama administration. The online organization gave the material to The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The administration has condemned WikiLeaks' action as heightening the danger to the nearly 100,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It is unclear the degree to which that is true since most of the documents are low-level field reports covering the period between January 2004 and December 2009. Americans there already had most of this information; the Taliban and the Pakistanis knew what they knew from their side. Nonetheless, the government says the leak is problematic because it allows the Taliban and Pakistanis to know what the Americans knew and thought about their activities.

The group that can learn the most from the documents is the American people. First and foremost, it is important to understand that what they will be reading is, for the most part, raw, unevaluated intelligence. Despite that, the revelations about the war in the WikiLeaks release are interesting and perhaps important. The Taliban are more deeply entrenched in Afghanistan and harder to defeat than U.S. military and political leaders might suggest. The documents also indicate that the killing of Afghan civilians by U.S. military was more widespread than in previous reports.

The assessment of the Taliban's prospects is made more valid by the picture painted of Pakistan's role. In spite of the $10 billion that the United States has poured into attempts to stiffen Pakistan's will and capacity to back the U.S. in Afghanistan, important segments of the Pakistani security apparatus -- in particular, its military intelligence service -- are supporting the Taliban, even to the point of working with suicide bombers against the Americans.

Perhaps the most important military information in the documents is that the Taliban possess portable, heat-seeking, ground-to-air missiles to use against U.S. and NATO aircraft -- something not previously disclosed. The United States provided Stinger missiles, the previous generation of a similar weapon, to the Afghan mujahedeen during their war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

If this information had been available earlier, would Congress and the public have continued to pour in billions of dollars? Knowing the state of the Afghanistan war, would they have been ready to support President George W. Bush's plunge into another war in Iraq? We will never know.

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