In Kabul, the Afghan government accused the United States of ignoring Pakistan’s role in the Taliban insurgency as the fallout continued from Sunday’s unauthorized release of 91,000 classified US military reports on the war.The House of Representatives gave final approval to $37 billion in funding for the war effort -- and the 30,000 extra troops Obama is sending to Afghanistan to try to break a resurgent Taliban in the nine-year-old-war -- by a vote of 308 to 114 but more Republicans than Democrats voted for it. In all, 102 House Democrats voted “no.” The Senate previously passed the bill, which now goes to Obama to sign into law.
The leaked documents, made public by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, detailed allegations that US forces sought to cover up civilian deaths and described American concerns that Pakistan secretly aided Taliban militants even as it took billions of dollars in US aid. In his first public comments on the leak, Obama said it underscored the need to stick with his war strategy. “While I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations, the fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan,” Obama told reporters. The general who Obama nominated to head the command that oversees the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq agreed. “I’ve seen no big revelations,” General James Mattis, nominated to lead US Central Command, told a Senate hearing. “One of the newspaper headlines was that ‘The war is a tense and dangerous thing.’ So if that is news, I don’t know who it’s news to on this planet.”
Some analysts said the revelations could be damaging as the White House seeks to shore up sagging public support for the war while setting the stage to start withdrawing US troops by Obama’s target date of July 2011.
