Is Wikileaks' Data Dump the "Pentagon Papers" of Afghanistan?

No.

I'm a member of the Baby Boomer generation, and like many of my contemporaries in the media, I naturally have a tendency to draw my cultural references from the 1960s and 1970s, so I wasn't surprised to hear Daniel Ellsberg being interviewed about Wikileaks' big Afghanistan media leak.. (Well, maybe a little surprised, since I wasn't sure he was still alive.) And on top of it all, Wikileaks' head explictly compared their documents to the Pentagon Papers. So naturally, it was inevitable there would be comparisons, just as every war is compared with Vietnam.

My first reaction, without having read much of the material, was that this is something quite different. Now I see, after starting to write this post, that another veteran of that era, Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, has said the same thing.

What people forget is that the so-called "Pentagon Papers" was not just a big data dump. It was a history of the origins and escalation of the Vietnam War compiled at the direction of Robert McNamara: it included ancillary documents, but also interpreted them.

It was also a history of the war at the level of policy formation, and so it directly revealed the thinking of President Lyndon Johnson, and of the senior policymakers, and many were shocked to learn that what the planners were planning in Vietnam was at odds with what Johnson was saying publicly in the 1964 Presidential campaign. The Wikileaks papers seem to be intelligence assessments and reports from the field, not a glimpse inside the national security policy apparatus.

Of course, technology guarantees that there will be no need for another Supreme Court case such as New York Times Co. vs. United States, the 1971 case banning prior restraint. In the Internet age, once something is out there, it's out there.

Of course, that doesn't mean there are no parallels. Public opinion about the war is already in flux, as it was in 1971, and if the new document dump raises questions about the conduct of the war, it could shift opinion further against it. But these are documents of a very different source, and one that non-professionals may have trouble interpreting. The Pentagon Papers came with their own interpretation.