Two more documents and a list of email addresses from CIA Director John Brennan’s personal email account were released by WikiLeaks on Thursday.
The documents, which were dated Nov. 7, 2008, pertained to U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One was presumably authored by Brennan; the other was authored by Louis Tucker, then the minority staff director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and directed at former Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., who served as vice chair of the committee.
Neither document was classified, though they were private. They also contained nothing revelatory, generally speaking to the need for a comprehensive regional strategy that included Pakistan in order to stabilize Afghanistan and eliminate the Taliban.
“The USG [U.S. government] must develop and coalesce around a comprehensive regional strategy designed to meet a set of clearly defined goals for the Afghanistan Pakistan region,” Tucker wrote in his memo.
WikiLeaks published an initial set of six documents from Brennan’s email Wednesday, though one was a public copy of legislation related to waterboarding proposed in 2008. It isn’t clear how many documents the site intends to publish. However, in the absence of something more scandalous emerging, widespread interest in the documents may begin to fizzle out.
In the new release, Brennan provided additional advice on topics such communication in the region. He complained that the U.S. public affairs officer in Kabul “relayed that 95 percent of public diplomacy in Afghanistan is in the form of press releases,” which, he said were “largely ineffective in a mostly illiterate society.”
“The USG must adjust expectations for its efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan and gain long-term public support,” Brennan wrote. “The in-coming President should initiate a media campaign to communicate his vision of USG efforts in the region.”
He also warned the incoming president to end what he referred to as a ” ‘go it alone’ philosophy,” and to stop sending troops in the absence of a new strategy. “Sending more troops into the USG’s current modus operandi in the region is a recipe for following the Soviet model to disaster in the 1980s,” he said.
The list of published email addresses included security and defense experts, government officials, Obama staffers, and some businesses that Brennan had presumably patronized.
