WASHINGTON: US lawmakers opposed to the Afghan war, emboldened by a huge leak of military files on the conflict, pushed Tuesday for pulling US forces from Pakistan in a blunt challenge to President Barack Obama.
The House of Representatives was expected to vote on both an emergency spending bill to pay for Obama`s strategy to turn around the faltering Afghan campaign and on a measure calling for a withdrawal under a Vietnam-era law.
"Wake Up America. WikiLeaks` release of secret war documents gave us 92,000 reasons to end the wars. Pick one," Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich, author of the Pakistan measure, said as debate began.
But as the US Army announced it had launched a criminal investigation into the affair Tuesday, Representative Buck McKeon, top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, invoked US forces on the frontlines.
McKeon warned "cutting off their funding in the middle of that fight is tantamount to abandonment."
He said he was "confident" US forces "will succeed in Afghanistan if given the time, space, and resources they need to complete their mission."
US officials were grappling with the possible impact of the WikiLeaks disclosures, which appeared to pack no reliable blockbuster revelations but put fresh media focus on the unpopular conflict.
Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said an Army Criminal Investigation Division would be taking a "broad look" at the leaks of the military reports from 2004 to 2009 that paint an unsettling picture of a troubled war effort.
With November elections fast approaching, Kucinich charged the United States was shortchanging Americans struggling to make ends meet in a sour economy while Congress approved "unlimited money for war."
Foes of the war, now in its ninth year, were drawing strength from the massive leak of Pentagon documents by the whistleblower`s website, which seemed to buttress criticisms of the governments in Kabul and Islamabad.
Kucinich, who has called for US forces to leave Afghanistan and Pakistan before, said US money went to "a corrupt government in Afghanistan," or to "a corrupt government in Pakistan which helps the Taliban in Afghanistan kill our troops."
Democratic leaders hoped to have the "magic number" of votes to pass the war spending measure and predicted defeat of the so-called War Powers Resolution on Pakistan -- named after a 1973 law aimed at boosting congressional authority over US war-fighting, a leadership aide said on condition of anonymity.
In Kabul, the Afghan government said Tuesday the leaked documents showed Pakistan helped insurgents who target Afghans and that the country`s Western allies had an incoherent approach to the insurgency.
But Admiral Mike Mullen, the US military`s top officer, Tuesday denied the leaks raised questions over US strategy or relations with Pakistan, where US forces are trying to hunt down top Al-Qaeda leaders believed to be hiding in the border area with Afghanistan.
Mullen said the information had been taken into account during a strategy review last year and that Washington made clear to Islamabad its concerns about possible links to militant groups.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, denied in an interview with the US television network CBS that his government provided support to Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.
"We do not support any group," Ahmadinejad said. "We just and only support the Afghan people. We support and we want to strengthen security in Afghanistan."
The Obama administration and its allies in the US Congress -- many of whom have expressed grave doubts about the conflict -- sought to play down the impact of the leak and denied any shift in policy on Pakistan.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry said it was important not to "overhype" raw intelligence field reports, some of them "completely dismissable," others "unreliable."
"People need to be very careful in evaluating what they read there," the Democrat said, insisting Washington had "made some progress" in addressing the issue of Pakistan.
The former top US diplomat in Kabul, Ryan Crocker, openly worried about the US public`s will to see the bitter conflict through and about the Taliban`s take on Obama`s July 2011 timetable for starting a US withdrawal.
"Impatience is on the rise again in this country," he told Kerry`s committee, warning a failure of US resolve was "what our adversaries are counting on now."
BDST: 1001 HRS, July 28, 2010
