"This haphazard cache of documents. . ."

ANYONE who has spent the past two days reading through the 92,000 military field reports and other documents made public by the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks may be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. I’m a researcher who studies Afghanistan and have no regular access to classified information, yet I have seen nothing in the documents that has either surprised me or told me anything of significance. I suspect that’s the case even for someone who reads only a third of the articles on Afghanistan in his local newspaper. . .

Indeed. Mind you, if the rumpus makes things harder for the White House to persist in its coddling of the military-industrial complex known as the Pakistani ISI, then that's fine with me (bonus: Andrew Potter on the affair).

Meanwhile, the future need not be a boot stamping on a human face forever: Peter Ryley on Alone in Berlin.