There's not much new in this material

When, at the height of the Viet-nam War in the 1970s, a disaffected Pentagon analyst published explosive details about how the White House was running the campaign, US military commanders soon found themselves being forced into ordering a humiliating retreat from the war zone.

The Pentagon Papers, which were leaked to the New York Times in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg, a Democrat-supporting defence expert, lifted the lid on how successive presidents going back to Harry Truman had deliberately misled the American public on the conduct of the war.

The papers revealed how the White House had intentionally expanded military action by authorising the carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos, while insisting it had no desire to seek "a wider war". Even though most of the deception played on the American public had been undertaken by Democrat presidents, particularly Lyndon B. Johnson, it was left to the Republican Richard Nixon to implement the withdrawal strategy.

Now anti-war campaigners opposed to the Nato-led mission in Afghanistan are desperately hoping that history is about to repeat itself following publication of tens of thousands of secret Pentagon documents relating to the Afghan war.

The extracts, which are drawn from US military and intelligence report logs and have been published on the anti-war website Wikileaks, provide some disturbing reading. They show how nearly 200 civilians have been killed by Nato troops, while there has been a steep increase in Taliban attacks on coalition forces. A "secret" Special Forces unit has been created to "capture or kill" key Taliban commanders, and US forces are increasingly using unmanned Reaper drones to attack Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

The Taliban, meanwhile, has acquired heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles, and has caused significant civilian casualties through the increased use of roadside bombs. The insurgents have also allegedly received valuable support from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, which is supposed to be Washington's most important regional ally.

But, hang on a minute, you might well say. There is very little that is new in this material. The reason, after all, that the Pentagon Papers had such a dramatic impact on the course of the American involvement in Vietnam is that they contained hitherto unknown details about a major political deception. The "logs of war", on the other hand, have succeeded in generating much publicity without actually telling us anything we did not already know about a war that is proving to be immensely complex and challenging for all those attempting to bring it to a successful conclusion.

Swaying public opinion

The anti-war campaigners' aim in publishing the Afghan war logs is to turn public opinion in the US and Europe irrevocably against the campaign.

The carefully orchestrated publicity campaign, where details of the military logs were published simultaneously in the US, Britain and Germany, is aimed at further undermining public support for the conflict at a time when politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are discussing how long they are prepared to allow their forces to undertake combat operations.

As one senior Washington official commented on Monday: "They want publication of this material to have the same effect on public support for the Afghan war as the Abu Ghraib pictures had on the Iraq conflict".

For that to happen, the release of the war logs will need to become one of the defining moments in the history of the Afghan conflict. Otherwise they will simply fade into obscurity.

On Monday Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks who organised the international publicity blitz, said that by publishing the material he wanted to change the way people regarded the war. In an interview in Der Spiegel, he said: "I enjoy crushing b*****ds. The most dangerous men are those who are in charge of war. And they need to be stopped". He said he believed that "thousands of war crimes" had been committed in Afghanistan, and called on governments to bring prosecutions where there was sufficient evidence.

Assange is clearly a man with a mission, which is to wreck the entire Nato campaign in Afghanistan, with all the implications that will have for western security. Whether or not he succeeds will depend on how public opinion responds to his project and how much the leaks can, as he claims, "shift political will".