Among the ninety-one thousand or so documents from the Afghan war released by WikiLeaks Sunday is an incident report dated November 22, 2009, submitted by a unit called Task Force Pegasus. It describes how a convoy was stopped on a road in southern Afghanistan at an illegal checkpoint manned by what appeared to be a hundred insurgents, “middle-age males with approx 75 x AK-47’s and 15 x PKM’s.” What could be scarier than that?

Maybe what the soldiers found out next: these weren’t “insurgents” at all, at least not in the die-hard jihadi sense that the American public might understand the term. The gunmen were quite willing to let the convoy through, if the soldiers just forked over a two- or three-thousand-dollar bribe per truck; and they were in the pay of a local warlord, Matiullah Khan, who was himself in the pay, ultimately, of the American public. According to a Times report this June (six months after the incident with Task Force Pegasus), Matiullah earns millions of dollars from NATO, supposedly to keep that road clear for convoys and help with American special-forces missions. Matiullah is also suspected of (and has denied) earning money “facilitating the movement of drugs along the highway.”

That is good to know. The Obama Administration has already expressed dismay that WikiLeaks publicized the documents, but a leak informing us that our tax dollars may be being used as seed money for a protection racket associated with a narcotics-trafficking enterprise is a good leak to have. And the checkpoint incident is, again, only one report, from one day. It will take some time to go through everything WikiLeaks has to offer—the documents cover the period from January, 2004, to December, 2009—but it is well worth it, especially since the war in Afghanistan is not winding down, but ramping up. (Also very helpful: Raffi Khatchadourian’s piece for The New Yorker on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.)

WikiLeaks gave an advance look at the papers to the Times, the German weekly Der Spiegel, and the British Guardian, and all three were convinced that the documents were genuine. (The Times and Guardian both called the collection “The War Logs.” Der Spiegel went with the Ludlumesque rubric “The Afghanistan Protocols”; its package also has a sidebar titled “The Naivete of the Germans.”) Reporters at each of those publications have already zeroed in on some fascinating items, including revelations about an assassination squad called Task Force 373, connections between the Taliban and Pakistani military intelligence, and the incident I described above. One of the Times’s prime concerns was whether the files caught this or the previous Administration, or the American military, in any outright lies. While it did find “misleading statements” on matters such as the Taliban’s use of heat-seeking missiles, and much that had been “hidden from the public eye,” the Times decided that

Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war.

One should pause there. What does it mean to tell the truth about a war? Is it a lie, technically speaking, for the Administration to say that it has faith in Hamid Karzai’s government and regards him as a legitimate leader—or is it just absurd? Is it a lie to say that we have a plan for Afghanistan that makes any sense at all? If you put it that way, each of the WikiLeaks documents—from an account of an armed showdown between the Afghan police and the Afghan Army, to a few lines about a local interdiction official taking seventy-five-dollar bribes, to a sad exchange about an aid scam involving orphans—is a pixel in a picture that does, indeed, contradict official accounts of the war, and rather drastically so.

But after more than eight years at war, how carefully are we even looking at Afghanistan? The Times had a piece in Sunday’s paper on the strange truth that our expenditure since 9/11 of a trillion dollars on two wars has barely scraped our consciousness. Fifty-eight Americans have died in Afghanistan so far this month; one of them—Edwin Wood, of Omaha—was eighteen years old. Maybe the WikiLeaks documents will make those numbers less abstract.

This stash will be compared to the Pentagon Papers, and in some ways that’s right—WikiLeaks, like Daniel Ellsberg, has been accused of ignoring the national interest. (An unfair charge, unless by “national interest” one means the political interests of a particular Administration.) But the Pentagon Papers were a synthetic analysis, a history of the war in Vietnam. WikiLeaks has given us research materials for a history of the war in Afghanistan. To make full use of them, we will, again, have to think hard about what we are trying to learn: Is it what we are doing, day to day, on the ground in Afghanistan, and how we could do it better? Or what we are doing in Afghanistan at all?

We might also use the papers to ask ourselves, more than we have, how the Afghans see the war. Can we expect them to understand that we mean well when we hit the wrong house with a strike from one of our drones—which, according to these documents, are less effective than we’d like to think? How does our talk about democracy sound to them? One document, which has already been widely quoted, is the report of the provincial reconstruction team for Paktia, which met with members of a local council and was told that

The Chamkani Chief of Police and the Danwa Patan District Commissioner are fighting for the control (earnings) of illegal checkpoints. The people of Afghanistan keep loosing [sic] their trust in the government because of the high amount of corrupted government officials. The general view of the Afghans is that the current government is worst than the Taliban.

At the meeting, an old Afghan man spoke scornfully of democracy, which he saw as little more than a guarantee of an equal right to bribe. In response, the reconstruction team’s first recommendation was to

DO an Information Operation campaign explaining [to] the Afghan people: What DEMOCRACY is? How a democratic systems works? What they can do to report wrong doing? (The last only if there will be real consequences to the wrong doing, if not the confidents/narrators will be squash[ed] by the system).

That is a very big if. In that parenthetical, one glimpses the failure of our war. We may be the ones being shaken down on the highway, but from an Afghan perspective we are, by aligning ourselves with and propping up Hamid Karzai, also deploying the bandits. We are robbing ourselves, both of our purse and of our good name.

Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images.