On July 25, Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, a non-profit Swedish website started in December 2006, posted an unprecedented 91,731 mostly classified documents, the so-called “War Logs,” and most with a middling “secret” clearance level – from United States military databanks relating to the war in Afghanistan – on the Internet.

The documents make it possible to compare the mainly dismal frontline reality on the battlefield with the political propaganda coming from the higher-ups.

At the same time the material was also made available by WikiLeaks to be published across various portals and platforms in three of the world’s most prestigious daily newspapers – the New York Times in the United States, the Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany.

Assange himself lives in the shadowy world of the stateless cyber-geek. A 38-year-old Australian, he is constantly on the move from Kenya to Iceland to wherever. He became a computer hacker in his late teens breaking into computer systems in Europe and North America with two fellow hackers, who called themselves the International Subversives.

In September 1991 when Assange was 20, he hacked into the master terminal Nortel Networks maintained in Melbourne. The Australian Federal Police nabbed him in “Operation Weather” and he was charged with more than 30 computer hacking offences. Assange pleaded guilty to 24 charges and was fined $2,100.

While some – including Assange – have compared the War Logs to the leaking of the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers to the New York Times by defence analyst Daniel Ellsberg, published by the paper beginning in June 1971,the War Logs and Pentagon Papers were different in kind, as Ellsberg has noted himself in interviews last week.

“There is a very real drama because of the size of the release and it’s an important step, but these are low-level field reports while the Pentagon Papers were a high-level analysis about the origins of the war,” Ellsberg said. “Still, it’s a very important moment because this is a war that is taking place right now and what WikiLeaks has done could change how people think about it.”

The motives of leakers such as Assange and Ellsberg are invariably painted as pure and idealistic and just as invariably prove to be mixed, if venial. That they have feet of clay should come as no surprise. Nor should it discredit the documents.

In the case of Assange’s War Logs, these are not so much new revelations as confirmation of the dreary facts from Afghanistan that we have already long known: It is an unwinnable war for Canada, the United States, Britain and their North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies.

Afghanistan sits at a geopolitical crossroads between East and West. During the “Great Game,” the strategic contest between the British Empire and its Russian rival for supremacy in Central Asia between 1813 and 1907, Afghanistan was a buffer state.

The Afghans defeated the British at the Battle of Maiwand in July 1880, one of the principal battles of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. As they defeated the British in the 19th century, the Afghans also defeated the Soviet Union in the 20th century, with the Russians spending a decade mired down there from their invasion in December 1979 to their withdrawal in ignominy in February 1989.

When we first wrote about Afghanistan in this space on Feb. 11, 2009, 108 Canadian soldiers and one diplomat had died during the Afghanistan mission since April 17, 2002.

As 2009 ended, 138 Canadian soldiers, a Canadian diplomat, two Canadian aid workers, and a Canadian journalist had lost their lives in Afghanistan.

As of July 20, the number of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan stood at 151.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is standing firm in its determination to end Canada’s 2,500-troop combat mission in less than 11 months by July 1, 2011.

Until then we remain mired in a much longer conflict than either the Second World War or First World War. Almost nine years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, followed by the subsequent ouster of the Taliban from official power in Afghanistan, their leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar Mujahid, still remains uncaptured and leads the resistance. Ditto Osama bin Laden, who eluded the Americans in Tora Bora in December 2001.

Despite the Prime Minister’s earnest talk about the importance of having “a viable, functioning state in Afghanistan that has some acceptable democratic and rule of law norms,” nation-building with President Hamid Karzai is largely an act of wilful blindness in working with him and his unsavoury narco-warlord compatriots. Grafting on a patina of our exported democracy to Afghanistan’s political governance structure is about as likely to succeed as our military mission has over the last nine years.

It is time, nay past time, to say adieu to Afghanistan.