US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently accused Wikileaks of having the blood of US soldiers on its hands, after it published thousands of leaked Afghanistan war logs.

But Wikileaks defiantly said it would continue to publish similar documents.

Afghanistan leak

This is not the first Pentagon leak in the US history. In 1971 the New York Times and the Washington Post published a top-secret study of US decision-making in Vietnam handed to them by Daniel Ellsberg, then a US defense strategist. The documents came to be known as Pentagon Papers. They sparked outrage among the American public and fed anti-war sentiment that finally led to the end of the Vietnam War.

The Wikileaks documents and the Pentagon papers have much in common. Both resonated strongly with the public. The Afghan war has cost the US government a fortune in blood and treasure and there seems no end in sight. Calls to "bring our soldiers home," are growing ever louder.

Government handling of the leaks was similar. On both occasions politicians denounced the damage to national security on the one hand, and swore to find out who was responsible for the leak on the other.

Revealing state secrets is, on the face of it, reprehensible. But most Americans expressed sympathy and even support for the whistle-blowers. The secrets were revealed to the public at home, not to a foreign intelligence agency. And those who leaked the information sought neither profit nor fame. On the contrary, they risked unemployment and even imprisonment.

So why did they leak the documents? The Wikileaks files were evidently released by a source within the government or the military. That implies there are people who are both very familiar with and very unhappy about the situation in Afghanistan. Their motivation was to tell the public the truth about the war, to bring pressure on the authorities to change their strategy.

That is why sections of the media are warning the US government that the top priority should not be to find out who is responsible for the leak, but to reflect upon the war.

We will have to wait for history's verdict on the Wikileaks documents. But Ellsberg is no longer regarded as a traitor for releasing the Pentagon Papers. And history proved that the administration was not doing the right thing at that time.

(This article was translated by Zhang Ming'ai.)