Afghans and Pakistanis Attack Cables

By ALISSA J. RUBIN and CARLOTTA GALL
NYT

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan president and the Pakistani prime minister dismissed the WikiLeaks revelations about their respective countries as alternately false, unreliable and the work of “junior officers” in a joint news conference here on Saturday.

However, a senior Afghan minister later took a more aggrieved tone, suggesting that the leaked cables had irreparably damaged relations between the American ambassador, Karl W. Eikenberry, and members of the Afghan government. The minister, Omar Zakhilwal, also said that remarks attributed to him by Mr. Eikenberry in one of the cables, disparaging President Hamid Karzai, were false.

Until Saturday, the Afghan government had said little about the contents of the cables, thousands of confidential State Department memos that were made public in the past week by the Web site WikiLeaks and a number of newspapers. The Afghan president’s spokesman had said only that most of the major points had been previously disclosed and that Afghanistan and the United States had a strategic relationship.

Answering questions from the Afghan, Pakistani and international media at the news conference on Saturday, Mr. Karzai and the Pakistani prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, appeared to be at once trying to diminish the significance of the cables by throwing doubt on their authenticity while at the same time taking them seriously enough to deny some of their contents.

(More here.)