IT is perfectly legitimate for a journalist to publish papers leaked to him by a source. But this is fundamentally different from the theft of a load of documents from the premises of an embassy, ransacked during armed conflict, and their subsequent publication in a journal of repute published in a friendly country.

After Sept 11, 2001, the Northern Alliance ousted the Taliban regime. There was utter lawlessness in Kabul. Pakistan’s ambassador, Arif Ayub, was obliged to leave. Less than a year later, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies published in its journal Survival an article entitled, ‘The Taliban Papers’ by Tim Judah, a freelance journalist, who had covered the conflict in Afghanistan in October-November 2001.

He wrote exultingly: “The fall of the [Afghan] Taliban regime has provided us with … a unique treasure trove of Pakistani Foreign Ministry documents”, and that they “were obtained in Kabul following the collapse of the Taliban”. Undoubtedly, he did not enter Pakistan’s embassy to take advantage of the ransacking. However he could not but have acquired what he calls the “unique treasure trove” from someone who thus acquired them or directly from the culprit or through a chain of handlers.

The one who purloined the documents was a thief.

The documents cover Pakistan-Taliban relations for “much of the year 2000 and up to June”. Legally and morally, the property in the documents still vests in the Pakistan government. The one who purloined the documents was a thief and the one who received the papers was a receiver of stolen property. This characterisation is not being applied to Tim Judah since he does not reveal how he acquired them. It is never too late to make amends by whosoever is in custody of the papers now.

As only brief extracts are published, we have to depend on Judah’s comments. One must read his article with the memoirs of the distinguished Pakistani diplomat and editor of the prestigious quarterly Criterion. The book is entitled Afghanistan: The Taliban Years and gives a firsthand account of the events including talks with Mullah Omar. Among the extracts are minutes of an envoy’s conference held in Islamabad in January 2001. Arif Ayub’s paper criticised the policy towards the Taliban as did Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, then high commissioner to India. On April 23, 2001, the embassy in Kabul prepared a briefing paper “which gave a detailed analysis of Osama bin Laden’s activities in Afghanistan and his links to other groups”.

But the legal and moral issue remains. US Customs prevented the entry of the papers of the US embassy in Tehran published by the students who had seized the embassy on Nov 4, 1979, and confiscated them as stolen property. Entitled Documents from the US Espionage Den, they comprise over 50 volumes and were available for a song in a kiosk on the embassy grounds. A whole set was confiscated by US Customs on the ground they were stolen property. Can you imagine the howl of protests in the West if the embassy of any Western power had been ransacked by the Taliban and its papers published by an Asian journalist?

The US embassy was used systematically for the subversion of the Iranian state. Even after the revolution, the CIA tried to enlist Bani Sadr, before he became president, as an informant. Volumes 30 and 31 concern Afghanistan; 45 and 46 contain documents on Pakistan’s relations with the US. The late Agha Shahi, former foreign minister, comes out as a staunch nationalist whom the US disliked. He was characterised as “a strong advocate of the movement away from reliance on the US and toward multilateral organisations”.

The volumes establish that the US had every reason to suspect a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan but did not act. President Carter writes in his memoirs how his timely warning deterred the USSR from invading Poland. A similar warning would have saved Afghanistan.

The US charge d’affaires in Kabul was in regular contact with the Russians. A diplomat Vasily Safronchuk saw Amstutz a good deal and discussed — of course, only to discount it — the possibility of Soviet intervention. On May 29, 1979, Amstutz cabled to Washington, D.C. — “The most important question is: can we expect to see Soviet combat troops enter the Afghan conflict? We can only observe that that possibility cannot be excluded.”

The US charge d’affaires Bruce Laingen in Tehran warned his government, well in advance, of the consequences of letting the Shah enter the US. Friendly Iranian officials pleaded with him to keep the Shah out.

Two terrible tragedies would have been averted if only the US had listened to its own diplomats; scholarship has been remiss in its neglect of the Tehran documents. Some were shredded as students attacked the embassy. They painstakingly pieced them together and published them.

The writer is an author and a lawyer based in Mumbai.

Published in Dawn, February 20th, 2016