For the US, it is very embarrassing and it would take a lot of time and energy to rebuild the trust they have lost from the release of the cables. For other countries, the cables, however, provided a peek into a system of the world’s most powerful nation that has helped it to remain a leader of nations for so long. The US power is certainly not only built on the foundations of its strong economy and military might but, as the leaked memos show, also on systematic communication and information processing that they have put into place to understand what’s going on in each part of the world no matter how uninteresting the event may seem to be.
This can be a valuable learning lesson for many countries, including Nepal, where the concept of documentation is almost alien. Diplomatic communication and the power of information, along with the power of technology that was there for all to see in the WikiLeaks saga, has undoubtedly provided cues to all nations on how to conduct diplomacy in a beneficial way.
For many, the leaks also showed that diplomacy is much more than just smiling people with cleverly-phrased words and sentences that they often see in the media. Rather, the real face of diplomacy is murky, almost akin to a James Bond movie with blunt and sometimes nasty observations of people and events. The world hidden from general public came onto the limelight and many enjoyed reading every bit of it.
The website has reported that it has 2,278 documents sent from the US Embassy in Kathmandu and a couple of hundred more tagged Nepal but which has originated from somewhere else. We await the release of the documents and will publish them as soon as they are available. We believe that the way in which WikiLeaks has been releasing the documents – by protecting innocent names and maintaining secrecy on globally-sensitive issues as advised by the mainstream media – is a journalistically-correct practice and the information in the cables worth public consumption.
We also believe that while the attempts by the US and other nations to stop the release and/or block the website are understandable, it is something that they could have safely avoided.
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