Perhaps the Taliban deserves the presumption of innocence like anyone else, but it's a concern that deserves better than that kind of dismissiveness.

They've said they intend to hunt down and punish informants named in the Wikileaks docs, and they have a long enough history of brutality towards informants (as you'd expect of any side in a military conflict) that it's only prudent to take them seriously.

But sure, let's all sit behind the safety of our computer screen in our (relatively) free and democratic society, and scoff at the possibility that this might make the struggle yet more difficult for people fighting for a chance at freedom and democracy in their own land.

Of course it _might_ make things more difficult. What I'm saying is this: We know how our informants are, so we'd know if they died. The government would _love_ to find more stuff to pin on Wikileaks. Therefore, if 50 informants got killed, as your sibling says, Obama'd be on TV talking about it tomorrow.

But we haven't. So until someone shows that they have been killed, I presume that they haven't. That doesn't mean that it won't happen in the future.

So the US has done a good job of protecting them. (You don't _seriously_ think the Taliban has just turned a blind eye, do you?)

Still, it'll hardly embolden anyone who might've been considering becoming an informant.

So, fair enough of you to presume no killings have eventuated _yet_, but it's a diversion from the main point: you can't call it a step forward in the struggle for freedom and democracy in Afghanistan.

and you know that if one could be even remotely identified as such that obama himself would announce it on national tv. they got nothin'.