Clive Fairweather: Leaks pose no apparent threat to our soldiers on the ground

MY FIRST reaction on reading these WikiLeaks was not shock or horror. Overall, I found little startling in the headline details. If anything, I found them, as usual, remarkably banal.

If the Americans did not have some "black units" pursuing Osama and his henchmen, then I think we truly would be surprised.

The news of casualties involving Afghan civilians comes as no surprise; if anything I expected worse being covered up, and the revelations at least show that such incidents are being properly documented.

Until analysts properly trawl through the WikiLeaks material, there is probably not much more that can be said, except that with the advent of the internet and e-mails you can bet your bottom dollar this will not be the last of it.

Leaks are here to stay; there will be material floating in the ether for years to come that will keep countless "geeks" up late into the night. Once upon a time, the mantra was "careless talk costs lives" or "watch your mouth". In future, the byword may well become "Watch your mouse."

As for damage the leaks will do to the safety of UK troops on the ground, that remains to be seen.

The top priority for any intelligence operation is to make sure the enemy cannot find out what you intend to do in the future, when and with how many troops. Any such document prepared must therefore be classified secret in order to save lives, lest the enemy be waiting, prepared for your arrival. Once the operation is over, however, that document need no longer remain secret, though in practice it may remain on files wrongly and over-classified because no-one has bothered to take the time to declassify. How many of the WikiLeaks documents fall into this category remains to be seen.

It will probably take analysts weeks, if not months, to be sure, such is the apparent volume of the material made available - but which eventually may fall into the category of "one of the biggest leaks of all time".

Events that are concerned with the past, as these files seem to be, normally fall into two main categories; those that expose details of specifically named operators on the ground and those that are politically embarrassing.

Certainly those concerning alleged collaboration by Pakistan's spy agency with the Taleban and others fall into the latter category, but as they were before Obama's time, there should be room for some manoeuvre. Whether operators' lives on the ground are at risk due to these revelations may be more of a moot point, but my gut reaction is "probably not".

• Clive Fairweather is a former SAS commander.