The White House and its international partners today sharply condemned a whistle-blower website's publication of more than 90,000 top-secret U.S. military records on Afghanistan and braced for the release of as many as 15,000 more, as the leak reverberated around the world.

A cache of leaked American diplomatic cables quoted Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the United States ambassador to Afghanistan, describing President Hamid Karzai s inability to grasp the most rudimentary principles of state-building.

Another international conflict, another horrific taxpayer-funded sex scandal for DynCorp, the private security contractor tasked with training the Afghan police.

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.

From hundreds of diplomatic cables, Afghanistan emerges as a looking-glass land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm and the honest man is a distinct outlier. Describing the likely lineup of Afghanistan s new cabinet last January, the American Embassy noted that the agriculture minister, Asif Rahimi, appears to be the only minister that was confirmed about whom no allegations of bribery exist.