David Rothkopf presented another Twitter reflection on Afghanistan, and in particular, the news coverage of the government’s collapse. It is worth your time:
There is a subtext to the coverage of Afghanistan that largely goes unspoken. In fact, even acknowledging it is likely to unleash a lot of vitriol. But it is this, many of those covering and commenting on the current events in that country have deep and intractable biases.
Many of these biases were arrived at for good reasons and at least, in terms of their origins reflect well on those who possess them. But they color how many media outlets cover Afghanistan.
First, the war in Afghanistan was triggered by a US national trauma. America wanted retribution and those who could provide it were widely and generally correctly portrayed as heroes, seeking justice for those lost in the 9/11 attacks.
This was “the good war,” the one any president of either party would have launched. The enemy had already been convicted of supporting the murder of thousands of innocent Americans and our national narrative was that they would remain a threat to us all until they were defeated.
It wasn’t a time for questioning. It was a time for unity. The problem was that opportunist pols & the misguided almost immediately began parlaying this momentary mood into a license to lie & as an excuse to over-reach, over-spend & pursue ideological or greed-driven vendettas.
The war in Iraq is one such example of this, of course. And related, so too was the deeply dangerous, costly, wrong-headed idea of the War on Terror. As Senator Bob Kerrey rightly noted, “Terrorism is a tactic–and you can’t declare war on a tactic.”
Adrift without a post-Cold War playbook, our leaders made the false analogy between the threat posed by like Al Qaeda that was estimated to have perhaps 170 members in 2002, many of whom were in hiding, some thought to be living in caves, and our Cold War enemies.
The Soviet Union posed an existential threat. Al Qaeda did not. (Even today, much much larger despite our “war” on terror, the number of violent extremists outside the US is less than the number of students at a US junior college.)
But the wounds of 9/11 were deep and America went along with these crazy, costly, dangerous ideas. And in that moment it was almost sacrilege to question our motives or the judgment of our military commanders. That too, proved a big error.
The stories journalists would tell when they embedded with troops were, therefore, naturally, more often than not, stories of heroes. And why not? The young men and women fighting in Afghanistan were sacrificing a great deal for their country.
It was considered by many covering the war to be bad form to note its futility, the mission creep, the ass-covering of the officer corps and political leaders. Not that this didn’t happen. It did from responsible journalists.
But there were also a whole cadre of journalists who romanticized the experience, wanted to make their bones writing as combat journalists or writing a stirring war novel, and who confused the goodness of the troops with the rightness of the undertaking.
Naturally, they also came to know the Afghan people. Many of these people were warm and welcoming. It was hard not to like them or celebrate the new freedoms they had won. Of course, from very early on it was clear the US and our allies would someday have to leave.
It was clear that the fate of these people would be dark. That was especially true as the Taliban consistently gained power, year-after-year. Of course, by then, many of these journalists had moved on to other assignments. They stopped covering the war.
In the past few years, the amount of network TV coverage of the Afghan war could be measured in the dozens of minutes per year. When the journalists could have been raising alarms about the fate of the Afghan people, for the most part, they did not.
But that did not mean that when the end finally came, their old attachments and feelings returned to the fore. Perhaps it was guilt at the degree to which they had ignored the onset of the inevitable. Perhaps it was just being human and seeing fear and suffering.
But co-mingled with those feelings were the beliefs they had built up in the days when this was not a war to question. They reported on America’s departure as if the US still had the national interest in Afghanistan that we had in the wake of 9/11.
They portrayed the nascent terror threat in the same language that was used to gin up the “war on terror.” Naturally, they found many political and policy experts who were actively selling these old ideas because they were so closely identified with them.
These people treated the Taliban and this broken country as if it might contain a major threat to the US–which it has not done for years and given our current resources, technologies, and understanding of managing threats, it is never again likely to do.
But somehow the 2021 stories came out sounding like they were written in 2002. wo decades of world history, a trillion dollars of expense, thousands of American lives lost, 170 thousand total lives lost, the futility of the effort did not color their views as much as they should.
Many of these journalists and commentators had grown too comfortable with this story, too close to it, had personalized elements of it too much. Some were defensive about the gaps in their coverage or the degree to which they took so much at face value without questioning it.
Again, this was not everybody. There were many good, objective journalists who framed the story based on the facts and with an eye to history and context. There were also commentators who did the same.
But for the others, many of whom fed off each other’s narratives in the tightly knit world of foreign policy & DC journalists and experts, old errors, old biases, old relationships colored their telling of the story of the past week much as it had the coverage of the war itself.
They will howl in denial of this. So it is for audiences and readers to judge. It is for audiences and readers to ask if there really should be anything controversial about ending America’s longest war, about refocusing our efforts on future priorities rather than past errors.
That is not to say that the chaos on the ground and the mishandling of the evacuation of the past week was not covered as it should be. It was. Often heroically and heart-rendingly. It is that the moment was too often conflated with the big picture, the now trumped the history.
Most of us only see far-away events like these through the eyes of others. And it is up to those others to constantly ensure their own histories and biases don’t color their stories, that they look at events through the lens of now rather than another time in their lives.
The War on Terror was a disaster on many levels. Bad policy producing bad outcomes. The war in Afghanistan achieved some of its goals but went on for far too long at far too high a cost and in the end must be considered a failure, a waste, a tragedy.
As a country, it is important to be able to acknowledge these things and learn from them. But it is hard to do that when the window through which we view what has happened distorts our view.
It was, as Rothkopf says, not a time for questioning, meaning an opportunity for parlaying “into a license to lie & as an excuse to over-reach, over-spend & pursue ideological or greed-driven vendettas.” Former Halliburton executive and shadow president, Vice President Dick Cheney, saw an opportunity to flex U.S. muscle and invade Iraq for its oil. President George W. Bush saw an opportunity to be a war president and avenge the plot by Iraq to assassinate his father. The War on Terror provided the justification America’s vital interests did not.
Fear is the go-to tool when politicians need to manipulate public opinion and sow confusion. A frightened public is an easily manipulated public. The Bush II White House launched a propaganda campaign to somehow connect Iraq to the September 11 attacks in people’s minds even if it could not connect Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in time and space.
Whether it is relief agency films of starving children covered with flies or somber animal welfare ads of abused dogs, blatant emotional manipulation does not make me want to help. It makes me angry. And it was obvious for those inclined to question that Bush and Cheney were twisting reality to manipulate the country.
George W. Bush’s October 7, 2002 Cincinnati speech was a textbook case. Bush used fear to whip up support for invading Iraq. He threw everything but the kitchen sink at Saddam Hussein in that speech. That he needed to made it clear how weak his evidence was. He made a “lengthy, if circumstantial, case that Mr. Hussein had extensive ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist organization and that Iraq trained members of the terrorist group in ”bomb-making, poisons and deadly gases.'” This was Bush’s infamous “aluminum tubes” speech in which he suggested (in all seriousness) that Iraq might deploy “manned and unmanned aerial vehicles” loaded with chemical or biological agents to target the United States. Bush warned that the final proof of his wild accusations might come “in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
Still seething, I wrote my North Carolina senators the next night. Here is that letter:
“Facing clear evidence of peril,” George W. Bush last night recalled President Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. I lived through the Cuban missile crisis, Senator. Those were real missiles, only 90 miles away, and not weapons we worried might be developed, might be intended for us.
Clear evidence of peril? I grew up and lived most of my life under the threat of nuclear annihilation on thirty-minute notice from hundreds of Soviet nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. We knew – unequivocally – that the Soviets had the bombs and the delivery systems, and that their ICBMs were aimed right at us. This country has never faced a more imminent and direct threat.
Against this backdrop the President would have us shaking in our shoes and supporting immediate preemptive war against a dictator and tyrant who might – if he has a death wish in development, too – threaten the United States from halfway round the world using crop dusters armed with mustard gas?
This is Bush’s “significant threat”? So why do Iraq’s immediate neighbors Saudi Arabia and Turkey – both defended by our military – not support Mr. Bush on this? On Larry King Live last night Sen. John McCain observed that the worst-case scenario from Iraq is Hussein launching a chemical or biological attack against Israel, not against us. Israel faced something like this already. And if Hussein tried it again, the Israelis – if unfettered – would reduce him to a greasy patch, and we would help them do it.
Bush keeps trying unsuccessfully to tie Iraq to 9/11 to gain support for his jihad. Again last night, he was unsuccessful. His reasoning as to why we should act immediately against Iraq? “We’ve experienced the horror of September the 11th.” “Saddam Hussein’s regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.” Because there are bad people out there who don’t like us, and Saddam Hussein is one of them. (And he keeps bad company.) He might be tempted someday to commit illegal acts of violence against us, so we are justified in committing illegal acts of violence against him first. Shoot at anything that goes bump in the night… and ask questions later.
A brilliant foreign policy. It makes me nostalgic for the good old days of 1962.
Let’s let the U.N. authorize legal military action, if it will, before Bush straps on his six guns and sets off on a lynching party. Do not support this Texas vigilante’s putsch.
Nevertheless, Bush and “history’s actors” charged off in search of glory and after his personal nemesis in the name of promised weapons of mass destruction that were fictions. Bush destabilized Iraq and the region, sparked the rise of ISIS, and turned what should have been a focused mission to hunt bin Laden into a 20-year, failed effort at nation-building in Afghanistan. Too few questioned the Iraq invasion at the time. Questioning was out of fashion.
And here we are.