DE-PRESSED

New York Post: “Joe Biden’s Defeat in Afghanistan Will Echo for Eternity.”

George Packer in The Atlantic: “Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live in Infamy.”

Buffalo News: “Afghan Collapse Could Leave Indelible Stain on Biden Legacy.”

Fox News: “The Biden Doctrine: Hear no evil, see no evil, stop no evil.”

Politico: “The definition of gaslighting”: as chaos unfolds at Kabul, Biden team projects calm.”

New York Post: “Our military and our allies no longer trust Biden.”

New York Times:  It Shouldn’t Fall to Veterans to Clean-Up Biden’s Mess.”

Washington Examiner: “Biden should accept accountability for his Afghan debacle.”

Bill Maher: “We did this completely ass-backwards.”

American main stream media coverage of the U. S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was a loud, persistent drumbeat of debacle, disaster, damnation, and disgrace from the moment the draw down began.  The reporting offered little or no examination of the actual context; that is, there was no discussion of the complex, then-current—as opposed to illusory--conditions on the ground.  There was no historical perspective, no recounting of the 1979 military coup in Afghanistan that invited the Russians to invade in support of a favorable government, which in turn sucked in Jimmy Carter in the waning years of the Cold War.  And no critical analysis of the events of the past two decades of the sort exposed in the Washington Post’s 2019 “The Afghanistan Papers, a Secret History of the War” (Afghanistan Papers).

Instead, the American press—especially the liberal press—wrote the end of the story in Afghanistan in inflammatory, hyperbolic, hysterical, conclusory reporting of the type captured in the headlines above, even before the draw down ended.  Here is a transcript of what Eric Boehlert, a reporter for Shareblue, Salon, and Rolling Stone had to say about the coverage on Reliable Sources last Sunday, when asked by CNN’s Brian Stelter if the bomb attack that killed 13 U.S. soldiers and at least 170 afghan civilians had tempered the tone of the reporting:

Yeah, I think the bombing—there was less of a need for the press to inject drama.  Not that the story ever needed drama.  But I think the press kind of got married to the story line, very doomsday, you know, Biden teetering on collapse, the evacuation will never work. These are things that just did not pan out.  A week ago, the consensus—media consensus—was we probably wouldn’t evacuate 20,000 or 30,000 people.  You know, we’re up to 110,000, 120,000 people. You know, according the FiveTirtyEight, Biden’s approval rating is down 2 ½ points in the last two weeks.  This is during a drumbeat of relentlessly negative 24/7 Kabul coverage.  So, you know, the story kind—before the bombing—the story kind of pivoted. But the press didn’t pivot.  I think with that horrendous attack, we saw more straightforward news coverage, rather than let’s inject drama into this.

So why all the drama?  To maintain the high ratings and increased revenue media outlets have enjoyed since the Trump years?  And why the hyper negativity?  To appear nonpartisan, after five+ years of reporting nothing but bad news about Donald Trump and his Republican hardliners? As Les Moonves once said of the 2016 presidential race, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” 

And that’s no exaggeration, as these ratings and revenue figures for CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC compiled by Pew Research Center illustrate.

 

 

So it seems money, eyeballs (which translate into ad revenue), and a misguided desire to appear even-handed in the face of uneven situations may have factored into the style of the withdrawal coverage, but what about the amount of the coverage?  While recent U.S. press reporting has been inflammatory, past coverage has been extremely sparse.  According to Azmat Khan, award-winning PBS Frontline journalist, NYT Magazine contributor, and adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia, there has been little attention paid to Afghanistan at all since Obama withdrew some troops in 2014 and U.S. casualties decreased, until Biden’s withdrawal announcement on April 14, 2021.  Here is what Khan had to say on Reliable Sources last Sunday about how American media has been ignoring Afghanistan for years (emphasis added):

I think that as U.S. troops withdrew from the country in 2014, you also saw news organizations dedicate less attention to the country.  Notable exceptions, a group of Afghan reporters at The New York Times, who’ve just really been on it in terms of tracking casualties.  But we tend to see the most accountability reporting, the most investigations happen when U.S. soldiers are dying. So even though the war was continuing at record pace, we were dropping more bombs at record pace in Afghanistan in 2019, media coverage was some of its lowest that year.  And it has terrible effects.  And what I mean by that is many Americans are watching what’s happening in Kabul right now as it’s unfolding, and that is informing their decision about whether or not the U.S. should have withdrawn, rather than some of the events in the last few years, including, for example, the fact that ISIS-K, which carried out the attack on [13 U.S. service members] Thursday, has been staging similar attacks for years.  And the U.S. has been dropping bombs on them, large ones, the mother of all bombs, in fact, a bomb that was more than 21,000 pounds, to no avail.  So, the question really is, what would be different? Are we getting the right context to know that? To really have an informed debate about this war?

Just how little attention did the American press pay to Afghanistan before Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. troops?  Boehlert can answer that question:

And just a quick data point on the lack of coverage, you know, prior to this year, ABC, CBS, NBC evening news, 2020, five minutes of Afghan coverage for the entire calendar year.

But as bad as the feast-or-famine coverage of the 20-year U.S. occupation of Afghanistan has been, and as damaging and distorting as the over-the-top press coverage of the withdrawal has been, much worse is the American press’ failure to ask what I think is the most important question:  namely, whether the U.S. should have been in Afghanistan in the first place.  Why is no one asking why the U.S. remained in Afghanistan after its initial hunt for Osama Bin Laden fell short?  Why is no one asking if the U.S. thought it had the right to occupy Afghanistan?  And most critically, why is no one asking if the U.S. thinks it has the manifest destiny to mold other countries like Afghanistan in its own image?

Those questions seem to me to be the most important ones, as it is only the answers to those questions that will inform the debate on future U.S. involvement in conflicts.  And there will be ample opportunities to have that debate and avoid the same mistake again, because there are many unstable countries around the world that tend autocratic and deny basic human rights.  But those hard questions, the really important ones, the ones that define who we are and what our national interest truly is, are not being posed by the American main stream media’s opinion contributors, editorial boards, or talking heads.  This is a terrible dereliction of intellectual duty.  When we need it most, the Fourth Estate is MIA. 

 

Instead of provoking a national soul searching, the press has eagerly grasped onto the sensational and the emotional, concentrating on peripheral questions like the following:  Which president is more to blame for sending in or withdrawing troops?  Who was responsible for the breakdown in the special immigrant visa program, Trump or Biden?  Was it a good idea or a bad idea to close Bagram Air Base?  Was it a betrayal of the Commander in Chief’s duty or an inevitable consequence of having only 2,500 troops on the ground that the Taliban assumed control of checkpoints leading to Kabul Airport?  And so on and so forth in an excruciating dissection exercise that, while it might be useful as an examination of military and diplomatic tactics, obscures the real question of national strategy.  We are missing the forest for the trees.

I think the root of our involvement in the kind of never-ending, futile wars like the one just ended in Afghanistan is the sacred, largely unexamined belief in American exceptionalism.  This phenomenon of faith should provoke some hard, fundamental questions and some honest answers by the American press, policy makers, and public. 

First up is whether the U.S. really is exceptional.  If not, so what?  And, if so, what is the nature of that exceptionalism?  What rights, responsibilities, and opportunities flow from it?  Does exceptionalism mean we have the divine right to impose our way of life on other countries around the world, whether they like it or not, including by force?  Does it mean we have the ability to make a killing (pun intended) as the world's largest arms dealer, selling weapons and military equipment that too often end up in the hands of our enemies, as is the sad case with the Taliban?  Or does it mean we have the opportunity to share our exceptional economic and technological advantages with others less fortunate, thereby building admiration, trust, cooperation, and friendship?  

Who among us has asked:  Are we more likely to achieve peace and security by exporting our soft power, or by exporting our weapons and young service men and women to fight and die in faraway lands for unclear motives based on unsound principles and unachievable objectives?  After this terrible end to a terrible military misadventure in the Graveyard of Empires that has cost thousands of American, allies’, and Afghan lives, and at least $2 trillion, I can answer that question.  

But I'm not convinced Biden answers it the same way.  Promising to wage the endless war on terror with an "over-the-horizon capability," (translation, drone strikes), may simply be an expansion of the humane wars his predecessor Barack Obama espoused.  Obama's words are worth recalling, as much for their hollowness as their prescience:

Force alone cannot make us safe.  We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root; and in the absence of a strategy that reduces the wellspring of extremism, a perpetual war—through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments—will prove self-defeating and alter our country in troubling ways.

 Keep it real!  And wear your damn mask!

Marilyn