A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

How Low Can They Go? The Media's Afghan Coverage
To assess the withdrawal, mainstream media go to the 'experts' who
were wrong or lied about the war for the past 20 years

Clichés become clichés because they are true, at least for a while.
When the British started calling Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires"
back in 1842 ,
they came up with one that had real lasting power. More than a century
and a half later, the Soviets buried their benighted empire there, and
now, with a little luck, so might the U.S.

Of course, lots of people will complain about this. They will say the
empire could have lived on if only we had listened to them. They will be
nostalgic for the days when it was still possible to believe that they
were living in a time when their nation was allegedly feared and
respected because of the size and the prowess of its military forces.
This is baked into the mentality of yearning for a lost empire, as it is
for all lost causes. Think of France in Algeria. (I am currently reading
volume one of Martin Walker's "Bruno, Chief of Police"

detective series, in which provincial French folk are still complaining
about that in 2010.) Stephen Wertheim puts the point nicely in a
Washington Post op-ed that begins: "You don't get to lose a war and
expect the result to look like you've won it.
"

One could write an entire doctoral dissertation on the multiple,
overlapping failures that have characterized most of the mainstream
media coverage of the collapse of the 20-year war in Afghanistan. So
many of the pathologies that interfere with its ability to tell simple
truths about our country and our world are being run through this
wringer that it would take literally hundreds of pages to do justice to
all of them; to explain how they operate across our media institutions
and why they operate the way they do. Ironically, the splintering of
these same institutions made possible by the internet has allowed some
writers and analysts to capture a few of these, practically in real
time.

The most obvious among the myriad failures of mainstream coverage of the
crisis is its stubborn ahistoricism. The Biden administration may have
screwed up the exit of U.S. troops and the friendly Afghans who helped
them, but hey, this was a 20-year, nearly $2.4 trillion war effort that
was built on lies and self-delusion and that we didn't really want to
win in the first place. Prospect alumnus Matt Yglesias does a fine job
of laying out some of the history that ought to be included in any story
about who is to blame, but almost never is, in his Substack essay "Biden
(and Trump) Did the Right Thing on Afghanistan
."

For more helpful historical background on the conflict, take a look at
these contributions from Adam Tooze
,
Robert Wright
,
Ali A. Olomi
,
and Sergey Radchenko
,
and (on Facebook) from Peter Galbraith
. In matters related to
"Af-Pak," I always rely on my friend Husain Haqqani. Here he is on
"Pakistan's Pyrrhic Victory
"
in Foreign Affairs. Finally, for some scholarly disputation on the blame
heaped on Zbigniew Brzezinski for the rise of the Taliban, you'll have
to go here
(h/t Rob
Rakove).

Many decades ago, the polymath economist John Kenneth Galbraith
(Peter's dad) proposed a rule that every time a reporter publicized an
economist's prediction about the future, it should be immediately
followed up by a list of that same economist's previous predictions.
That would, in virtually all cases, demonstrate the futility of taking
the original prediction seriously (and hence, obviate the need for the
article, so his idea, because of its very merits, was an obvious
nonstarter). And yet today, the makeshift Afghanistan punditocracy is
dominated by people who were either (a) terribly wrong about virtually
everything they said about the conflict in the past, (b) lying about it,
or (c) most commonly, alas, both.

I find myself a little shocked to be recommending a piece by someone who
is not only "vice president for research and policy at the Charles Koch
Institute" but was also "President Donald Trump's nominee for
ambassador to Afghanistan." But this William Ruger
fellow, writing in
The National Interest
,
is also a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and most importantly, makes
a great deal of sense. He praises Biden for "displaying real courage by
sticking with a decision that remains prudential given the realities
about Afghanistan and the United States. Biden is showing the requisite
realist spine that America needs at this moment." Ruger mocks his
critics who claim the U.S. "could have stayed longer at a low cost, all
the while preserving an Afghan government that was already teetering
when even more American boots were on the ground. They also place the
blame for the collapse we are seeing on withdrawal rather than on the
failed two decade-long Afghan nation-building project and its
architects."

Getting down to proverbial brass tacks, he indicts most MSM coverage
because the critics in question "were those same [Afghan war]
architects, along with their advisors and supporters outside government.
Indeed, these were often the very people who the Washington Post's
Craig Whitlock outed in his Afghanistan Papers series

as having had little clue how to find success in Afghanistan and who
consistently misled the American people about the state of the war.
Moreover, these critics are committed to propping up another, much
grander failed project-the primacist approach to the Greater Middle
East and the world more generally."

With similar concerns in mind, I wrote the following in my 2020 book
Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
:

The progress of [the Afghan] war would also turn out to be based on a
massive campaign of deliberate deception, as a comprehensive internal
Pentagon study would eventually reveal. That information was made public
following what the Washington Post called a "three-year public records
battle" between the Post, the National Security Archive, a nonprofit
research institute based at George Washington University working with
the newspaper on the project, and the Special Inspector General for
Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), an agency charged with oversight of
US spending in Afghanistan. In late 2019, more than eighteen years after
the war began, the Post was able to publish a lengthy overview of the
study's contents along with extensive excerpts from the study itself.
Post reporter Craig Whitlock, summarizing the more than two thousand
pages of documents and interviews the Post finally obtained, said that
the US military's true understanding of the effect of the massive US
military, diplomatic, and economic investment in that nation was at odds
with what Americans had been told. "The documents," he said, "contradict
a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military
commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they
were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.

In other words, we have especially clear and quite recent reason to know
that we have been consistently lied to by the military (as we usually
are; see, e.g., Vietnam, Cambodia, Central America, Iraq, etc.) and by
the very people whom reporters are depending on now to tell you how
awfully the Biden administration is screwing up things and how much
better everything would be if only the liars and the people who lost the
war, or cheerled for it, were in charge now.

Ruger goes after John Podhoretz, which is all to the good, but for a
more systematic takedown of an extremely typical specimen, go to Judd
Legum's Substack Popular Information, for his essay "The Media's
Systematic Failure on Afghanistan
." In
it, and merely for purposes of example, he dissects a lengthy news
report entitled "Biden's Promise to Restore Competence to the
Presidency Is Undercut by Chaos in Afghanistan
,"
by the Post's Matt Viser, in which the reporter credits reports that
the decision and its execution reflected "an inability to plan" and "an
underestimation of a foreign adversary," laying blame virtually
exclusively on Biden for the current chaos in Kabul.

Who are Viser's sources? The reporter describes them as "leading
lawmakers and others" who believe that "the chaotic, and deadly,
implementation of [Biden's] decision reflects a failure by Biden at a
critical moment to deliver the steady leadership and sound judgment he
promised." But who are these sources, really? Legum notes that Viser's
"lead quote comes from former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon
Panetta." He then goes through Panetta's previous statements about the
war, and man, the dude was wrong about just about everything. Legum
helpfully adds that "Panetta was also quoted by Fox News
,
the New York Post
,
The Hill
,
MSNBC
,
NBC News
,
the New York Daily News
,
CNN and many other outlets. None of them noted Panetta's prior
inaccurate predictions about the future of Afghanistan."

(I note that in Politico Playbook, Panetta is respectfully quoted saying
to CNN's John King
:
"I think of John Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs [botched Cuba invasion in
1961]. It unfolded quickly and the president thought that everything
would be fine. And that was not the case." I have written extensively
about the Bay of Pigs in three different books, including my doctoral
dissertation. This is literally the stupidest comment I can ever
remember seeing about the Bay of Pigs debacle. To compare it to
Afghanistan is like comparing apples and, say, orangutans.)

Back to Legum: "The next person quoted [by Viser] is Ryan Crocker, the
former Ambassador to Afghanistan during the Bush and Obama
administrations." Crocker goes so far as to say of Biden, "I'm left
with some grave questions in my mind about his ability to lead our
nation as commander in chief." Yes, well, read his previous statements
and then wonder if Viser should be quoting him as an expert and if the
guy should have had the good sense to STFU in the first place. But he
does not. Again, Legum notes, "Crocker's role in covering up the
corruption of the Afghan government is not mentioned in Viser's
Washington Post article or the other outlets that quoted him for
criticizing the withdrawal-NBC News
,
The Hill
,
Axios
,
and Fox News
."

There are others. In typical establishment "the Republicans are not
crazy and it's important to quote 'both sides' so as not to give
succor to those who claim we are a liberal media conspiracy" journalism,
Viser winds up with additional attacks from Afghanistan hawks Mitch
McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Mark Warner, and Seth Moulton. But
"unrepresented in Viser's piece," Legum adds, were "any voices that
supported withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan-even though a poll
last month found that 73% of Americans supported withdrawal
."
Eric Boehlert has more on this kind of thing, here
.

Oh, and have any Republicans been asked about why, on its now-deleted
webpage
,
the GOP cheered the fact that on February 2, 2020, the Trump
administration signed a "'preliminary peace agreement' with the
Taliban that 'sets the stage' to end the U.S.-Afghan war that had
been raging for more than two decades
."
The Republicans trumpeted the fact that their hero had negotiated a deal
that would see "nearly 5,000" U.S. troops withdrawn from the region in
exchange for "a Taliban agreement to not allow Afghanistan to be used
for transnational terrorism"-in case anyone needs a refresher.

Note that I've been sticking to the mainstream, not even dealing with
the lunacy over at, say, Fox. But I did happen upon an essay by one of
the few conservatives I enjoy and learn from, Walter Russell Mead over
at The Wall Street Journal. To my horror, his not-all-that-terrible
essay actually ran under this ridiculous headline: "Biden's
Chamberlain Moment in Afghanistan
"-perhaps
the worst analogy imaginable. (Going to Hitler, as a rule, almost always
means you've already lost the argument.) Scrolling down to the
article's end, it was followed in order by recommendations for these
other Journal masterpieces:
* William McGurn: "Afghanistan Reveals All the President's Weaknesses
"

* Review & Outlook: "Biden's Afghanistan Surrender
"

* Review & Outlook: "Biden to Afghanistan: Drop Dead
"

(And this was before the paper ran Mike Pence's lunatic essay

that insisted that had Biden stuck to Trump's schedule, and left four
months earlier, everything would have been hunky-dory.)

But the most offensive piece I came across all week was Mark
Thiessen's Washington Post op-ed

"Biden Is Blaming Everyone but Himself. But He's the One Who Gave the
Taliban a Green Light." In it, this advocate for torture in Iraq
suggested that it was too bad Trump
was no longer president because if he were, "[h]e would have unleashed a
bombing campaign the likes of which the Taliban had not seen since
2001." This is not only belied by everything Trump said or did regarding
the Taliban, it's also a call for mindless (and pointless) mass
murder. And the Post printed it. Shame on everyone involved.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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