The media to a large extent has been a complete failure in covering the Taliban victory in Afghanistan after twenty years of Donald Rumsfeld’s “Forever Wars.”
The cable jockeys have actually trotted out the Neocon war monger architects of the Forever Wars from the Project For a New American Century (PNAC), the George W. Bush administration, and their media propagandists to blame President Joe Biden for the chaotic collapse of the corrupt and incompetent American puppet government of Afghanistan that they created.
None of them have ever been held accountable for their war crimes in Afghanistan or Iraq.
And that includes their media propagandists, like George W. Bush’s “Minister of War Propaganda,” Marc Thiessen, whom the Washington Post gave a cushy job on its opinion pages after he left the White House. He should have been prosecuted under the Nuremberg Principles along with the other architects of the Neocon Forever Wars for war crimes. The role of propaganda and propagandists figured prominently at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal following World War II. See, The Propaganda Prosecutions at Nuremberg.
And then there are the mainstream journalists who have covered the Forever Wars for twenty years, during the rise of what is known as “access media” (exemplified by Politico and Axios). Access to anonymous sources for insider information was the lure used by the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (President Eisenhower’s early drafts called it the “military-industrial-congressional complex,” but he deleted “congressional,” in the final address he delivered) to add the mainstream media as the cheerleaders for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex. Remember how the Pentagon used “embedded reporters” with military units in Afghanistan and Iraq? This created a bond with the military sources they were covering and destroyed any objectivity in their reporting.
This has been infuriatingly obvious in their biased reporting of the Taliban victory in Afghanistan. Our military mission in Afghanistan was to destroy the operational base of Al Qaida and to bring them to justice for the attacks on September 11. We achieved this a decade ago. The military mission was never nation building (so we were told) or women’s rights, or even human rights. And yet these are the reasons these reporters are now focused on as a justification for remaining longer in the Neocon Forever Wars. It is really about their support for American imperialism.
Not all reporters fall into this media bias. Some have done exceptional objective reporting on the lies we were sold for the Neocon Forever Wars. See the Washington Post’s The Afghanistan Papers: At War with the Truth, for example.
This media failure was best captured by something MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, who worked for President George W. Bush when Americans first went into Afghanistan in 2001, said the other day: ’95 percent of the American people will agree with Biden while 95 percent of the press won’t’:
“I’m going to say two things, both hard to say,” she prefaced. “But I’ll say them anyway because here they are: 95 percent of the American people will agree with everything he just said. Ninety-five percent of the press covering this White House will disagree. And for an American president to finally be completely aligned with such an overwhelming majority of what the American people think about Afghanistan is probably a tremendous relief to the American people.”
Or as Amanda Marcotte correctly notes at Salon, The Afghanistan blame game begins — and the media immediately ignores what triggered this disaster (excerpt):
Watching the swift fall of the Afghan government to the hands of the Taliban this weekend, my gut reaction is one I suspect may be true of most Americans watching this disaster unfold: If 20 years of occupation did diddly squat to set up Afghanistan for success, it’s doubtful that another 20 years was going to do the trick.
“One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country,” President Joe Biden, who unlike most Americans actually pays attention to the military and political details of the Afghanistan war, said in a statement released on Saturday. “I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”
The mainstream media, needless to say, does not truck with Biden’s common-sense argument.
The same media that embraces an often absurd allergy to the appearance of “bias” in domestic politics showed no similar modesty in letting enthusiasm for American imperialism fly over the weekend. Instead, the collapse of the Afghan government was portrayed as a massive political liability for Biden.
[F]or those of us who remember well how the mainstream media enthusiasm for war helped fuel not just this ill-advised war in Afghanistan twenty years ago, but the even bigger debacle in Iraq, the current media narrative is both bewildering and exhausting.
To be clear, there are some errors Biden made in withdrawing. Critics focused on the Afghans trying to flee the country without help from Americans are 100% right, and every effort should be made to get refugees to safety. Still, this larger media outrage over the withdrawal is a dark reminder of the pro-war bias in the press that helped create this mess in the first place: luring the American public into thinking a war in Afghanistan could ever end in any other way.
[T]he generous view of this pro-war bias on the media’s part is that journalists give undue credence to the opinions of military brass and foreign policy hawks. It’s tempting for a lot of journalists to treat these leaders as objective experts, rather than as people whose own egos have led them to embrace forever war to avoid admitting defeat. Certainly, it seems that the “defer to the experts” mentality is why Obama, who went into office with an anti-war message, was so easy to cow on these matters. But even the Washington Post’s own reporting shows how much of a lost cause the Afghanistan war has been for years, and probably always was, making this “Biden screwed up” narrative even more inexcusable.
The less generous interpretation is that the mainstream media is thick with dudes (and a few women) who have read one too many doorstopper histories of WWII and are still wrapped up in fantasies of American military triumph. Either way, the result is what we saw over the weekend: A press that appears to have learned nothing about the dangers of reflexively backing a hawkish foreign policy and military establishment, despite debacles dating back to the Vietnam War.
[I] suspect the only people left who really are invested in the imperialism masquerading as American beneficence are concentrated in elite political circles in D.C. and thus have an outsized impact on how the media frames this story. It’s doubtful, however, that most Americans will ultimately remember this differently than they do the end of the Vietnam War or the withdrawal from Iraq — as a sad but inevitable end to yet another misguided American adventure war. Biden won’t be seen as a failure, so much as the guy who just accepted a reality that multiple presidents refused to embrace.
Unfortunately, the media response to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan after 20 years doesn’t leave one with much hope that the mainstream press will be wiser the next time the hawks start beating the war drums, trying to lure the U.S. into yet another expensive entanglement bound for failure.
The most concise commentary I have seen comes from MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. As someone with multiple family members who were drafted and served in Vietnam, and whose family followed the war closely as a result, I agree entirely with Lawrence O’Donnell’s analysis. (I also have younger relatives who served in Afghanistan and Iraq).
Lawrence O’Donnell dares to speak the truth that several of his own colleagues fail to acknowledge: all wars end in chaos, and the American military does not know how to lose a war and to plan for the ensuing chaos.
Transcript (excerpt):
O`DONNELL: Well, what could become one of America`s enduring lies to itself about Afghanistan is being given birth on live TV these days. Last night on this network, an unnamed American military source in Afghanistan was quoted as saying what we are seeing now in the American evacuation of Afghanistan is worse, much worse than what we saw in 1975 in the American evacuation from Vietnam after we lost the war there.
The problem with that kind of quote is that any unnamed military source in Afghanistan tonight is too young to remember the Vietnam War and was probably not born yet. When we evacuated Vietnam in 1975 and so that source literally does not know what he or she is talking about, so, too Republican Senator Ben Sasse who said this today on television,
What is happening at the Karzai International Airport today is a more shameful, lower moment in U.S. history than 1975 in Saigon.
Ben Sasse was 3 years old in 1975. Ben Sasse literally does not know what he is talking about.
Everything about Vietnam was much, much worse than what has happened in the American experience in Afghanistan. The total of American military personnel killed in Afghanistan over 20 years equals approximately just one month of American military deaths in Vietnam in May of 1968.
And here is just one measure and only one measure of how much worse the American experience in Vietnam was. U.S. military deaths in Vietnam over roughly 13 years of active combat were 57,939. The American military deaths in Afghanistan over 20 years are 2,448.
On American — of American military deaths alone, on that figure alone, Vietnam was 20 times worse than Afghanistan. When we fled Vietnam in defeat and disgrace, the number of American families who no longer knew why they lost a loved one in Vietnam was 20 times larger than the number of American families who are suffering with that feeling tonight about the lose of their loved ones in Afghanistan.
We left behind millions of Vietnamese civilian and military personnel, casualties in Vietnam. Millions of war dead in Vietnam and Cambodia, we left behind babies, fathered by American soldiers and yes, we left behind people who helped American reporters in Vietnam.
We left behind all sorts of people who helped us in Vietnam. Evacuating armies always leave people behind despite Hollywood mythology to the contrary.
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger illegally expanded the Vietnam War across the border into Cambodia, where they killed thousands of innocent victims with a sustained strain of bombs that we dropped from the skies.
There is no measure by which the American experience in Afghanistan is worse than the experience in Vietnam but it is particularly American to believe that your personal version of an experience is always the best or the worst and so for 49-year-olds like Ben Sasse who have never before witnessed the United States being driven out of a country in total military defeat, this must be the worst.
The American military did not just terrorize Southeast Asia for 13 years with the Vietnam War. The American military and the American government terrified Americans at home in the Vietnam War, especially every American boy over 18 years old who had a draft card in his pocket that could get him sent to his death in Vietnam against his will. That terrified American families everywhere, everywhere in this country for years, families who were for or against the war were terrified of losing a son, losing a loved one in Vietnam.
Vietnam was much worse but if you are young enough to have never seen a draft card, never held one in your hands, you might not know that. I was a teenager protesting the Vietnam War and so I for one have never been able to support America`s entrance into another war because of the lessons of Vietnam. One of the lessons is that the American government and the American military do not know how to invade a country, lose a war and then exit without chaos and dishonor. No one in the Pentagon knows how to do that but it is their job to publicly pretend that they know how to do that.
And none of the TV pundits who are telling you that we can do that, and that we could have exited Afghanistan without chaos and dishonor actually knows how to do that.
When my cousin Johnny went to West Point before being shipped off to Vietnam and never coming back, West Point didn`t teach him how to lose a war and exit a country gracefully. West Point still does not have a close on how to successfully and honorably exit a war that the American military loses. No one knows how to do that.
It is not up to us how orderly the American exit from Afghanistan is, that is entirely up to the Taliban now.
David Halberstam`s brilliant book “The Best and the Brightest” told the story how the best and brightest minds from the Ivy League and American business and foreign policy establishment were infected with the delusion during the Vietnam War they could manage everything. That delusion is alive tonight and many of the best and the brightest in the American press core who seem to believe that the American military knows how to do things that it has never successfully done in its history.
If you are outraged with what you are seeing in Afghanistan tonight, may it not be the end of the war that outrages you but war itself. If you oppose what you`re seeing in Afghanistan tonight, oppose war. War is hell. War is hell in the beginning. War is hell in the middle and war is hell in the end if you lose.
The best and the brightest thought hell was manageable because of secretary of defense during the American buildup of forces in Vietnam during the 1960s successfully run the Ford Motor Company. The best and brightest believed he could successfully run and win the Vietnam War. The American military has the best equipment in the world, the American military may well have the best and brightest troops in the world but America`s successful opponents in Vietnam and Afghanistan have something that America has never had, patience.
The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong always knew that all they had to do was out last the American military commitment to Vietnam because American patience would run out. The Taliban always knew because of that lesson in Vietnam that all they had to do was patiently wait for the Americans to leave and so the Taliban won by waiting.
One very big difference between Afghanistan and Vietnam, we never had a president who believed that he could charm the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong into a gentlemanly end of the war.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONLD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT: We had a very good conversation with the leader of the Taliban today and they are looking to get this ended and we`re looking to get it ended.
I think we all have a very common interest.
The relationship is very good that I have with the mullah and we had a good, long conversation today and, you know, they want to cease the violence. They`d like to cease violence, also.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O`DONNELL: The person he had that conversation with is now the head of the Taliban in Afghanistan after he had him released from prison.
Today, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan explained some of what we`re seeing in Afghanistan today to a White House press corps too young to remember how much worse it was in Vietnam.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAKE SULLIVAN, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR: We communicated with American citizens for weeks telling them to get out of the country. We offered financial assistance for those not able to afford to get on flights themselves. Many chose to stay right until the end and that was their choice.
We now are faced with a circumstance we have to help evacuate those. That`s our responsibility as the U.S. government but the point I`m making is that when a civil war comes to an end with an opposing force marching on the capital, there are going to be scenes of chaos and lots of people leaving the country. That is not something that can be fundamentally avoided.
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John Kavanagh’s last comment is the internet version of him covering his ears, yelling “nah nah nah nah” and running home to mommy.
Childish old man.
Here’s the context we need to keep in mind in evaluating Biden’s Afghan policy: Trump demanded and got the release of the leader of the political office of the Taliban, Baradar, from jail in Pakistan. Baradar then led the negotiations with the US for our withdrawal in Qatar. The Trump Admin decided to exclude the Afghan national government from that negotiation. The Trump Admin decided to deadline a withdrawal of American armed forces at the beginning of May 2021. Biden decided to honor Trump’s negotiated withdrawal and pushed back the date to the end of August 2021.
In the mean time, between Trump striking an agreement to withdraw with the Taliban, which left out any partners in the Afghan government at any level, the Afghan government leaders began the negotiate piece-meal with the Taliban to surrender, often under threat of violence, bribes, and assassination. These agreements were totally outside of any process that was transparent to American diplomats or military leaders: the entire country except the very top leadership of the Afghan government had already quietly surrendered to the Taliban by the time Biden even took office.
Biden pressed the Afghan national government to begin evacuation operations once he took office in anticipation of a Taliban takeover, but the Afghani leaders refused, not wanting to appear weak or cause a panic. So, the result was that even though our intelligence services were aware that the country had already surrendered to the Taliban, the top leaders of the Afghan government were in denial, and our military and diplomatic leadership were largely in the dark and surprised by the swiftness of the take over. Biden knew that things would collapse quickly, but the top of the Afghan national government was in denial and would not permit evacuations any sooner.
Given the inept and traitorous agreement Trump made with the Taliban, that totally sold out our Afghan allies and left them out of the settlement entirely, what exactly does any critic offer in terms of how Biden could have dealt with the situation better? Could he have insisted on commencing evacuations against the wishes of the Afghani national government leadership? Sure. Maybe he should have. But that is the only way things would have gone ‘better’ and then he would be criticized by the Right in this country for “selling out” our Afghan allies and causing a panic that led to the collapse of the government. Damned if he do, damned if he don’t. The GQP has no interest in anything but cheap criticism of the Biden Admin, no matter what they do.
IMHO, Biden should have told the Afghan national government to pound sand and immediately begun evacuations of our allies and political refugees, and damn the delusional and deeply corrupt national leadership, but he’s more experienced in foreign policy than any President in the past 50 years: I’m gonna give him the benefit of the doubt that he had strategic reasons to do it the way he did.
Arguably, Biden’s biggest mistake is accepting ANYTHING the Trump Admin agreed to as carrying the faith and credit of American prestige and honor. I’ll bet he wishes he could have repudiated the inept and unilateral withdrawal agreement by Trump and started over with Afghan governments of all levels at the table. But that ship had sailed. Afghanistan had already surrendered to the Taliban and final power dynamic was already baked in. It’s infuriating to anyone who knows shit about the situation that Trump is now acting like ANY of this is Biden’s fault. Total bollocks to that.
The tragedy of the fall of Afghanistan is squarely on Trump, for being a chump and the worst negotiator in existence and leaving the Afghani government out of the negations, and forcing them to make a separate peace with the Taliban with absolutely no real power from which to negotiate. Secondly, the tragedy of our failed mission to build a new Afghan state falls on Bush, for putting us on this path in the first place. We should have declared victory and negotiated a settlement with the Taliban for a SOF agreement and a quick-reaction force in the country for counter-terrorism and some humanitarian guarantees. Instead, he did exactly what he said he would not do when he was running, engaged in hubristic “nation building” in a territory that has never wanted to get built into a modern nation.
Screw it. I’ll make this a post. Too long for a comment, really. Anyway, John Kavanaugh is political hack and is assuredly either pig ignorant, or a dishonest weasel. Of course, he might also be both.
Of all the criticism of my post, the only one that has any merit is David Gordon calling me out for misspelling a word and for that I apologize profusely.
David Ignatius, the Washington Post’s national security columnist, writes “Good intentions and seductive illusions: Scenes from Afghanistan’s long descent”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/17/david-ignatius-afghanistan-government-20-years/
The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban was like watching the collapse of the twin towers. In an instant, the edifice crumbled into a pile of rubble.
But it didn’t happen quickly, really. The structure of the Kabul government has been rotting from within for all 20 years of the United States’ war. And every U.S. commander knew its weakness. They worried about the corruption and incompetence of the government, devised elaborate strategies to fix it, kept convincing themselves they were making progress. Hope is not a strategy, as every commander knows. In this case, it was.
Too often, the generals brought the media along with them in this exercise of self-delusion. Looking back over a dozen years of my own reporting from Afghanistan, that’s one painful recognition. These columns often expressed skepticism about the larger enterprise, but they kept recording, year after year, the generals’ ambitions for success. It wasn’t a big lie so much as a series of little bubbles of false optimism.
[B]iden is being flayed both for his decision and its sloppy execution. Many of us had warned that by withdrawing the small remaining force too quickly, without a transition plan, he was unwisely ending a low-cost insurance policy against the disaster now unfolding. Biden owns the final decision, for better or worse.
But the hard truth is that this failure is shared by a generation of military commanders and policymakers, who let occasional tactical successes in a counterterrorism mission become a proxy for a strategy that never was. And it was subtly abetted by journalists who were scratching our heads wondering if it would work, but let the senior officials continue their magical thinking.
Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post offers “A primer on false narratives about Afghanistan”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/18/primer-false-narratives-about-afghanistan/
Hey Kavanagh, how many Afghan refugees is Arizona going to take?
From “The New Colossus”
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
How many does your Bible instruct you to bring to Arizona?
Yeah, thought so. You talk trash but you have no interest in helping solve the problem.
John Kavanagh is old enough to know that we won’t really understand the full extent of the toll of the war for a year or more.
He should have learned that over his lifetime. He’s being disingenuous.
The big picture takes time to be exposed, and no one is saying Biden did a good job.
Biden was handed the proverbial sh1+ sandwich by the last guy, who promised to do what Biden actually did, and was still taking credit for it just a few weeks ago in his rallies.
He knows this, but his handlers in Kansas expect him to tow the party line, so he brays like a sheeple whatever the right wing media tells him to bray.
The rest of us already know Bush/Cheney (most shame goes to them), Obama, T4ump, Pompeo, Stephen Miller, the corporate owned media, and Hollywood, Biden, some generals, the defense industry, and lots more, share responsibility.
In fact, I made a comment the other day about Hollywood sucking up to the military and intelligence communities, so he’s late to that party.
I have no idea why he posts here, he looks foolish every time.
And JK, if you’re reading this, I would not go toe to toe with Wileybud on history.
There you go again Johnny Boy. Don’t you ever get tired of swallowing & then regurgitating everything the right wing media spoon feeds you? Media overkill in the sense that you’ve eagerly been brainwashed when just a light rinse would suffice (h/t Eugene McCarthy).
As each day brings more blame upon President Biden for his inept withdrawal from Afghanistan, his supporters desperately look for others to blame, so why not the press too? But there is so much blame for President Biden to shoulder that more scapegoats will be needed. How about the movie industry for glorifying war or the toy industry for making toy guns?
Think hard and long AZ Blue Meanie because the blame will increase as the days move forward and the crisis worsens. You would have a lot more credibility if you just admitted how bad the screw up was.
And by the way, the issue is not whether we should have gone to Afghanistan in the first place or how long we should stay but how ineptly President Biden planned and executed the withdraw.
“The issue is not whether we should have gone to Afghanistan in the first place or how long we should stay but how ineptly President Biden planned and executed the withdraw[al].” So 20 years of massive lies and failures, and the only thing that matters is the “final act”? Bullshit! There needs to be a full After Action Report for the entirety of the war. After botching leaving Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the U.S. military clearly does not know what it is doing, except making money for military contractors. My family served our country in these wars, did yours?
BTW, when I posted a couple of critical posts about the extraction of Americans and our allies from Kabul on Sunday, you had nothing to say about that. Being pretty damn selective, Troll Boy. I’ve no more fucks left to give for your stupidity.
John. You spelled withdrawal wrong. You want to talk about ineptness John. Talk about how your boy Donnie made the deal with the Taliban in the first place. You want more ineptness, John. Talk about how George W. Bush’s failure to pay attention to the intelligence cost close to 3,000 lives on 9/11 and his response is what put us on this 20-year course in the first place. To date, no Americans have lost their lives during this withdrawal. With your logic, Junior Bush and the twice impeached, twice popular vote loser one are the ineptness of all.
Thank you for posting this. The pro-war bias of the MSM (left and right) is IMO one of the reasons who the US recently ranked last among countries in trusting its media. I will note that the servicemember casualty figures given by O’Donnell leave out all of the contractors killed (many of the latter years the US deployed more contractors than military personnel).
Looking at the last several presidential primaries, you can detect a clear pattern of media bias against anti-war candidates: Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Tulsi Gabbard (Jon Stewart even made fun of the media bias against Ron Paul in 2012—search Jon Stewart Ron Paul on youtube). And notice how these anti-war stands are often described as “principled”, as in, you can have your principles, or you can have gobs of cash from defense contractors.
Two trillion dollars spent over twenty years. Three hundred million dollars a day. For that kind of money, we could have given each of the homeless in America a thousand dollars a month housing voucher as well as paying for mental health counseling and drug rehab for them. We could have all but eliminated homelessness.
We can’t get that two trillion back, but we can stop spending US lives and money occupying Syria (a war started by Obama and just as pointless as Afghanistan) and dropping bombs on Somalia. We will see if Joe Biden also has the good sense to do those things.