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Just how much reaches American ears?

Thursday, August 27, 2009

STORIES - IF THAT'S WHAT we should really call them - keep cascading out of Afghanistan. They’re more like simple repetitive “sit-reps”, to use army jargon … periodic reports on a situation already officially stamped "serious and deteriorating" in Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen's declaration, made on CNN's State of the Union earlier this week.

Last Thursday's presidential elections passed with the inevitable degree of ballot fraud, low turn-out, intimidation, and now such an apparently close-run outcome that another voting round must be held. The run-off, probably in October, would decide between incumbent President Hamid Karzai (together with Marshal Fahim, his heroin-dealing running-mate) and the nearest challenger, ex-Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah.

 

So an extra huge challenge looms for those working to establish safety and security, even as this week a massive bomb kills over forty civilians, and the death toll for international troops, with US personnel to the fore again and increasing their numbers under Barack Obama's new policies, ominously reaches the highest annual level - already nearly 300 deaths by late August, more than half of them American - since the coalition first invaded back in 2001.

 

US top brass from all four regional command centers in Afghanistan have been telling the Administration's special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, that yet more troops will be needed beyond what President Obama has already agreed to.  (The exchanges were not in public, of course, but their drift has been made pretty clear - without actual troop numbers being spelled out - in quiet media briefings, notably to The New York Times' leading day-by-day Obama-watcher, West Africa-born Helene Cooper.)

 

And General David Petraeus, now head of US Central Command, let out a careful - and deliberately somewhat vague - warning, in his Tuesday speech to the American Legion, that the drive to reverse Afghanistan's downward trend in security "will require a sustained, substantial commitment".

 

But just how sustained? any listener, viewer or reader is entitled to ask. Specifically: just how long a commitment?

 

Well, some soldiers who’ve been fighting as America's allies are giving much more concretely quantified answers to those questions when they talk to the press.

 

In an exclusive interview with The Times of London, Britain’s incoming Chief of the General Staff, General Sir David Richards, who from 2006 to 2007 was overall commander of international forces in southern Afghanistan, actually put a number on the time-span for the country’s stabilization. He said: “the whole process might take as long as 30 to 40 years. There is absolutely no chance of NATO pulling out”.

  

   

 

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LONDON's Daily Telegraph, a largely very sober newspaper, and for what it’s worth an acknowledged right-wing publication, quite naturally picked up the Richards story and ran with it. To an accompanying photo of present-day international troops in a dusty stretch (above) of Helmand Province, Telegraph editors appended a telling caption which could have been hyperbolic but in fact carried some pointed realism: “These soldiers’ grandchildren could be fighting in Afghanistan”.

 

The general's interview itself, in all its candor and clarity, resounded throughout the media of every NATO country with troops in the arena. Every country, that is, except this one.

 

Here is my list of the American media outlets that did NOT cover the Richards prediction: the supposedly 24-hour news channels CNN, FOX News and MSNBC ... nationally circulating newspapers the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune  ... all three network TV news services ABC News, CBS News and NBC News, and the usually reliable broadcaster National Public Radio.

 

Indeed the only major American venue to feature a report on this debatable (of course) but unquestionably authoritative forecast was the radio service Voice of America.

 

But then - and forgive my heavy-handed irony here - VoA’s job is to broadcast important information to the world. Its job is not to broadcast important information to Americans - Americans whose lives and tax-dollars will be expended in Afghanistan ... over whatever “sustained” period of time it turns out to be.

 

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder why America's mainstream domestic media seem reluctant to focus on such specifics, which could aid a full discussion of America's ongoing military involvement.

   

 

IT'S DIFFICULT TO ADD anything of substance to the waves of media reaction to Senator Edward Kennedy's death.

 

I wouldn't know how, for instance, to begin balancing the death of a young woman with the millions of lives that his children's health and nutrition legislation has saved.

 

I do hope, though, that among all the "assessments" that are pouring out space might be found - especially at a time when revisionism about the Ronald Reagan years is rampant - to recall that President Reagan tried to veto Congressional sanctions against white-supremacist South Africa, and that it was Kennedy who spearheaded Congress' triumphant overturn of that veto.

 

It's incalculable how many lives were saved by the defeat, hastened by those sanctions, of apartheid's murderous, oppressive rule.

 

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