August 19, 2021 at 1:44 p.m.
Afghanistan and the media's mockery of tragedy
Afghanistan and the media's mockery of tragedy
Do we start at the end, the scenes of chaos at the American embassy - Saigon redux - and at the Kabul airport, as desperate Afghans tried to escape the murderous terrorists taking over their country? Do we begin at the beginning, with George Bush's disastrous decision to send us into the same quagmire the Russians had been mired in for years?
Do we jump in somewhere in the middle, with the ongoing years of lies and deception told by the U.S. government to the American people about the prospects in that country, as American blood and money were spilled?
Well, let's start somewhere else: with the national media, who, except in the earliest days of the Bush presidency, have been complicit all along the way.
Perhaps the most dangerous, if not the worst thing about this tragedy, is that the president, the vice president, and press secretary Jen Psaki - a key administration player - were all missing in action as the Taliban ran wild, and the press failed to call them out on it.
Some might say that no leadership at the top in a dangerous world is a security risk, but there you have it. The Afghan president fled to Uzbekistan; President Biden, to a Camp David bunker, holed up just like he was in his Delaware basement during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, Psaki went on her own vacation, leaving a standard 'I'm-out-of-the-office' message. As for Harris, who knows where she was, though we now understand she's on her way to Vietnam. The optics of that are precious.
All through the early part of the year, the mainstream press crowed about how the adults were back in charge, and how Biden, after he decided to leave Afghanistan, had a plan, unlike Trump, they said.
Even The Wall Street Journal heaped on their praise for Biden and contempt for Trump. "Leaving Afghanistan the Right Way" the newspaper declared back in February. If this is the right way, we'd hate to see the wrong way.
And when Biden boasted just six weeks ago that there would be no Saigon this time around, no airlifting personnel from the embassy roof, the press applauded. Last week, though, when there was personnel being lifted from the embassy roof, the press looked for excuses for the declining and aged president.
Over at CNN, one reporter sought to soften the implications of the whole thing, saying the advancing Taliban members both shouted "Death to America" but seemed "friendly at the same time."
So, really, there's no crisis because these are friendly folks. Nothing to see at the airport. Biden's plan worked, so move on along.
Over at ABC, the state news crew once again adopted the government's narrative, supporting Biden's Monday attempt to say it was Trump's fault, saying he inherited a bad deal and that it was the Afghans' fault for not fighting.
Even Stephen Colbert, that comedian whose jokes are really not meant to be jokes but deadly serious commentary on the news, defended the abrupt pull-out, suggesting that we had to fight domestic terrorists instead, aka Trump supporters: "Why should our soldiers be fighting radicals in a civil war in Afghanistan? We've got our own on Capitol Hill."
On social media, Twitter was doing its part, allowing Taliban leaders to say what they wished, while Trump's permanent ban from the platform remained in place.
On and on the charade went, few questions about why the nation's top leadership was AWOL in a time of crisis and little questioning of Biden's competence, except for Fox News. Instead they presented pictures of him alone in a big conference room, as if he was working.
If Trump had been president and went on vacation, there would have been demands for yet another impeachment, and Trump's own plan to withdraw was deemed incompetent by definition, no analysis required.
Others in the liberal corporate media squawked about how surprised the Biden administration was at the quick collapse, and, well, who could blame them for believing the security forces would fight for their country?
The thing is, we can all blame them. As The Washington Post itself reported in 2019, the government had known for years that the security forces were not up to snuff, perhaps the major reason Trump decided not to withdraw during his term. And the Biden White House ignored even more recent reports that a withdrawal would precipitate an immediate collapse of the country into Taliban hands.
This is not much reported, but, when it is, it is buried near the end of stories giving the poor president a pass.
It gets even worse. Over at CNN and MSNBC, the newsrooms there have been overrun much like Afghanistan itself has been overrun. Only they have been overrun by former FBI, CIA, and other security state officials who have been hired by the networks to analyze the news. Their job is to defend the war state, and they continued during the Afghanistan collapse.
And so there was CNN trotting out the bloodthirsty John Bolton to make all things right.
In the end, a couple of truths stand out. The first is that the U.S. should never had entered Afghanistan on a nation-building exercise, a point Trump made this week in an interview with Sean Hannity:
"It was a horrible decision going into the Middle East," Trump said. "I know the Bush family will not be happy, but I believe it was the worst decision in the history of our country when we decided to go into the Middle East."
To be sure, once we were there, it was going to be sticky getting out without causing grave humanitarian injury. That's what an abrupt withdrawal would bring, knowing the country could not sustain itself, and it's why Trump did not move ahead with his own withdrawal plans.
Grave humanitarian injury is just what Biden has caused now.
He took an immoral decision by the Bush administration, and compounded it exponentially with another one last week - immoral because he had to know what was going to happen.
The truth is, no one in the military-industrial establishment cares a whit about rebuilding Afghanistan; they were too busy putting the dollars we were spending there into their own pockets.
Here's how independent journalist Glenn Greenwald put it to Tucker Carlson this week:
"It's not a case where they got it wrong in good faith. It's a case where they deliberately lied to the public to justify this endless war because so many people were profiting from it."
The truth is, withdrawal was right, but the first principle must be to do no harm to innocent people. The country and the Biden administration has deeply harmed innocent people.
The second truth is, until this country's media begins to actually report on what the government and its military-industrial wing is doing, instead of hiring their spokespersons as news analysts and simply repeating and pushing the government narrative, Afghanistan will happen again and again.
Until the nation decides it needs an independent media rather than an arm of the Democratic National Committee, peace will be unattainable, except for the blissful sleep of presidents snug in their big beds in their Camp David retreat.
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