Eric Alterman: How Low Can They Go? The Media's Afghan Coverage

The American Prospect
Altercation: 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.
by Eric Alterman
August 20, 2021

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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.”

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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.”

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https://prospect.org/world/altercation-how-low-can-they-go-medias-afghan-coverage/