Media

Some of the smartest, toughest editors I've known, like Peter Braestrup, came out of the Marine Corps. I didn't know Richard Harwood, who was before my time at the Washington Post, but he had a terrific reputation for hard-nosed skepticism, even among people who didn't know he fought in four island campaigns in the Pacific in World War II, including Iwo Jima, where he was wounded.

The downside of Marines in the newsroom is that if you call them a really bad name, they might take a swing at you, as happened last Friday in the Post's Style section. This makes me nostalgic for the good old days of journalism, when being a reporter was fun and newspapers made money.   

(HT to Mr. Andrew Sullivan for video illustration)

Flickr user BL1961

Two of the most influential columnists on foreign affairs are Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and David Ignatius of the Washington Post. Both are centrist middle-aged white men writing for major newspapers. Both also are successful authors, though the Rousseauian Friedman produces optimistic non-fiction works, while the more Hobbesian Ignatius writes dark thrillers about intelligence. Also, I think Friedman tends to be influenced a bit more by diplomats, while Ignatius seems a bit more plugged into the worlds of intelligence and the military.

These very similar writers have come to very different conclusions on what President Obama should do in Afghanistan. Friedman says cut your losses, while Ignatius says put in more troops.

Friedman thinks the United States can't do much right in the Middle East, so shouldn't try:

We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.

I base this conclusion on three principles. First, when I think back on all the moments of progress in that part of the world - all the times when a key player in the Middle East actually did something that put a smile on my face - all of them have one thing in common: America had nothing to do with it.

Friedman, oddly to me, thinks that Iraq is more important than Afghanistan and Pakistan. I disagree, but this may be in part because he lived in Lebanon and Israel, while I lived in Afghanistan. I think the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan threatens the United States far more than anything in Iraq does. That is, I think Pakistan is deteriorating quickly and has weapons of mass destruction and Islamic extremists who are gaining ground, while Iraq is only deteriorating slowly, has no WMD (remember, Tom?) and its few Islamic extremists are on their heels.

"Iraq matters," he states flatly. He doesn't say why. I disagree with Friedman a lot on Iraq-he was wrong about the invasion, he doesn't understand the dynamics of what happened in 2006-08, and he still thinks "a decent outcome there really could positively impact the whole Arab-Muslim world." That veers mighty close to Wolfowitizian dreams of swamp draining.

Ignatius does better. First, he's on the ground, in Kandahar, and that always helps in commentary. He thinks more troops could help protect the people and "buy enough time for the country's army and government to fight their own battles" against the Taliban and their allies.

Good as far as it goes. I wish Ignatius also had written about the need to have U.S. troops protect the people from the brutality and abuses of Afghan soldiers and police. The need for more U.S. forces isn't just about insurgents. The predatory behavior of some of them has driven Afghans into the arms of the Taliban. Having American units partnered with Afghan forces won't stop such abuses, but it will lessen them. For example, I am told there currently are five checkpoints between Spin Boldak and Kandahar, with official shakedowns of truck drivers at each. Such corruption is a tax on the stomachs of poor Afghans. Get rid of the unnecessary checkpoints, and have Americans around the other ones, and fewer Afghans will go hungry.

Final score: Ignatius 1, Friedman 0.

Meanwhile, my worry is that Abdullah drops out of the runoff in the next few days, leaving us with little but a half-rotten Karzai. More on this on Christiane Amanpour's CNN show this coming Sunday at 2 pm Eastern.    

I didn't realize how many porn lovers were out there until I got some e-mails on Friday. Jeez, another aggrieved interest group. 

Guam, on the other hand, only had two defenders. 

Flickr user Vaticanus

Turns out that the Daily Beast reads this blog too. They asked me to elaborate on my concerns about President Obama's handling of Afghanistan, so I wrote this, which ran yesterday. This also may answer some of the plaintive posts of yesterday asking me to 'splain myself.  

U.S. Army/flickr

I forgot to mention that I was on Fareed Zakaria's Sunday CNN show the other day to discuss what happened at Wanat, the small battle in the summer of 2008 that strikes me as representative of the war.

Zakaria struck me as one of the smartest people I've ever met. Long-time readers of this blog may remember that I think he did the best foreign affairs interview I've ever seen with Obama, back when Obama was running for president. 

DMITRY ASTAKHOV/AFP/Getty Images

Jamie Macintyre has a good post on an issue I hadn't heard about, Disney World's refusal to let disabled vets use Segways to get around -- even though Disney employees use the devices.

Raymond Brown/flickr

The Washington Post just ran a solid three-part series on the Wanat firefight that went down in the summer of 2008. Joshua Foust summarizes and critiques the series here. CBS also did a long story Monday night on its Evening News program. (To its credit, CBS gave the entire half hour to Afghanistan, reminding me of Ted Koppel's glory days on Nightline.) The New York Times on Saturday trotted out a once-over-lightly story that I would classify as a "spoiling attack." 

So far nothing much new in all that huffing and puffing. But glad to see that the defense press corps is tracking this blog. Thanks, fellas! And even more glad that Col. Brostrom got a fair hearing, finally. 

For all that, this old thing remains the best thing I've ever read about westerners travelling to the back valleys of Nuristan.

drmvm1/Flickr

This comment, posted the other day in response to the item about the book on the experiences of platoon leaders, wins the contest in which the prize was my extra copy of the platoon leaders' book. Mark M., please send me an e-mail so I can mail it to you. 

ThePL and majors' books

by MarkM on Fri,10/02/2009 - 12:27am

Tom:

Just as we now have asymmetric warfare, which is certainly evolving in both theory and practice, we also now have asymmetric journalism. The platoon leaders compilation you cite and the majors' book are part of this new, rich, stunning, sometimes-chaotic, multi-pronged way (largely over the Internet) to better understand the various environments of a war -- and it's available through mainstream and freelance media, soldier diaries, jihadi Web sites, policy journals, Osama audiotapes, blogs, embeds by reporters and photographers, YouTube clips from the field, academic papers, foreign media, left-right rants, NGO reports, political and military memoirs, accounts from released detainees, leaked documents from the ICRC, you name it.

Any one of these, taken alone, delivers the classic "drinking-straw view" ---that is, a view not inherently inaccurate but also narrow, tunneled and tightly focused. A corporal's view of a firefight, for example, is not necessarily the definitive one. Nor is a major's. Nor is an emebedded journalist's. It's a Rashomon world.

But asymmetric journalism --- or maybe it's asymmetric history --- offers great promise and a fuller accounting of what is transpiring in our wars, ourmilitary, our government and our lives.

I think he is on to something here. The claim journalism makes is, yeah, that other stuff is good, but we move around and talk to lots of people and get the overview, so we're not just looking through a soda straw. But the platoon leader book gets an overview of that experience better than any journalist can, I think.

Journalism also is being changed by technology. The old line in newspapers was that news was defined by those who owned printing presses -- that is, the rich. (The golden rule being that those who have the gold make the rules.) But nowadays everyone who has a laptop effectively can publish a daily newspaper.  

chris.corwin/flickr