The
media missed
the story in Afghanistan
By JONATHAN
POWER
January 16, 2002
LONDON - The media has paid for its mistake of
believing in George Bush's war against the Taliban. At
the end of the day it is pretty clear that in the
supposed objective of the war, the hunting down of Osama
bin Laden, the trail has gone cold. The scorecard of
deaths reveals that not only have more civilian Afghanis
died than Americans in the World Trade Centre and the
Pentagon, but the number of journalists killed in action
was eight times the total of American soldiers.
Yet by and large the Western media have swallowed the
White House hype wholesale. Not only was it generally
considered a just and necessary war, they devoted all
their considerable resources - and more, even to the
point of financial exhaustion and the exploitation of the
very lives of their reporters - to covering it in
excruciating detail.
War, sure enough, provides the journalistic rush of
adrenalin that keeps old editors young and persuades
young journalists that this is the way to make their
careers. Too many of them overlook the wise words of one
of the greatest journalists of them all, Walter
Lippmann, who observed, "News and truth are not the
same thing. The function of news is to signalise an
event. The function of truth is to bring to light the
hidden facts."
Of course, the best papers published the voice of the
occasional dissident. The conservative paper in Spain, El
Mundo, has been surprisingly open to anti-war
contributors, and columnists Simon Jenkins of the London
Times and William Pfaff of the International Herald
Tribune (but who inside America?) have been among the
strongest voices of dissent. But set against the
outpourings of the news pages, the television coverage
and the backbone of the editorial comment these have been
solitary voices crying in the wilderness.
They didn't get it all right by any means. They
underestimated the effectiveness of modern day American
airpower and they overstated the malaise in the Islamic
world, particularly in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan - there
was no popular uprising in favour of the fundamentalist
extremists. But on the essentials they were right - bin
Laden and his henchmen would not be laid low by this kind
of war, Afghanistan's political structure would remain
precarious, and America would not change its spots and
overnight become a progressive force for international
cooperation, the supporter of a reinvigorated UN, the
imposer of a settlement between Israel and Palestine and
the country that would no longer walk away from the
growing and disturbing problem of failed states.
It is these issues that should have been the focus of
the press coverage from the start, not the mock-heroics
of aircraft carriers, Special Forces and the stunt work
of the young pilots in the sky. Yet the Western press
were easily intimidated by the near unanimity of the
political class into going along with the essentials of
the war. The BBC early on even apologised for letting a
studio debate run away with itself and become too
critical of America.
The problem of terrorism remains. I have little doubt
that although America will remain the prime target,
Europe, in particular my home country, Britain, will be a
target too. There is, however, no way that this type of
terrorism can be fought by either conventional war nor by
the construction of a defensive missile shield. Indeed,
if America now extends the war to Somalia, the Sudan,
Yemen and Indonesia, as is the talk, it will end up
bogged down, counterproductive and, most dangerous of all
for the rest of us, profoundly angry, the condition of
those who back themselves into hopeless quagmires.
The hard answers don't go away. We are back to where
we were 1993 when the World Trade Centre was first
attacked. We need good police work to track down these
terrorists. Then when they are found - as bin Laden was
in 1996 in the Sudan - we need governments which are
ready (which the Clinton Administration was not) to send
him and his likes for trial in a U.S. civilian courtroom
or, better still, in the International Criminal
Court.
Beyond that we need the West together with the rest of
the world to grapple with the problems that breed
terrorism - lack of political progress in the Middle
East, first and foremost, and the continued tolerance for
deep poverty and growing income inequality in many parts
of the Third World. As The Economist has just reported,
for $25 per rich-country citizen invested in low cost
health services in the poorest parts of the world a
colossal number of lives could be saved and immeasurable
suffering relieved. Now that would be a start. And that,
dear editor, would not only be a good story, but one to
stay with.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 By
JONATHAN POWER
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