Whoa. A newsletter? That offers media criticism? In 2021? It's like O. Henry defied the laws of God and Man, suffered an ironic reverse in fortune and the punitive fate of mortals who challenge Nature and his example purged the commonwealth of pity and fear!
I may wax sarcastic these days.
Just in general, the news has been really depressing lately. Since like June. I'm actively trying to pay less attention. Some days I only read the stories about antivaxers who get covid.
If you think the American media response to developments in Afghanistan is bad, just wait till you check out Austria's (note: do not do this, it will make you cry). Here are the main narratives, in rough order of priority:
1- Can we still deport rejected asylum seekers to Afghanistan? Opinions differ; every expert and every court says it is impossible, but the interior ministry says he will find a way. Let's discuss!
2- How can we make sure no Afghan illegal immigrants make it to Austria? All parties are united: "Never again!" -- no, we're not talking about the Holocaust, we're talking about 2015, when a million of refugees made it to Europe. A catastrophe without parallel in modern history! All parties are united on the need to make sure the vast majority
3- Biden's feckless withdrawal has condemned Afghanistan's women to barbarity! Those irresponsible Americans, how could they do this?!?!
Oops, the last sentence of point 2 got cut off: "All parties are united on the need to make sure the vast majority of fleeing Afghans go no farther than neighboring countries -- its neighbors, recall, being those famous respecters of human rights Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and China."
Isn't there a fairly mainstream right-wing contention in Europe that something about Afghanis makes them particularly prone to sexually harass western women? I could have sworn I just read a long piece about this.
Afghans, racist. Afghanis is the currency.
It's a fairly widespread contention right here on this site, if I remember, except people say it about the French and Italians, which means it isn't racist to say it but it *is* sexist to deny it.
Who is the Pepé Le Pew of the Pashtuns?
5: Yes, that's absolutely true. I mean, you see this narrative for Africans and Arabs too, but Afghans most of all, I think. And I should add that the reason deportation has been dominating the headlines lately is that about a month ago four Afghan refugees allegedly raped and killed a 13 year old (white) girl in Vienna, which the right wing has been exploiting exactly as you'd expect.
And in fairness, I don't think you can believe in rape culture and patriarchy and not think that someone who grows up in Afghanistan is likely to be particularly steeped in it. And they are, in fact, crazy-overrepresented in sexual violence statistics. That's driven partly by so many Afghan refugees being young, single, and male -- in other words, prime age for criminal offenses -- and partly because stranger-rape is way more likely to be reported and investigated than intimate partner rape, but it's hard to entirely dismiss. Here's a Google Translated article in a quality newspapers, "Are Afghans really more likely to commit crimes?"
I'm not clicking. Not being able to understand Germans is my superpower. I was bitten by a radioactive xenophobe.
Or at least by my brother when we were babies. He isn't particularly xenophobic or radioactive, but he has never learned a second language except for very poor Spanish.
The uninformed impression I got from mainstream media pre-9/11 is that 90's Taliban was worse for women than nearly anywhere else in the world. Young Heebie was under the impression that the key differences were things like having to wear niqabs that had a screen over the eyes, not being allowed to leave the house without a family member escorting you, and not being allowed to drive or hold a job outside the house. (Unspoken but implied: massive amounts of rape on demand.)
Medium-age Heebie has not really revisited these notions. Are there other places where women are under this degree of lockdown? Or was 90s Afghanistan not as bad as I was led to believe?
In so many ways this feels like Iraq and 2003 all over again. The media has coalesced around a narrative, and any threat to that narrative needs to be shut out.
Also I think this is mostly wrong. First of all, the media always coalesces around a dumb narrative and has trouble deviating, so I don't think these two are particularly unique.
But more importantly, I think that this coverage - while very, very important! - has a bit of "slow news day and the great white sharks aren't biting" to it, as far as the MSM is concerned. They've happened to choose something that they should actually be covering, yes, but I bet this will not be making headlines by September. Whereas in 2003, this dominated coverage for what - a year? more? - and the systematic suppression of any other viewpoint was sustained and witch-hunt-ish.
First of all, the media always coalesces around a dumb narrative and has trouble deviating, so I don't think these two are particularly unique.
But isn't it a bit of a divergence* for them to present it so one-sidedly? Usually they look to give a voice to "dissent" no matter its credibility (experts disagree on shape of earth). Here, they're trying to convey the image that everywhere they go they find shock and outrage at the administration, even though most of Congress as well as the public agrees with this direction.
*Not by the standards of natsec coverage, but in most other contexts.
Afghanis is the currency.
Listen, colonialist, in Farsi, people from Iran are Irani and people from Afghanistan are Afghani; I don't care about your Amreekai rules.
Maybe? My understanding of the mainstream narrative is, "This withdrawal is a disaster! We should not be staying and this should not be a disaster!" Which isn't exactly pro-war nor anti-war.
From the link in the OP:
Yesterday's newsletter detailed how the media is largely overlooking voices that supported Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. Instead media reports are almost exclusively highlighting criticism of the withdrawal -- often from people complicit in two decades of failed policy in Afghanistan.
You can support the decision to withdraw and criticize the withdrawal. I can't justify them picking and choosing the rightwing talking heads though over leftwing anti-war talking heads. Except that click-bait-wise, they want the recognizable names from the past 20 years of failed policy.
I'm mostly arguing to argue and have that feeling that I'm going to lose this one.
Are there other places where women are under this degree of lockdown?
Saudi Arabia, most famously. It's an extreme level of restriction that is associated with a similarly extremist interpretation of Islam that isn't in control of society very many places, but for those places where these extremist groups do manage to take charge it's a pretty accurate assessment. Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in the 90s was definitely one of those places.
16: I would say that criticizing the panning/events of the withdrawal has been front and center (in the sensationalistic way it almost always is i-"good visuals") but then they either implicitly or often explicitly (CNN having John fucking Bolton on for instance) take a position that is consistent with not withdrawing. Government collapses are messes; so there was always going to be a mess, everyone just hoped it would occur after most of the Westerners were no longer on the scene.
And I do think there is a certain uniformity of response from the MSM that sometimes goes above and beyond the usual--ones where everyone has to genuflect towards the default position even if they are "disagreeing." Iraq war is probably the most prominent on, but as you note in went on for a long time and was relentless.
Other prime examples I see were:
- National debt after the GFC and during and after the stimulus debate. Everyone writing about it or mentioning it had to state how bad it was.
- ACORN. Those bad people at the bad organization were caught being bad. Must be banished from the world.
- Whitewater. Clintons corrupt or something bad or something. (Lewinsky thing was basically a desperate follow on from it - a Hail Mary by utterly corrupt sex crime apologist Ken Starr that paid off. In 2016 Is aw several MSM-types basically using the fact that he found the Lewinsky thing to justify the completely fucking insane Whitewater coverage which preceded it.)
- 2000 election. Makes me to mad to detail it.
- But her emails. Same.
That said, there are certainly some that go the other way that I am less prone to notice or complain about. Charlottesville comes to mind.
And I see the fucking Atlantic continues its winning streak of George Packer to David Frum to Caitlin Flanagan. Geezus.
16: The Washington Post Editorial Board advocated explicitly for indefinite presence:
Contrary to his and others' cliches about "endless war," though, U.S. troops had not been in major ground operations, and had endured very modest casualties, since 2014. Mr. Biden statically measures the dollar costs of staying in Afghanistan. Yet there will be costs, potentially high ones, attached to a botched withdrawal, too. A small U.S. and allied military presence -- capable of working with Afghan forces to deny power to the Taliban and its al-Qaeda terrorist allies, while diplomats and nongovernmental organizations nurtured a fledgling civil society -- not only would have been affordable but also could have paid for itself in U.S. security and global credibility.
I suspect someone with a subscription could find similar from the NYT.
I don't think that's at all compatible with how fast the government actually fell. It sure looks to me like if we made it look like we were going to stay much longer, we'd have been kicked out if we didn't send in a whole lot more force.
Selective editing of quote to leave out the part where the President gives the politically acceptable answer to make it see more controversial.
WSJ story misstating an embassy cable to make it sound more controversial. You can play this game with a lot of issues but it's not usually so easy to find egregious media behavior.
15: In the US your entire life, and still refusing to assimilate. Shame.
The whole thread is good. https://twitter.com/FadhelKaboub/status/1426724033966510082?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Ode to Empire
[for John Hobson]
Wars without
pause
pride without
cause
Occupations
free of laws
mass murder
just because
no contrition
no remorse
all a prosaic
matter of course
I think 22 gets it more or less right. I read somewhere that after the US announced its withdrawal, local Taliban commanders on the ground were calling their opposite numbers in the Afghan National Army to negotiate terms of surrender, in order to save lives. If the Americans and their alllies had insisted on waiting to be driven out, it would have been a much bloodier mess, and nobody would have thanked the western powers for making it so.
I think 22 gets it more or less right. I read somewhere that after the US announced its withdrawal, local Taliban commanders on the ground were calling their opposite numbers in the Afghan National Army to negotiate terms of surrender, in order to save lives. If the Americans and their alllies had insisted on waiting to be driven out, it would have been a much bloodier mess, and nobody would have thanked the western powers for making it so.
19: Yeah, I said the other day that the two positions that are allowed to just be repeated in straight news stories as accepted-by-all-reasonable-people baseline reality are that forever wars are good and that budget deficits are bad (and should be closed by cutting spending). I think maybe for similar reasons, too--there's a sort of '90s consensus on them that journalists are just steeped in, and then there's a bunch of ancillary institutions dedicated to making sure that the idea gets reinforced.
I am not a big fan of Joe, but he's been doing the right thing on this in the face of a quite resistant military/foreign policy establishment, and good on him.
It's also impressive the way Trump and Pompeo's cease-fire with the Taliban in 2020 (and agreement to withdraw in 2021! And decision to hobble Ghani's response!) has just been memory-holed. Here's a prominent foreign correspondent for NBC News with the memory of a goldfish.
I also have seen zero discussion of the whether assertion (which I saw on Twitter) that Pompeo's State Department stopped processing SIVs for Afghanis after the agreement was finalized, which I could 100% believe.
31: Yes, that Engel tweet was his crowning achievement in a week of bad take after bad take.
For non-clickers: "Biden says US in constant contact with Taliban to get safe passage to airport. So, US asking former enemy, the Taliban, to please allow us to get our people out while they take the country." The "please" is utterly gratuitous. And, yes, Richard that is how it tends to work in situations like these. I think they really want US soldiers blasting their way through the streets. Fallujah forever!
31.last: And Also reported that Miller et al basically stopped everything up over most of the 4 years.
Also Engel and his MSM ilk are doing a pretty piss poor job of actually reporting on what is happening with negotiations, and the evacuation other than chaotic scenes at the airport .
This by Josh Miller-- You Wouldn't Know It From the US News Coverage, But ...--is a good example.
... the key leaders of the US backed government over the last two decades are relaxedly meeting with the political leadership of the Taliban in Kabul about the formation of the new government.
...
If nothing else it reminds us that a key truth of any military occupation is that the locals live there and the occupiers don't. They'll be there after the foreigners are gone; a reality never lost on the people from the country.
...
I flag this first because it seems highly newsworthy if we're trying to understand just what is happening in the country. But it is remarkable to me that you can immerse yourself in the current US media coverage and as far as I can tell see very, very little discussion of this at all. I only noticed it and started digging around because I noticed Abdullah's tweet* and did some digging from there.
* "Along with HE @KarzaiH , we welcomed members of the Taliban political office, & negotiation team. We exchanged views on the current security & political developments, & an inclusive political settlement for the future of the country."
"Good example" of what is not really getting covered in the NYT, Post etc.
I did like his opening sentence:
The bonfire of hyperboles in US press coverage seems limitless at the moment.
Not to be callous but it's also quite striking that the death of a single Afghan child at the airport is now headline news while tens of thousands of civilian deaths were completely ignored when it was just part of the ongoing operation.
