| U.S. mainstream liberal media is still struggling to comprehend the defeat of a U.S. war in Afghanistan that they wholeheartedly supported. Each day, we see new expressions of cluelessness: The Taliban’s cabinet includes men who fought U.S. forces! Well, yes, the Taliban came to power by winning the war, which is how they’re able to install their commanders in power. There are no women in the Taliban cabinet! Well, there are no women leaders in the Taliban. One doesn’t need to accept the Taliban’s principles to stop acting shocked that the war’s victors are setting their own terms. And the media’s surprise notwithstanding, the Taliban’s return to power has long been the predictable consequence of a misguided intervention. U.S. involvement in Afghanistan actually began in July 1979, decades before the 9/11 attacks, when Washington launched a covert CIA program to fund, arm and train mujahideen fighters resisting the Soviet occupation – not out of love for Afghanistan, but to drain Moscow’s resources. Al Qaeda was built on foundations laid in a CIA directed program to recruit Arab volunteers to fight the Soviets. After Moscow was defeated, Washington would go on to repeat its rival’s mistakes after the 9/11 attacks. After 9/11, liberal American media quickly fell in line with government policy. CNN in 2001 instructed its staff to be “careful not to focus excessively on the casualties and hardships in Afghanistan that will inevitably be a part of this war, or to forget that it is the Taliban leadership that is responsible for the situation Afghanistan is now in” and to “contextualize” Afghan casualties by referring to the 9/11 attacks. When the same Western media outlet dutifully reiterated the U.S. military’s self-serving account of last month’s bomb blast at the gate of Kabul airport, and of the drone strike that killed 10 members of a single Afghan family the following day, they were following a familiar pattern. Years of trusting government spin meant that the U.S. media has shielded its audiences from a key factor in the Taliban’s victory: The tens of thousands of Afghan civilians killed by the U.S. and its allies in their counterinsurgency campaign. The media bears substantial responsibility for failing to challenge the lack of accountability or transparency over that toll. Mainstream coverage also habitually focused on the relative freedom enjoyed by women in Afghanistan’s major cities at the expense of the countryside where the majority of Afghans live in a reality shaped mostly by the war (as Rafia Zakaria has written, Afghan women never asked for airstrikes). All too rare, in mainstream coverage, was the sort of perspective added by Anand Gopal’s reporting in the New Yorker, which introduced American readers to some of the seldom-heard women of rural Afghanistan, for whom the U.S. was not a liberator but a detested occupier that had violently destabilized their lives. The U.S.-backed regime that allowed relative freedom in Afghanistan’s cities was also riddled with epic corruption at the expense of the rural population – which helps explain why so few Afghans were willing to fight for it. In the desperate weeks that followed the collapse of the U.S.-backed regime, Western media was dominated by stories of English-speaking women and men expressing their fears about what Taliban rule would bring. But news outlets reporting on the situation on the ground painted a more ambiguous picture – calm, though fluid and dangerous, while Afghans struggled to figure out what rules the new government would impose. Afghanistan’s future, even its present, is unwritten. Making sense of it requires engaging with the complexity of a society that has suffered more than four decades of war and relinquishing the media narratives that helped drive the invasion in the first place. Source URL |