WASHINGTON: When US soldiers conducted a raid north of Kandahar, on Jan 24, it was initially reported as an American victory. “US Special Forces got into a fight with the Taliban. Fifteen Afghan fighters were killed and 27 taken into custody,” said ABC’s Peter Jennings.
“Army Special Forces stormed two Taliban compounds,” said NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski. Newspapers carried similar stories, adding such caveats as “Defence Department officials said.”
Days later, however, a few reporters in Afghanistan began challenging the official accounts, eventually prompting the Pentagon to acknowledge that those captured were not Taliban members after all. On balance, though, some journalists say the news business has been too passive during a war in which the first, often lasting impressions are left by military briefers at the lectern.
“We are the auditors of this operation,” said Mark Thompson, Time magazine’s defence correspondent. “Sometimes you get the feeling there’s a little too much Arthur Andersen going on.”
After five months in which the Bush administration drew consistently upbeat coverage for a successful military campaign, the media climate has turned sharply negative. Suddenly, the issues of civilian casualties, military mistakes and the Pentagon’s own credibility have been dragged into the national spotlight.
Perhaps there was resentment among journalists over their limited access during the war while Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was hailed on magazine covers like a rock star. Perhaps the tales of innocents slain in remote Afghan villages became too heart-rending to ignore. Perhaps there was a news void as the fighting largely subsided and the Osama bin Laden trail went cold.
Or perhaps it is easier for reporters to raise uncomfortable questions about military blunders now that the Taliban regime has been toppled and the threat to American troops greatly eased.
Whatever the cause, war coverage now resembles a kind of time-lapse photography, with journalists revisiting the scene of past bombing raids for the kind of up-close-and-personal reporting that was all but impossible while the ground war was raging.
On Monday, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The New York Times reported allegations by some of the 27 Afghans captured in last month’s raid that American forces had beaten and kicked them - prompting Rumsfeld to order an investigation. A day earlier, The New York Times ran a lengthy piece on civilian deaths in several raids in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, The Post, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times examined civilian casualties in a raid in October.
But the Pentagon still controls access in some areas where journalists want to dig for information. One dramatic clash took place last weekend when Washington Post reporter Doug Struck tried to visit the site of the Jan. 24 raid. He was turned away at gunpoint by US soldiers who threatened to shoot him if he went farther.
Struck said from Afghanistan that “the important thing isn’t whether Doug Struck was threatened. It shows the extremes the military is going to keep this war secret, to keep reporters from finding out what’s going on.”
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke defended the department’s dealings with the media. “I think it’s a reflection of the often confusing and shifting nature of a very unconventional war,” she said. “It’s always a balance. We want to put out as much information as we can, and we want that information to be as accurate as it can be. We can’t always do that as quickly as some reporters would like.”
Since the Persian Gulf War, the military and the media have been arguing over the degree to which journalists can accompany battlefield troops without jeopardizing their safety. These complaints grew louder after the United States began bombing Afghanistan on Oct 7 without activating previously designated pools of reporters. At the same time, Rumsfeld threatened to prosecute anyone caught leaking classified information.
Now that journalists are relatively free to invade Afghanistan on their own, the war’s latest phase has produced a spate of murky, conflicting accounts of whether US troops sometimes targeted the wrong people.
Thompson said the military itself frequently has incomplete information about the impact of its bombing. “The Pentagon was pretty much as blind as we were,” he said. “As painful as it was to watch, the Pentagon has provided us with th their changing assessment as it occurred. Frankly, I don’t know how they screwed up so bad.”—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.