This week, the New York Times reported that the U.S. government made war in Afghanistan while helping to “recruit, train and pay for lawless bands of militias that pillaged homes and laid waste to entire communities.” Those militias “tortured civilians, kidnapped for ransom, massacred dozens in vendetta killings and razed entire villages, sowing more than a decade of hatred toward the Afghan government and its American allies.”
Written by a former Kabul bureau chief for the Times, the article appeared under a headline saying that “U.S.-backed militias” in Afghanistan were “worse than the Taliban.”
Now they tell us.
The new reporting made me think of a chapter in my book War Made Invisible titled “Now It Can Be Told.” Here’s an excerpt:
Timing is crucial in media and politics — and never more so than when war is at stake. It’s completely unsatisfactory for journalists to toe the war line for years and then finally report, in effect: Now it can be told — years too late.
Virtually the entire U.S. media establishment gave full-throated support to the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in early October 2001. Twenty years later, many of the same outlets were saying the war was ill-conceived and doomed from the start.
Immediately after the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, with very few exceptions, even the mainstream news organizations that had been expressing trepidation or opposition swung into line to support the war effort. Two decades later, many of the same media outlets were calling the invasion of Iraq the worst U.S. foreign-policy blunder in history.
But such framing evades the structural mendacity that remains built into the military-industrial complex, with its corporate media and political wings. War is so normalized that its casualties, as if struck by acts of God, are routinely viewed as victims without victimizers, perhaps no more aggrieved than people suffering the consequences of bad weather.
Hellbound and Down 