Why is it that all the progress made in Afghanistan, from elections to education opportunities, it never made headlines unless and until a US helicopter went down killing 16 special forces soldiers (and a unit of recon that the helicopter was trying to relieve is still unaccounted for)?
Media bias? Could be.
Tens of thousands of girls enrolled in schools? Who cares. Peace in most of the country? Boring.
Democratic elections? Non-story. Economic progress? Less than a non-story.
A construction boom in Kabul? About time journalists had a nice hotel. Afghan troops defending their elected government? Zero interest, dude.
Sixteen GIs lost in a helicopter shot down by terrorists? Now THAT'S news.
It is news, of course. We mourn the loss of every one of our service members. And while every American casualty, colonel or corporal, counts equally, the loss of a team of Navy Seals is an operational blow. We want to know what happened.
The problem is the imbalance in the reporting. My friends who serve or served in Afghanistan are bewildered by the only-bad-news-counts coverage. By any objective measure, Afghanistan's an incredible, they-said-it-couldn't-be-done success story. But we only hear that the Taliban is back.
Well, the Taliban never went away entirely. The movement may never fully disappear — no more than nutty white-supremacy groups will vanish completely from the U.S. scene. But we're better off now than in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Taliban's been reduced to a local nuisance.
The Taliban's supporters are drawn to disciplinary religion and social repression. Low education levels and ethnic fissures help them survive. International terrorists provide support. But compare today's beggarly Taliban with the power that ruled the country less than four years ago.
We can't expect perfect solutions to the world's problems. The current skirmishing in Afghanistan involves classic frontier-bandido clashes, reminiscent of our own past. Apache raiders would strike in our southwest, then flee across the border to Mexico — just as the Taliban flees into Pakistan.
The Apaches remained a local problem for decades, but they never threatened our government's survival. And the Taliban won't return to rule in Kabul.
But the Taliban have an ally the Apaches never dreamed of — the media. Make no mistake: Our Islamist enemies are as media-savvy as the top Hollywood agents. They know they can't defeat us militarily, so attacks aim to influence opinion polls and decision-makers in the United States. Calls for withdrawal timetables and partisan declarations that we're failing only encourage our enemies to kill more of our troops.
This week, we lost 16 fine Americans in the Afghan mountains. They deserve to be mourned, and their sacrifice merits respect. But the failure to provide balanced reporting from Afghanistan — and Iraq — is nothing less than spitting on their graves.
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