Afghanistan.

TheBurgerKing · Aug 25, 2021

I believe the current wording from the WH is that they are going to evacuate everyone that wants out, so if those scared high school kids can't get themselves to the airport, it's because they didn't want it enough. Seeing as how the U.S. CO was whining at the Brit CO because the SAS was going out and rescuing its citizens and they were making the U.S. look bad, you KNOW no one will lift a finger for them. From what I can piece together those kids are the families of U.S. servicemen. And Psaki, like usual when questioned about it had no idea. Biden needs to step down.

14thDoctor · Aug 25, 2021

TheBurgerKing said: ↑

Biden needs to step down.
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I was with you until you had to go full retard at the end.

TheBurgerKing · Aug 25, 2021

14thDoctor said: ↑

TheBurgerKing said: ↑

Biden needs to step down.
Click to expand...

I was with you until you had to go full retard at the end.
Click to expand...

If stranding the children of U.S. service members in Afghanistan for the males to be beheaded and the females to be married off (among numerous other HORRIFIC and embarrassing acts the fuckup-in-chief has done in Afghanistan) isn't enough to warrant anyone who would call themselves a decent human being to somberly reflect upon their mistakes and realize that they are unfit to continue to lead, than what would be? Where would YOU draw the line?

14thDoctor · Aug 25, 2021

TheBurgerKing said: ↑

14thDoctor said: ↑

TheBurgerKing said: ↑

Biden needs to step down.
Click to expand...

I was with you until you had to go full retard at the end.
Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Remind me how many people died on 9/11 again? Or how many Americans died of covid in 2020? Or fighting in Vietnam? Or in Iraq?

You never go full retard.

Man Afraid of his Shoes · Aug 25, 2021

TheBurgerKing said: ↑

14thDoctor said: ↑

TheBurgerKing said: ↑

Biden needs to step down.
Click to expand...

I was with you until you had to go full retard at the end.
Click to expand...

If stranding the children of U.S. service members in Afghanistan for the males to be beheaded and the females to be married off (among numerous other HORRIFIC and embarrassing acts the fuckup-in-chief has done in Afghanistan) isn't enough to warrant anyone who would call themselves a decent human being to somberly reflect upon their mistakes and realize that they are unfit to continue to lead, than what would be? Where would YOU draw the line?
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What the Fuck were children of U.S. service members doing in Afghanistan???

TheBurgerKing · Aug 26, 2021

Man Afraid of his Shoes said: ↑

TheBurgerKing said: ↑

14thDoctor said: ↑

TheBurgerKing said: ↑

Biden needs to step down.
Click to expand...

I was with you until you had to go full retard at the end.
Click to expand...

If stranding the children of U.S. service members in Afghanistan for the males to be beheaded and the females to be married off (among numerous other HORRIFIC and embarrassing acts the fuckup-in-chief has done in Afghanistan) isn't enough to warrant anyone who would call themselves a decent human being to somberly reflect upon their mistakes and realize that they are unfit to continue to lead, than what would be? Where would YOU draw the line?
Click to expand...

What the Fuck were children of U.S. service members doing in Afghanistan???
Click to expand...

I have no clue, the whole thing is fucky. The L.A. Times article I read said "the families traveled to Afghanistan on special visas for U.S. military service". And it's a San Diego suburb, so that makes me think military families. I'm assuming the news is downplaying this to not call attention to it.

Man Afraid of his Shoes · Aug 26, 2021

TheBurgerKing said: ↑

Man Afraid of his Shoes said: ↑

TheBurgerKing said: ↑

14thDoctor said: ↑

I was with you until you had to go full retard at the end.
Click to expand...

If stranding the children of U.S. service members in Afghanistan for the males to be beheaded and the females to be married off (among numerous other HORRIFIC and embarrassing acts the fuckup-in-chief has done in Afghanistan) isn't enough to warrant anyone who would call themselves a decent human being to somberly reflect upon their mistakes and realize that they are unfit to continue to lead, than what would be? Where would YOU draw the line?
Click to expand...

What the Fuck were children of U.S. service members doing in Afghanistan???
Click to expand...

I have no clue, the whole thing is fucky. The L.A. Times article I read said "the families traveled to Afghanistan on special visas for U.S. military service". And it's a San Diego suburb, so that makes me think military families. I'm assuming the news is downplaying this to not call attention to it.
Click to expand...

How many? Why? Do you have a link?

shootER · Aug 26, 2021

14thDoctor · Aug 26, 2021

Considering how much Trump gave the Taliban in exchange for basically nothing, I feel like a Democrat would be on trial for treason or charges of "aiding the enemy" if they did even a fraction of that.

Shirogayne · Aug 26, 2021

Man Afraid of his Shoes said: ↑

TheBurgerKing said: ↑

Man Afraid of his Shoes said: ↑

TheBurgerKing said: ↑

If stranding the children of U.S. service members in Afghanistan for the males to be beheaded and the females to be married off (among numerous other HORRIFIC and embarrassing acts the fuckup-in-chief has done in Afghanistan) isn't enough to warrant anyone who would call themselves a decent human being to somberly reflect upon their mistakes and realize that they are unfit to continue to lead, than what would be? Where would YOU draw the line?
Click to expand...

What the Fuck were children of U.S. service members doing in Afghanistan???
Click to expand...

I have no clue, the whole thing is fucky. The L.A. Times article I read said "the families traveled to Afghanistan on special visas for U.S. military service". And it's a San Diego suburb, so that makes me think military families. I'm assuming the news is downplaying this to not call attention to it.
Click to expand...

How many? Why? Do you have a link?
Click to expand...

He's talking about this, that I linked via a Twitter post ten posts back or so:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.co...ghanistan?_amp=true&__twitter_impression=true
These were Afghan refugees/immigrants on a trip to visit family. The confusion is liking from this:

Miyashiro said that the families involved are on special Visas for U.S. military service and that the Department of Defense considers them “allies.”
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East County of San Diego has a huge population for Middle Eastern, Arabic and North African immigrants, especially in El Cajon (much to the chagrin of it's racist neighbor, Santee, which went viral during lockdown for a guy wearing a Klan mask to protest the mask mandate).

spot261 · Aug 26, 2021

Order2Chaos said: ↑

Largely on the topic of media bias, but also has some facts about the withdrawal you might not know. Did you know over 82,300 have already been evacuated, or that Biden has been threatening the Taliban if they interfere with the evacuation? Or that civilians KIA in Afghanistan are lower this year than any time since 2005? No? Here's an answer as to why.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/media-bias-biden-polls-approval-afghanistan-withdrawal.html

The Media Manufactured Biden’s Political ‘Fiasco’ in Afghanistan
“Straight news” has chosen sanctimony over circumspection.
By Eric Levitz @EricLevitz

America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has yet to cost our nation a single casualty. Evacuations of U.S. citizens and allies from Kabul’s airport are proceeding at a faster pace than the White House had promised, or than its critics had deemed possible. Afghanistan’s decades-long civil war has reached a lull, if not an end. On the streets of Kabul, “order and quiet” have replaced “rising crime and violence.” Meanwhile, the Taliban is negotiating with former Afghan president Hamid Karzai over the establishment of “an inclusive government acceptable to all Afghans.”

In other words, Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a “disastrous” and “humiliating” “fiasco,” in the words of the mainstream media’s ostensibly objective foreign-policy journalists.

This may be an accurate description of what recent events in Kabul have meant for the president, politically. The latest polls have shown sharp drops in Biden’s approval rating, driven in part by widespread opposition to “the way” his administration handled its (otherwise popular) exit from Afghanistan. Yet this political fiasco is not a development that the media covered so much as one that it created.

The Biden administration made some genuine errors of contingency planning. It could have done (and should now do) more to facilitate the mass resettlement of Afghan refugees. But as far as conclusions to multi-decade wars go, America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is thus far proceeding with relatively little chaos and tragedy. And it’s far from clear that the withdrawal could have been much more orderly had the White House only executed it in a better “way.”

It has long been apparent that America’s exit from Afghanistan would be tantamount to the Taliban’s victory. U.S. intelligence officials may have been excessively optimistic about the Afghan government’s staying power, but even they thought the government in Kabulwould collapse within two years of America’s retreat. Simply put, there is no proud way to lose a war to a cult of heroin-dealing child rapists (especially when your side in that war featured no small number of men who fit a similar description). And there probably wasn’t a non-chaotic way of doing so, either. The Biden administration advised all U.S. civilians in Afghanistan to leave the country in May. Forcibly evacuating those who chose to stay, along with every Afghan ally who feared Taliban reprisals — before the Afghan government fell — would have been a Herculean task in terms of pure logistics. And it was an impossible task in terms of geopolitics: Before its collapse, the Afghan government had pressured the United States to limit its evacuation efforts, so as to avoid broadcasting the message that America deemed a Taliban victory inevitable. This was a reasonable concern. Few in the Afghan security forces were eager to die for a lost cause, which is one reason why the Taliban met weak resistance by the time it reached Kabul. Had the U.S. attempted to evacuate all its allies before the capital, the initial stages of that effort would have almost certainly expedited the surrender of the Afghan security forces and thus, left manyAfghans who worked with the U.S.in the same basic predicament they find themselves in now.

All of which is to say: Ascertaining how much of the heartache in Kabul today derives from imperfections in Biden’s withdrawal plan — and how much would have occurred under any plausible U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — is no easy task.

It is also a task that the media has felt no obligation to undertake. Mainstream coverage of Kabul’s fall and its aftermath has been anything but circumspect. Attempts to weigh the benefits of America’s withdrawal (e.g., the humanitarian gains inherent to the cessation of 20 years of civil war) against its costs have been rare; attempts to judge Biden’s execution of that withdrawal against rigorous counterfactuals have been rarer still. Instead, ostensibly neutral correspondents and anchors have (1) openly editorializedagainst the White House’s policy; (2) assigned Biden near-total responsibility for the final collapse of the proto-failed state his predecessors had established; and then (3) reported on the potential political costs of Biden’s actions, as though they were not actively imposing those costs through their own speculations about just “how politically damaging” the president’s failures of “competence” and “empathy” would prove to be.

Some manifestations of media bias have been overt. Declan Walsh, the New York Times’ chief Africa correspondent (a reporting position, not an opining one) tweeted shortly before the Taliban’s final victory, “Jalalabad gone, only Kabul left. For those who lamented ‘forever wars’ — is the phrase anything more than a comforting cop-out for epic failures of policy and the imagination? — here’s what the end looks like.” It is difficult to read that statement as anything but open advocacy against U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a policy supported by both the sitting president and a majority of the American public.

Meanwhile, Richard Engel tweeted Friday, “Biden says U.S. in constant contact with Taliban to get safe passage to airport. So, U.S. asking former enemy, the Taliban, to please allow us to get our people out while they take the country.” There were many ways that NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent could have characterized the news that Biden had secured the cooperation of Afghanistan’s reigning regime in the evacuation of U.S. citizens. He chose to portray it — dubiously — as a display of national self-abasement; in Engel’s account, Biden was “asking” an enemy to “please allow” Americans’ safe passage out of the country, as though the U.S. president were groveling at Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar’s feet, rather thanthreatening ruinous sanctions should harm come to U.S. nationals. This is the sort of commentary one expects from jingoists on right-wing radio, not high-ranking reporters at major networks.

At the same time, CNN’s chief foreign correspondent Clarissa Ward saw fit to present her own pessimistic hunches about the Biden administration’s future performance as established fact, reporting Friday, “I’m sitting here for 12 hours in the [Kabul] airport, 8 hours on the airfield and I haven’t seen a single U.S. plane take off. How on Earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 people in the next two weeks? It just, it can’t happen.” The U.S. evacuated about 21,600 in a 24-hour span between Monday and Tuesday; as of this writing, the U.S. has evacuated more than 82,300 people in the past 11 days.

The most audacious expression of the “straight news” media’s embrace of advocacy journalism may have come from CBS News’ White House reporter Bo Erickson, who chose to disseminate a poll showing Biden’s approval had sunk — as a majority opposed his handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan — like so:

The media’s bias takes slightly subtler form in a Times dispatch from Kabul published Sunday:

Every death at the Kabul airport, every child with a teddy-bear backpack separated from a parent, every Afghan supporter of the United States who is marooned, reinforces the impression of an unplanned United States withdrawal that was too precipitous and based on a disastrous misjudgment of the capacities of the American- and NATO-trained government military forces. They simply melted away.
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This piece is presented to readers as straight reportage, not an op-ed or even a “news analysis.” Thus, its author, Times Paris bureau chief Roger Cohen, doesn’t assert that every marooned Afghan ally reinforces the fact that the U.S. withdrawal was too precipitous; he merely asserts that it reinforces that impression. This is, of course, a thin scrim for concealing outright advocacy. Impressions are inherently subjective. Events in Kabul make no direct impression on Americans in Peoria, so Cohen is not describing something that exists beyond his own subjectivity. Rather, he is presenting his own personal impression (and/or the dominant impression among the Western journalists around him) as a disembodied, globe-spanning sense of Biden’s policy. When Cohen’s peers at CNN, NBC, and CBS do the same, the alchemy of mass media turns its subjective impression into what it purports to be: a neutral description of public opinion.

This is not to say that Cohen’s despair at the plight of Afghan translators is not well-founded, or that his opposition to Biden’s withdrawal is necessarily unreasonable. The point is merely that he is presenting editorial judgments as factual ones. In doing so, he is also opining without assuming the burdens of the op-ed columnist: to clearly state one’s thesis (e.g., “The swift collapse of the Afghan army and consequent chaos in Kabul proves that America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was excessively rapid”); defend that thesis with evidence; anticipate opposing arguments (e.g., “The fact that the Afghan security forces had so little capacity after 20 years of training actually demonstrated the inevitability of the Afghan government’s collapse and thus, the imperative to avoid prolonging bloodshed in a war that was already lost”); and then to rebut those arguments.

I articulated my own substantive views on these matters last week (although I now think that I was a tad harder on the White House than available facts justified). Those views may bespeak the biases of a millennial progressive whose formative years were spent gawking at George W. Bush’s war crimes and reading Noam Chomsky’s lectures. I cannot always prevent my ideological commitments from blinkering my vision. But I can be transparent about those commitments, and test my biased intuitions against the rigors of reasoned argument.

The mainstream media’s most influential opponents of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan refuse to do the same. This refusal may not be conscious. It can be hard to recognize one’s normative assumptions as ideological when those assumptions are commonsense among one’s peers. There is certainly some diversity of opinion within the broad universe of U.S. foreign-policy reporters. And nearly everything I know about the pitfalls of America’s occupation of Afghanistan I learned from the foreign correspondents of mainstream news outlets. Nevertheless, the widely shared ideological assumptions and personal experiences of elite U.S. foreign-policy journalists biased mainstream coverage of Afghanistan over the past two weeks. The consequent bias is neither liberal nor conservative. One might call it “imperial,” in a not wholly pejorative sense: It is a point of view that (1) assumes the U.S. can and should exert decisive influence over global events; (2) aims to lift Americans out of their parochial nationalism and into a cosmopolitan sense of moral obligation; and (3) privileges suffering caused by American inaction abroad over suffering caused by American military “engagement.”

We’ve already seen that first aspect of the bias in action: The presumption that the U.S. president has both the right and capacity to, in the words of the Times’ Peter Baker, “assert command over world events” is what allowed the mainstream media to condemn Biden’s withdrawal without scrutinizing counterfactuals. The second aspect of this bias — its missionary quest against the median American’s indifference to foreign affairs — can be gleaned from the media’s laudable attempts to put a face on the victims of the Taliban’s violence and misogyny, as well as its not-so-praiseworthy expressions of contempt for Americans who wish to bring their nation’s troops home. Personally, I find this element of elite foreign-policy journalists’ ideology partly congenial and beneficent; Americans’ widespread support for taking in Afghan refugees surely owes something to the humanitarian convictions and narrative gifts of the mainstream press. And yet, that press has ultimately fallen victim to its own parochialism. On Sunday, the great Times reporter C.J Chivers dismissed nefarious explanations for the press’s negative coverage of Biden’s withdrawal by saying, in a now-deleted tweet, “Maybe people who have worked with Afghans, and been helped and protected and welcomed by them for years or even decades, happen to give a shit about them? If these are motivations for outcry that you can’t understand, that’s on you.”

These are indeed humane and understandable motivations for using one’s influence as a “straight news” reporter to advance the cause of one interested party in a contested policy debate. But they are not justifiable grounds for doing so.

In mainstream coverage, the suffering of the U.S.–aligned Afghan translators — whom foreign correspondents have come to know as sources and friends over two decades of occupation — looms large. The suffering of the thousands of Afghan security forces and civilians who’ve been dying each year in a civil war that our government has the wherewithal to prolong but not to win, however, has been all but ignored.

Countless reporters and commentators have cited the relatively low level of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan in recent years as proof that maintaining the status quo was a near cost-free proposition. When doing so, such cosmopolitan correspondents reveal the insularity of their moral vision. Before Biden commenced his withdrawal and the Taliban completed their victory, the 20th year of the war in Afghanistan was set to “witness the highest-ever number of documented civilian casualties in a single year” since the U.N. mission there began keeping records. Meanwhile, civilians unharmed by the war’s violence have endured “elevated rates of disease due to lack of clean drinking water, malnutrition, and reduced access to health care” as a result of the conflict, according to the Watson Institute’s “Costs of War” project. American involvement in Afghanistan has not only harmed civilians indirectly by perpetuating civil war; our nation also directly incinerated and tortured Afghans in the course of defending their freedom.

Every “child with a teddy-bear backpack separated from a parent” may reinforce the impression that America withdrew from Afghanistan too soon. Or every child killed in the course of a doomed counterinsurgency campaign may reinforce the impression that America withdrew far too late. It all depends on where one chooses to look.

The problem with the “imperial bias” of the media’s Afghanistan coverage is not that it has harmed Joe Biden’s approval rating. The problem is that it has compromised the Fourth Estate’s journalism and circumscribed its humanitarianism. One can reasonably argue that safeguarding the rights of Afghan women was worth the costs of prolonging armed conflict (costs that fell quite heavily on Afghan women). But one cannot reasonably leave those costs out of the discussion, or malign those who weigh them heavily as opponents of human rights. One can critically report on concrete failings in the Biden administration’s withdrawal plans. But one cannot presume Biden’s responsibility for every negative consequence that follows from ending a misbegotten war and deserve the title journalist. By privileging the victims of American military withdrawal over those of American military engagement — while presuming the U.S. president’s capacity to decisively shape events in foreign lands — the media has rendered itself objectively pro-war. In allowing personal attachments to dictate its humanitarian concerns, mainstream reporters have concentrated moral outrage on an injustice that the U.S. can’t resolve without resort to violence (the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan), while enabling mass indifference to a much larger injustice that the U.S. can drastically mitigate without killing anyone (the global shortfall of COVID-19 vaccines).

Until America’s bleeding-heart correspondents reckon with their field’s endemic biases, their reporting will routinely devolve into advocacy, if not rationalizations, for future bloodshed.
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Interesting.

We were told the media were owned by the left.

matthunter · Aug 26, 2021

Billionaire Erik Prince is charging $6500 per seat to fly folk out. He claims this also covers costs in getting them to the airport, but still - very charitable.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/en...anistan_n_61269fb4e4b092664347e1f4?ri18n=true

Bailey · Aug 26, 2021

14thDoctor said: ↑

Considering how much Trump gave the Taliban in exchange for basically nothing, I feel like a Democrat would be on trial for treason or charges of "aiding the enemy" if they did even a fraction of that.
Click to expand...

There ain't no lie there.

Bailey · Aug 26, 2021

Good thread, but especially the last part:

Order2Chaos · Aug 26, 2021

spot261 said: ↑

Order2Chaos said: ↑

Largely on the topic of media bias, but also has some facts about the withdrawal you might not know. Did you know over 82,300 have already been evacuated, or that Biden has been threatening the Taliban if they interfere with the evacuation? Or that civilians KIA in Afghanistan are lower this year than any time since 2005? No? Here's an answer as to why.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/media-bias-biden-polls-approval-afghanistan-withdrawal.html

The Media Manufactured Biden’s Political ‘Fiasco’ in Afghanistan
“Straight news” has chosen sanctimony over circumspection.
By Eric Levitz @EricLevitz

America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has yet to cost our nation a single casualty. Evacuations of U.S. citizens and allies from Kabul’s airport are proceeding at a faster pace than the White House had promised, or than its critics had deemed possible. Afghanistan’s decades-long civil war has reached a lull, if not an end. On the streets of Kabul, “order and quiet” have replaced “rising crime and violence.” Meanwhile, the Taliban is negotiating with former Afghan president Hamid Karzai over the establishment of “an inclusive government acceptable to all Afghans.”

In other words, Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a “disastrous” and “humiliating” “fiasco,” in the words of the mainstream media’s ostensibly objective foreign-policy journalists.

This may be an accurate description of what recent events in Kabul have meant for the president, politically. The latest polls have shown sharp drops in Biden’s approval rating, driven in part by widespread opposition to “the way” his administration handled its (otherwise popular) exit from Afghanistan. Yet this political fiasco is not a development that the media covered so much as one that it created.

The Biden administration made some genuine errors of contingency planning. It could have done (and should now do) more to facilitate the mass resettlement of Afghan refugees. But as far as conclusions to multi-decade wars go, America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is thus far proceeding with relatively little chaos and tragedy. And it’s far from clear that the withdrawal could have been much more orderly had the White House only executed it in a better “way.”

It has long been apparent that America’s exit from Afghanistan would be tantamount to the Taliban’s victory. U.S. intelligence officials may have been excessively optimistic about the Afghan government’s staying power, but even they thought the government in Kabulwould collapse within two years of America’s retreat. Simply put, there is no proud way to lose a war to a cult of heroin-dealing child rapists (especially when your side in that war featured no small number of men who fit a similar description). And there probably wasn’t a non-chaotic way of doing so, either. The Biden administration advised all U.S. civilians in Afghanistan to leave the country in May. Forcibly evacuating those who chose to stay, along with every Afghan ally who feared Taliban reprisals — before the Afghan government fell — would have been a Herculean task in terms of pure logistics. And it was an impossible task in terms of geopolitics: Before its collapse, the Afghan government had pressured the United States to limit its evacuation efforts, so as to avoid broadcasting the message that America deemed a Taliban victory inevitable. This was a reasonable concern. Few in the Afghan security forces were eager to die for a lost cause, which is one reason why the Taliban met weak resistance by the time it reached Kabul. Had the U.S. attempted to evacuate all its allies before the capital, the initial stages of that effort would have almost certainly expedited the surrender of the Afghan security forces and thus, left manyAfghans who worked with the U.S.in the same basic predicament they find themselves in now.

All of which is to say: Ascertaining how much of the heartache in Kabul today derives from imperfections in Biden’s withdrawal plan — and how much would have occurred under any plausible U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — is no easy task.

It is also a task that the media has felt no obligation to undertake. Mainstream coverage of Kabul’s fall and its aftermath has been anything but circumspect. Attempts to weigh the benefits of America’s withdrawal (e.g., the humanitarian gains inherent to the cessation of 20 years of civil war) against its costs have been rare; attempts to judge Biden’s execution of that withdrawal against rigorous counterfactuals have been rarer still. Instead, ostensibly neutral correspondents and anchors have (1) openly editorializedagainst the White House’s policy; (2) assigned Biden near-total responsibility for the final collapse of the proto-failed state his predecessors had established; and then (3) reported on the potential political costs of Biden’s actions, as though they were not actively imposing those costs through their own speculations about just “how politically damaging” the president’s failures of “competence” and “empathy” would prove to be.

Some manifestations of media bias have been overt. Declan Walsh, the New York Times’ chief Africa correspondent (a reporting position, not an opining one) tweeted shortly before the Taliban’s final victory, “Jalalabad gone, only Kabul left. For those who lamented ‘forever wars’ — is the phrase anything more than a comforting cop-out for epic failures of policy and the imagination? — here’s what the end looks like.” It is difficult to read that statement as anything but open advocacy against U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a policy supported by both the sitting president and a majority of the American public.

Meanwhile, Richard Engel tweeted Friday, “Biden says U.S. in constant contact with Taliban to get safe passage to airport. So, U.S. asking former enemy, the Taliban, to please allow us to get our people out while they take the country.” There were many ways that NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent could have characterized the news that Biden had secured the cooperation of Afghanistan’s reigning regime in the evacuation of U.S. citizens. He chose to portray it — dubiously — as a display of national self-abasement; in Engel’s account, Biden was “asking” an enemy to “please allow” Americans’ safe passage out of the country, as though the U.S. president were groveling at Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar’s feet, rather thanthreatening ruinous sanctions should harm come to U.S. nationals. This is the sort of commentary one expects from jingoists on right-wing radio, not high-ranking reporters at major networks.

At the same time, CNN’s chief foreign correspondent Clarissa Ward saw fit to present her own pessimistic hunches about the Biden administration’s future performance as established fact, reporting Friday, “I’m sitting here for 12 hours in the [Kabul] airport, 8 hours on the airfield and I haven’t seen a single U.S. plane take off. How on Earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 people in the next two weeks? It just, it can’t happen.” The U.S. evacuated about 21,600 in a 24-hour span between Monday and Tuesday; as of this writing, the U.S. has evacuated more than 82,300 people in the past 11 days.

The most audacious expression of the “straight news” media’s embrace of advocacy journalism may have come from CBS News’ White House reporter Bo Erickson, who chose to disseminate a poll showing Biden’s approval had sunk — as a majority opposed his handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan — like so:

The media’s bias takes slightly subtler form in a Times dispatch from Kabul published Sunday:

Every death at the Kabul airport, every child with a teddy-bear backpack separated from a parent, every Afghan supporter of the United States who is marooned, reinforces the impression of an unplanned United States withdrawal that was too precipitous and based on a disastrous misjudgment of the capacities of the American- and NATO-trained government military forces. They simply melted away.
Click to expand...

This piece is presented to readers as straight reportage, not an op-ed or even a “news analysis.” Thus, its author, Times Paris bureau chief Roger Cohen, doesn’t assert that every marooned Afghan ally reinforces the fact that the U.S. withdrawal was too precipitous; he merely asserts that it reinforces that impression. This is, of course, a thin scrim for concealing outright advocacy. Impressions are inherently subjective. Events in Kabul make no direct impression on Americans in Peoria, so Cohen is not describing something that exists beyond his own subjectivity. Rather, he is presenting his own personal impression (and/or the dominant impression among the Western journalists around him) as a disembodied, globe-spanning sense of Biden’s policy. When Cohen’s peers at CNN, NBC, and CBS do the same, the alchemy of mass media turns its subjective impression into what it purports to be: a neutral description of public opinion.

This is not to say that Cohen’s despair at the plight of Afghan translators is not well-founded, or that his opposition to Biden’s withdrawal is necessarily unreasonable. The point is merely that he is presenting editorial judgments as factual ones. In doing so, he is also opining without assuming the burdens of the op-ed columnist: to clearly state one’s thesis (e.g., “The swift collapse of the Afghan army and consequent chaos in Kabul proves that America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was excessively rapid”); defend that thesis with evidence; anticipate opposing arguments (e.g., “The fact that the Afghan security forces had so little capacity after 20 years of training actually demonstrated the inevitability of the Afghan government’s collapse and thus, the imperative to avoid prolonging bloodshed in a war that was already lost”); and then to rebut those arguments.

I articulated my own substantive views on these matters last week (although I now think that I was a tad harder on the White House than available facts justified). Those views may bespeak the biases of a millennial progressive whose formative years were spent gawking at George W. Bush’s war crimes and reading Noam Chomsky’s lectures. I cannot always prevent my ideological commitments from blinkering my vision. But I can be transparent about those commitments, and test my biased intuitions against the rigors of reasoned argument.

The mainstream media’s most influential opponents of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan refuse to do the same. This refusal may not be conscious. It can be hard to recognize one’s normative assumptions as ideological when those assumptions are commonsense among one’s peers. There is certainly some diversity of opinion within the broad universe of U.S. foreign-policy reporters. And nearly everything I know about the pitfalls of America’s occupation of Afghanistan I learned from the foreign correspondents of mainstream news outlets. Nevertheless, the widely shared ideological assumptions and personal experiences of elite U.S. foreign-policy journalists biased mainstream coverage of Afghanistan over the past two weeks. The consequent bias is neither liberal nor conservative. One might call it “imperial,” in a not wholly pejorative sense: It is a point of view that (1) assumes the U.S. can and should exert decisive influence over global events; (2) aims to lift Americans out of their parochial nationalism and into a cosmopolitan sense of moral obligation; and (3) privileges suffering caused by American inaction abroad over suffering caused by American military “engagement.”

We’ve already seen that first aspect of the bias in action: The presumption that the U.S. president has both the right and capacity to, in the words of the Times’ Peter Baker, “assert command over world events” is what allowed the mainstream media to condemn Biden’s withdrawal without scrutinizing counterfactuals. The second aspect of this bias — its missionary quest against the median American’s indifference to foreign affairs — can be gleaned from the media’s laudable attempts to put a face on the victims of the Taliban’s violence and misogyny, as well as its not-so-praiseworthy expressions of contempt for Americans who wish to bring their nation’s troops home. Personally, I find this element of elite foreign-policy journalists’ ideology partly congenial and beneficent; Americans’ widespread support for taking in Afghan refugees surely owes something to the humanitarian convictions and narrative gifts of the mainstream press. And yet, that press has ultimately fallen victim to its own parochialism. On Sunday, the great Times reporter C.J Chivers dismissed nefarious explanations for the press’s negative coverage of Biden’s withdrawal by saying, in a now-deleted tweet, “Maybe people who have worked with Afghans, and been helped and protected and welcomed by them for years or even decades, happen to give a shit about them? If these are motivations for outcry that you can’t understand, that’s on you.”

These are indeed humane and understandable motivations for using one’s influence as a “straight news” reporter to advance the cause of one interested party in a contested policy debate. But they are not justifiable grounds for doing so.

In mainstream coverage, the suffering of the U.S.–aligned Afghan translators — whom foreign correspondents have come to know as sources and friends over two decades of occupation — looms large. The suffering of the thousands of Afghan security forces and civilians who’ve been dying each year in a civil war that our government has the wherewithal to prolong but not to win, however, has been all but ignored.

Countless reporters and commentators have cited the relatively low level of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan in recent years as proof that maintaining the status quo was a near cost-free proposition. When doing so, such cosmopolitan correspondents reveal the insularity of their moral vision. Before Biden commenced his withdrawal and the Taliban completed their victory, the 20th year of the war in Afghanistan was set to “witness the highest-ever number of documented civilian casualties in a single year” since the U.N. mission there began keeping records. Meanwhile, civilians unharmed by the war’s violence have endured “elevated rates of disease due to lack of clean drinking water, malnutrition, and reduced access to health care” as a result of the conflict, according to the Watson Institute’s “Costs of War” project. American involvement in Afghanistan has not only harmed civilians indirectly by perpetuating civil war; our nation also directly incinerated and tortured Afghans in the course of defending their freedom.

Every “child with a teddy-bear backpack separated from a parent” may reinforce the impression that America withdrew from Afghanistan too soon. Or every child killed in the course of a doomed counterinsurgency campaign may reinforce the impression that America withdrew far too late. It all depends on where one chooses to look.

The problem with the “imperial bias” of the media’s Afghanistan coverage is not that it has harmed Joe Biden’s approval rating. The problem is that it has compromised the Fourth Estate’s journalism and circumscribed its humanitarianism. One can reasonably argue that safeguarding the rights of Afghan women was worth the costs of prolonging armed conflict (costs that fell quite heavily on Afghan women). But one cannot reasonably leave those costs out of the discussion, or malign those who weigh them heavily as opponents of human rights. One can critically report on concrete failings in the Biden administration’s withdrawal plans. But one cannot presume Biden’s responsibility for every negative consequence that follows from ending a misbegotten war and deserve the title journalist. By privileging the victims of American military withdrawal over those of American military engagement — while presuming the U.S. president’s capacity to decisively shape events in foreign lands — the media has rendered itself objectively pro-war. In allowing personal attachments to dictate its humanitarian concerns, mainstream reporters have concentrated moral outrage on an injustice that the U.S. can’t resolve without resort to violence (the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan), while enabling mass indifference to a much larger injustice that the U.S. can drastically mitigate without killing anyone (the global shortfall of COVID-19 vaccines).

Until America’s bleeding-heart correspondents reckon with their field’s endemic biases, their reporting will routinely devolve into advocacy, if not rationalizations, for future bloodshed.
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Interesting.

We were told the media were owned by the left.
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Like the right has a monopoly on war-mongering.

RickDeckard · Aug 26, 2021

matthunter said: ↑

Billionaire Erik Prince is charging $6500 per seat to fly folk out. He claims this also covers costs in getting them to the airport, but still - very charitable.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/en...anistan_n_61269fb4e4b092664347e1f4?ri18n=true
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Arrest him for war profiteering.

matthunter · Aug 26, 2021

RickDeckard said: ↑

Arrest him for war profiteering.
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The guy runs a mercenary company. If they let him operate THAT, he's not getting charged for "private charter flights". But the Afghans are.

Rincewiend · Aug 26, 2021

I hate people...

Police shut down a small demonstration against a centre for refugees from Afghanistan in Ede late on Tuesday night.
The protest, in the army location of De Harskamp, was at first peaceful but then some 250 demonstrators reportedly began to sing nationalist songs, and set alight tyres.
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https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2021/08/police-shut-down-demonstration-against-afghan-refugee-centre/

RickDeckard · Aug 26, 2021

You know, when you started reading about what the British did in Afghanistan in the 1800's, it's absolutely appalling.

Winston Churchill was in a British army that invaded Afghanistan in 1897 and said: “After today we begin to burn villages. Every one. And all who resist will be killed without quarter. The Mohmands need a lesson, and there is no doubt we are a very cruel people.”
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This kind of sustained brutalisation of a society has consequences that last for generations. It's the case in Afghanistan and in a lot of other troubled places.

Damar · Aug 26, 2021

Great point being made about the media rendering itself objectively pro-war. As we know, the average American has a very short attention span. The reporting we’ve seen in the last few weeks resembles the irresponsible reporting that was so prevalent in 2002, 2003, etc.

Forbin · Aug 26, 2021

Suicide bomber just blew up one of the airport gates.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/26/asia/afghanistan-kabul-airport-blast-intl/index.html

spot261 · Aug 26, 2021

RickDeckard said: ↑

You know, when you started reading about what the British did in Afghanistan in the 1800's, it's absolutely appalling.

Winston Churchill was in a British army that invaded Afghanistan in 1897 and said: “After today we begin to burn villages. Every one. And all who resist will be killed without quarter. The Mohmands need a lesson, and there is no doubt we are a very cruel people.”
Click to expand...

This kind of sustained brutalisation of a society has consequences that last for generations. It's the case in Afghanistan and in a lot of other troubled places.
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There's no doubt they have reason to be mistrustful.

Paladin · Aug 26, 2021

Paladin said: ↑

America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has yet to cost our nation a single casualty.
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Oops.

ISIS just gave us a going away present. 4 U.S. Marines dead.

Forbin · Aug 26, 2021

4 US Marines dead, 3 wounded by the suicide bombers.
Civilian casualties not yet counted.

Edit:
The Taliban has condemned the bombings.

14thDoctor · Aug 26, 2021

Forbin said: ↑

Edit:
The Taliban has condemned the bombings.
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Dan Leach · Aug 26, 2021

ISIS K are the sworn enemy of the Taliban.
Yes them condemning this bombing is roll yours eyes ironic. But not surprising

14thDoctor · Aug 26, 2021

Dan Leach said: ↑

ISIS K are the sworn enemy of the Taliban.
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Maybe we should offer to help the Taliban rid their land of those dangerous terrorists.

Yes them condemning this bombing is roll yours eyes ironic. But not surprising
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Of course the Taliban are condemning it, they're the good cops. Not like ISIS K, those guys are bad cops.

Forbin · Aug 26, 2021

US military dead up to 10 now.

Lanzman · Aug 26, 2021

Now saying 12.

Chaos Descending · Aug 26, 2021

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