Tomgram: The Bush Administration's Afghan Spring
Drugs, Bases, and Jails
*The Bush administration's Afghan Spring* By Tom Engelhardt
If Iraq has been the disaster zone of Bush foreign policy, Afghanistan is still generally thought of as its success story -- to the extent that anyone in our part of the world thinks about that country at all any more. Before the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan experienced a relative flood of American attention. It was, after all, the liberation moment. Possibly the most regressive and repressive regime on Earth had just bitten the dust. The first blow had been struck against the 9/11 attackers. The media rushed in -- and they were in a celebratory mood.
As Bush administration efforts quickly turned Iraqwards, however, so did media attention. By June 2003, just two months after the invasion of Iraq, the American Journalism Review <http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3815> tells us, "only a handful of reporters remained in the struggling country on a full-time basis, while other news organizations floated correspondents in and out when time and resources permitted." More recently, just /Newsweek/, the /Washington Post/, the Associated Press, and possibly the /New York Times/ (which seems to have Carlotta Gall back on the beat) consider Afghanistan -- the devastated land that has been the crucible for, and breeding ground for, so many of the crises and problems of our era -- important enough to have full-time reporters assigned to it.
There was a burst of media attention last October for the Afghan presidential election, won by Hamid Karzai. It was a demonstration of something we've seen since in Iraq and elsewhere -- that people everywhere feel understandable enthusiasm at the thought of determining their own fates with their own hands (however limited their ability to do so may be in reality). It was, in fact, with the Afghanistan election that the Bush administration's "Arab Spring" blitz, its present success story about spreading democracy worldwide, with an emphasis on the Middle East, really began.
Since then, what news Americans have gotten about Afghanistan has consisted largely of infrequent reports on the deaths of small numbers <http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-afghan28.html> of American troops there; statements, interviews, and press conferences by various American generals or officials on the ever-improving situation in the country, or on the Pentagon's <http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1446026,00.html> sudden willingness to tackle the drug problem there; pieces on "abuses" of Afghan prisoners by American troops or CIA agents; or statements about how we must stay in the country until a struggling new democracy truly takes root in that impoverished land. Throw in the odd propaganda visit by an American dignitary and you more or less have Afghan news as it exists in this country. After all, in most of Afghanistan there are no reporters. Even the 5,000 European troops guarding the capital, Kabul, under the NATO banner have but recently begun to make it beyond Kabul's bounds. The Americans alone have given themselves the run of the country and they have generally preferred to keep the news to themselves.
(full: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2303)