Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Is Afghanistan Getting Sufficient Coverage?

I’ve been writing about how Iraq is rapidly becoming the forgotten war, illustrated by this graph:

A corollary question is whether Afghanistan is getting the appropriate level of coverage, considering the rapidly deteriorating situation there. An LA Times editorial posits a Bush/Obama parallel:

The scenes and statistics are hauntingly familiar: a videotape of an American soldier held hostage, scared that he won’t return to the family he loves; two fighter jets downed this week and four U.S. troops killed by a roadside bomb, making July the deadliest month yet for Western forces in the country; British support flagging as losses mount; and a rise in civilian casualties alienating the very people the troops are there to protect. This sounds an awful lot like President Bush’s war in Iraq, but in fact it is President Obama’s war in Afghanistan, where the number of foreign troops has nearly doubled this year to 60,000, most of them American.

I’m dubious about the effort to reframe Afghanistan as “Obama’s war” - like so many other problems, he inherited it from Bush/Cheney. Still, it’s now the Dems’ responsibility and I’m interested in how the news media and online commentariat treat it. Among progressives, many of whom supported military action there and are concerned about the treatment of women by the Taliban, there’s less unified opposition than there was against the Iraq invasion. Consequently (and sadly), without the same kind of intense anti-war activity we saw with Iraq, it may take even worse violence and bloodshed to place Afghanistan squarely on the front page.

It’s worth noting that there’s a growing movement on the left to “Rethink Afghanistan,” led by filmmaker and activist Robert Greenwald:

Topics: obama, iraq, bush, afghanistan