Buried on page A6 of my New York Times this morning was the latest account of mass death from American drone aircraft in Pakistan. The toll currently stands at 60, at least some of which are certainly civilians. On Monday a story about our tough new policy on airstrike restrictions made the front page. That story, part of the ‘President Obama is bringing change to Afghanistan’ genre, has gotten a lot more play recently and the relative placement of these two stories is just the latest small example. (While there are editorial deadline issues at play here, the details of the current attack are still murky, this isn’t an isolated incident.) The Afghan War in general, and our airstrikes in particular, have been a consistently under- or unreported. As of this writing the word “Pakistan” does not appear on the home page of CNN or MSNBC. Fox News has a link to an AP story at the bottom of its homepage (it’s the very last story in the World section). The airstrike story isn’t anywhere near the front page of the websites of The Washington Post or The New York Times.
None of the above is exactly news; American journalism in general has shown shockingly little interest in the Afghan War the last seven years. But it melds rather disturbingly with another long term trend in these matters. The initial reporting about yesterday’s strike often mentions that several top Taliban commanders were killed, but not Baitullah Mehsud, the main guy we’re gunning for. It has shades of that idiotic “find the evil mastermind” policy that permeated the action movie obsessed Bush Administration. How many times did Bush the Younger announce that we’d captured or killed al-Qaeda’s #2 man? Remember how all the violence in Iraq was attributable to al-Zarqawi? He was killed three years ago. This Baitullah Mehsud guy is probably a nasty asshole, but he’s not John Connor. Killing him won’t end the Taliban and killing innocent people while trying to get to him sure seems counterproductive.
This is about the part where I’m obligated to point out that yes, indeed, it is vastly better to have Obama and his crowd than the zealous crusaders of Bush the Younger or whatever cigar chompers John McCain would’ve installed. It’s very much preferable to have people who are not certifiably insane running the show. But if the show itself is insane . . . well, then there’s only so much they can do, isn’t there?
That has been the basis of much of the criticism Obama has taken from the left over his decision to escalate the Afghan War. Better leadership of a doomed project doesn’t change the fact that it’s a doomed project. As Tom Engelhardt pointed out last week the odds are very good that this war will still be going in two years when it will be a full decade long. Think about that, a decade of war; of a war that barely rates mentioning because its continuation has become a given in our political discourse.
In the short term (i.e. the next 2-3 years) there isn’t much that can be done. Obama’s plan, such as he has one, appears to be to get us the fuck out of Iraq and hope that an undistracted and focused US military can bring something akin to order to Afghanistan (and by extension the government-less parts of Pakistan). It’s an open question as to whether or not it will work. And in the meantime we’ll continue ignoring it, because that’s what we do.
