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Progress
In Iraq and Afghanistan. Sadly, the Bush administration seems to have succeeded in "Afghanizing" media coverage of Iraq, getting organizations to cut down on the number of Iraq-based journalists they employ and pushing stories about lethal attacks off the front page. After all, if a country falls into chaos in the desert and no one sees it on the television news, did it really happen?
August 1, 2004 | Permalink
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Comments
We are so fucked in Afghanistan.
So fucked.
Do you think they realize it?
Reading between the lines of that article, you can see the seeds of a major long-term disaster.
Posted by: praktike | Aug 1, 2004 11:31:30 AM
This has been the plan since April, hasn't it? Say everything is going great in both places, and keep the media from reporting anything negative until the elections. You can't really be surprised by now that most of the media operates as a Republican propaganda arm.
Posted by: Tim H. | Aug 1, 2004 11:46:57 AM
"A Taliban campaign to derail a voter registration drive for the Afghan presidential election in October has largely failed, with roughly 8 million of 10 million eligible voters defying Taliban death threats and registering. "
Isn't this the most important sentence in the entire article? Enough of this chicken little, defeatist bullshit. Things can always be better, in Des Moines as well as Afghanistan. The facts on the ground are that the Afghans are progressing in their opportunity to create for themselves a representative political and social stucture.
Posted by: Warthog | Aug 1, 2004 11:56:38 AM
The facts on the ground are that the Afghans are progressing in their opportunity to create for themselves a representative political and social stucture.
Whether it actually gets implemented outside of Kabul, where the warlords and the Taliban still rule the roost... doubtful.
The facts on the ground are that the election and the wielding of power in Afghanistan exist on very different planes of reality.
Posted by: ahem | Aug 1, 2004 12:35:43 PM
Warthog, I hate to burst your bubble, but this is all happytalk and nonsense.
The fact of the matter is that the current situation does not reflect the balance of power in the country, nor does it reflect the strategic interests of Pakistan, which tends to have its way in the country.
The bottom line is that we're propping up the same losers -- the Panjshiris -- that got their asses kicked out of Kabul back in the early 90s. Karzai is a Pashtun, but he's viewed as a sellout who will be wiped off the map as soon as we leave. There are several major warlords -- Khalis, Haqqani, Hekmatyar -- who have swung their "votes" to the Taliban and are amassing strength sub rosa. The Taliban itself was around 40,000 strong. We've got 18,000 fine soldiers and some wusses from NATO. Not enough.
As such, I believe neither the polls nor the 8 million figure, nor would they matter.
Posted by: praktike | Aug 1, 2004 1:10:37 PM
I'm reading this morning the NYT story about how things are going to hell in Afghanistan, and my husband asks me why poeple don't know this. I say that it is because most folks are getting their news from TV. If you get all your news from TV, there's no way you can be informed. Then I say, "Well, I'm just so relieved that our president is telling us that we have turned the corner." The TV news does cover that. My husband says, "What corner?" I say, "I don't know, but anyway, it's good to know."
By the way, the NYT is pushing the Newsweek small bump in the polls for Kerry story, too.
Posted by: janeboatler | Aug 1, 2004 3:36:40 PM
There is some good news coming out of Afghanistan today, reported by the U.N., through the Associated Press:
90 Percent of Afghans Registered to Vote:
"KABUL, Afghanistan - Nine out of 10 eligible Afghans have signed up for landmark October elections, the United Nations said Sunday, a resounding endorsement of a democratic experiment supposed to help Afghanistan turn its back on years of debilitating war.
Women and ethnic minorities are strongly represented among those registered for the first-ever direct vote for president. But parts of the south risk being left behind because of stepped-up attacks on election workers and Afghan and U.S. security forces.
First tallies since the eight-month registration drive began winding down on Saturday show that 8.7 million of an estimated 9.8 million eligible voters have collected ID cards for the Oct. 9 election. Forty-one percent of those registered were women.
"The participation is amazing," U.N. spokesman David Singh said. "There was a lot of skepticism about this process at the beginning, but the targets have been fulfilled.""
Posted by: SoCalJustice | Aug 1, 2004 3:55:11 PM
this is all happytalk and nonsense.
The Afghans are making good progress in establishing a representative government. Will it look like the USA? No. Is it still progress? Yes.
Posted by: Warthog | Aug 1, 2004 5:27:03 PM
For some only utopia tomorrow is an acceptable improvement. Anything less is complete failure. Never mind the actual improvement to people's lives. But if hating Bush is the priority then that's what you end up arguning.
Posted by: neil | Aug 1, 2004 5:55:28 PM
No, Warthog, the problem is that it looks too much like the USA.
Which is why there's going to be a major rumble.
Posted by: praktike | Aug 1, 2004 7:17:42 PM
"the Bush administration seems to have succeeded in "Afghanizing" media coverage of Iraq,"
Huh? How on *earth* can you blame the Bush administration for changing media coverage of Iraq?
aarrghh. This is just getting insane. I am sooo looking forward to when the election's over.
Posted by: stanley | Aug 1, 2004 7:22:48 PM
90 Percent of Afghans Registered to Vote:
See, you're just seeing this all wrong - to folks like Matthew and praktike, this is NOT "progress". "Progress" has only one measure - if it makes Bush look bad, it is "progress"; if it makes Bush look good (like this story does), it is the opposite of "progress".
This is how f*cked up the Bush-Haters like Matthew and praktike are - they don't view progress in terms of the national interest; they only view progress in terms of their maked partisan interests... whatever brings them and their cronies into power. Unfortunately, this unbelievably bad Bush Hated has infected almost the entirety of the Democrat Party.
Posted by: Al | Aug 1, 2004 10:37:41 PM
Whatever, Al.
The fact of the matter is this: the real source of power in Afghanistan is Pashtun warlords, backed by Pakistan.
They aren't playing ball, and are slowly gathering momentum.
That's the real problem.
Posted by: praktike | Aug 1, 2004 11:28:39 PM
The articles cited do very little to report what is going on (has gone on) in Afghanistan, and as noted by several, are nothing but "feel-good-happy-talk."
As far as the voter registration, what was blatantly neglected are the numbers of women killed by the Taliban. Women that were going house to house, village to village to register eligible women voters, that includes the Taliban blowing up a bus of election workers about 2 weeks ago. Bush & Co. supported an increase in women's rights in Afghanistan at the start of this military campaign, but when push came to shove, he backed off.
Some progress.
Posted by: CE Petro | Aug 2, 2004 11:18:02 AM
Man, I am so tired of this trivialization of what is an enormous and immensely complicated effort that this Administration is making in Afghanistan, Iraq and many other places that do not get the same attention.
How about fewer characterizations and more substantive discussion?
Posted by: Warthog | Aug 2, 2004 12:10:42 PM
I'm wondering how much of the voter thing is real. I could imagine it working out.
Like, if each warlord's loyal followers vote him in, and he gets legislative strength proportional to his armed strength, he might find it works better to negotiate with the other warlords than to fight it out. That would be good.
Or possibly the people might really care about their elected representatives, and when those representatives do things they want then they're ready to stand up for them against the warlords. The warlords are ruling by the consent of the governed too, but maybe people have real low expectations and voting might raise their expectation.
Or maybe the vote statistics are getting done corruptly like everything else, and the number of people signed up is nowhere near as many as they say, and it all looks like another stupid american trick to them.
I can see the registration people telling the warlords "The more people who register in your area, the more influence your area has on the government.". I could imagine warlords being overjoyed that they could sign up as many widows as they wanted as voters. And if the registration teams can't tell one woman from another....
It's too early to tell what's going on there. It looks very bad but there might be a chance that the voting stuff will make a difference, or maybe not. It's a conceptual difference that might impress afghans, maybe.
Posted by: J Thomas | Aug 2, 2004 9:17:37 PM
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