Watchmen: The Buzkashi Blues

The national sport of Afghanistan, buzkashi, involves riders wrestling over the corpse of a headless calf or goat. The game is therefore the perfect metaphor for recent press coverage of Afghanistan.

No lover of language can fail to appreciate the allure of good combat reporting. No lover of freedom can fail to acknowledge the value of a skeptical press. In Afghanistan today, though, we're seeing too much of a good thing: chasing conflict for the sake of writing breathless accounts of conflict, or enshrining skepticism above any constructive virtue to prove to the world that you are nobody's fool. Like buzkashi, the rewards for these current modes of journalistic sport are money, the acclaim of your peers and, well, something about as valuable to the future of Afghanistan as a headless carcass.

It's a tenet of General McChrystal's approach to counterinsurgency that the operational environment is inherently complex. A lack of any fixed point of reference beyond conflict and doubt, however, makes most journalistic descriptions of the operational environment needlessly complex:

A daring attack in Kabul heralds a resurgent Taliban. Roll the tape. Boom! Bang!
Bang! Except what's shown but never described faithfully is a botched suicide attack in the capital of a war-torn country -- foiled by allegedly inept security forces, and roughly equal in both its grim inevitability and its grisly outcome to any college-campus shooting spree.

It's time to face the facts in Afghanistan. General McChrystal is a fearless truthteller for reinforcing my own doubts in his initial assessment of August 2009, so we know he is lying when he expresses a scintilla of optimism five months later. You can also rest assured that the civilian effort in Afghanistan is a shambles, but any effort by NATO to strengthen it must reflect European resentment of American leadership.

This is how many of us spend our days here, fighting for the honor of dragging the body of truth around in the dust of Afghanistan. But don't worry. It's only a game.