More Marjah Madness

One of the things that most disturbs me about my job is how otherwise thoughtful people somehow manage to jump off the Reason Train short of Plausible Junction, taking a sizable number of otherwise sane bloggers with them.

Case in point this week is Gareth Porter at Anti-War.com, who has somehow managed to convince himself and a bunch of people repeating his post that briefings and press accounts describing the rural community of Marjah as a "town" or "city" was somehow a misinformation campaign by the evil militarists of 40-plus nations who are committed to eroding their political support by duping the public into extending an unpopular war in the hopes of killing as many brown people as possible. Or something like that. A search for clear motives tends to muddle an otherwise pristine paranoia.

Gareth's argument is supported by an ISAF official "who asked not to be identified" confirming that Marjah is a "rural community" -- which adds to the air of a secret plot revealed. Except there's no secret. The official was me, and I didn't ask to be quoted anonymously.

The rest of my dismay is in my email to Gareth, quoted here in full:

Gareth,

I swore to myself I'd just drop this, but your earnestness on a fairly trivial matter is irresistible. You do in fact have small cities or large towns roughly the size and population of Marjah as the Marines described it. Not normally where I come from in Pennsylvania, true. But my wife's hometown -- Lawton, Oklahoma, home of the US Army's Fort Sill -- is described by its residents as a "city" of 93,000 people spread out over about 195 square kilometers--in other words, almost exactly like Marjah in size and population density. And typing in "town 200 square kilometers" in Google, I clicked right through to Shuangshui "Town" in Guangdong Province, China (about the same size and population of Lawton) and the "town" of Markham, Ontario, Canada (which really should be a "city" if there's a definable standard for the term, since it has more than twice the population of Lawton spread over 212 square kilometers).

I'm sure all these locations are guilty of "information war" in the sense of civic boosterism, but I also think it demonstrates that the terms have no precise meaning and therefore don't imply some kind of malicious intent when used with respect to Marjah.

At this point, I think any further objections will only serve to fuel greater suspicions of some kind of linguistic conspiracy on your part. I just have to say that for someone who strikes me as a very thoughtful guy, you've done your readers a disservice by creating a pseudo-issue when so many real issues about Afghanistan are under-reported.