Afghanistan writer Ann Jones has an essay on TomDispatch (7/16/09) in which she calls The Fixer "the best documentary I've seen on Afghanistan--so good it's hard to imagine a better one." Her description of a scene she found particularly moving demonstrates the harsh reality of unembedded reporting, begetting a corporate media output that merits her headline, "Everything That Happens in Afghanistan Is Based on Lies or Illusions":

It is 2006, late in the year. A reporter stands on a rocky hillside near the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan and points a wobbly camera at dark-clad gunmen ranged at a distance before him. They've wrapped the tails of their turbans to mask their faces. They carry their Kalashnikovs at the ready. The reporter shouts a question: "Does the Taliban receive support from Pakistan?"

As the camera jumps about to find the Talib who is speaking, a translator voices his answer: "Yes, Pakistan stands with us. On the other side of the border, we have our offices there. Some people in Pakistan is supporting us and the government of Pakistan does not say anything to us. They provide us with everything."

The reporter--Christian Parenti of the Nation magazine--has his story. For years, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has charged Pakistan with backing the Taliban, while Pakistan's then-President Musharraf denied it, and officials of the Bush administration looked the other way. Now, Parenti has the word of armed Taliban. This is the kind of story a foreign correspondent can't get without a fixer; that is, a local guy who knows the language, the local politics, the protocols of custom--and how to arrange a meeting like this in the middle of nowhere with men who might kill you.

Having beaten a hasty retreat from "an approaching reconnaissance plane," a relieved Parenti smiles and "describes the man sitting beside him--Ajmal Nashqbandi, a 24-year-old Pashtun from Kabul--as 'the best fixer in Afghanistan.'" But Jones tells us that viewers "already know what Parenti doesn't (because filmmaker Ian Olds has told us up front before the titles even hit the screen): Soon the fixer will be dead, murdered by the Taliban."

The latest segment to be made available online (7/7/09) from Robert Greenwald's Rethink Afghanistan documentary features the president of the Global Fund for Women Kavita Ramdas challenging U.S. media tropes about improved women's conditions since the U.S. invasion: "The perception of the women of Afghanistan having been severely oppressed only under the regime of the Taliban, and then having been freed by the united States' military intervention in 2001, is a false perception."

The film continues:

Ann Jones, author Kabul in Winter: We got reports back that indeed that had been accomplished and the women had thrown off their burqas and gone back to school and gone back to work and things were wonderful for women. This is complete mythology. It didn't happen.

Member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan [having to speak with her image blurred for her own protection]: Now the cases of violence against women are more than the Taliban time. There is 23 rape cases in two months in North Afghanistan. There is a lot of violence against women in West Afghanistan.

As Ramdas describes "rape, pillage, plunder, the abduction of young girls, the threatening of schoolteachers," a November 2008 BBC report narrator vocalizes that which cannot be spoken in U.S. media: "Girls attacked with acid for daring to go to school. Despite initial gains, women's rights, and even women themselves, are increasingly under attack."

Llisten to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Robert Greenwald on Rethink Afghanistan" (5/1/09).