Of deteriorating governmental control in Afghanistan, Norman Solomon (Common Dreams, 9/8/09) says that "a stale witticism calls Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai 'the mayor of Kabul.' Now, not even." He points to the "corrupt, inept and--with massive election fraud--now illegitimate" administration as a "notable work product" of "those who believe in making war":

After 30 years, the results are in: a devastated city....

Meanwhile, a war-stoking mindset is replicating itself at the highest reaches of official Washington--even while polls tell us that the pro-war spin has been losing ground. For the U.S. public, dwindling support for the war in Afghanistan has reached a tipping point. But, as you've probably heard, the war must go on....

Visiting Kabul in late August, I met a lot of wonderful people, doing their best in the midst of grim and lethal realities. The city seemed thick with pessimism.

In comparison, the mainline political discourse about Afghanistan in the United States is blithe. A familiar duet has the news media and the White House asking the perennial question: "Can the war be won?"

The administration insists that the answer is yes. The press is mixed. But they’re both asking the wrong question.

According to Solomon, a question "more relevant, by far," though unlikely to come from corporate media, "would be to ask: Should the U.S. government keep destroying Afghanistan in order to 'save' it?" See FAIR's Action Alert: "Where Is the Afghanistan Debate?: When Public Support Slips, TV Packs in War Boosters" (8/25/09).

Noticing that "the New York Times used three square inches of newsprint on Tuesday to dispatch two U.S. Army soldiers under the headline 'Names of the Dead,'" Norman Solomon (Common Dreams, 7/1/09) points out how apparently "there wasn't enough room for any numbers, names or ages of Afghans who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations."

Having observed wartime media long enough to know that "that's the way routine death stories go," Solomon has also observed that "reporting on life is like that, and reporting on death is like that: even more so when the media lenses are ground with ideology, nationalism and economic convenience":

The conventional wisdom of press and state insists that the U.S. war effort must do more than go on--it must escalate--in the name of human decency. The political rhetoric in Washington is close to 100 percent humanitarian, while the new supplemental infusion of U.S. spending for Afghanistan is 90 percent military.

Inside a contrived news frame, destruction can nurture life. In media myth, we can be well-informed and ignorant of war's realities. Along the way, the benefits of numbed quiescence and muffled dissent are vastly overrated.

Listen to Solomon's recent appearance on the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Norman Solomon on Obama's Inauguration" (1/23/09).