Newsweek (7/17/11) begins a piece on David Petraeus becoming CIA director with an account of how he got the "short-term job done" after he was named commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan:

Now, after 13 months, the 58-year-old Petraeus is coming home to head the Central Intelligence Agency. Since that day in the Oval Office, hopeful signs have begun appearing that he may have performed the seemingly impossible task of stabilizing the Afghan battlefield.

The article, by reporter John Barry, doesn't provide much detail on what these "hopeful signs" are, but Afghan civilian deaths are up 15 percent in the first half of 2011 vs. the first half of 2010.  (Maybe that's why an Afghan media executive cited in the piece contends that "not everyone in Afghanistan fully appreciates what Petraeus has achieved in his year there.")

As for U.S. troops and their non-Afghan allies, 705 of them were killed in the 13 months Petraeus was in charge of Afghanistan--as opposed to 725 in the 13 months before that. Other than that, I'm sure he had a great war.

Washington Post Dana Milbank (3/19/11) skewers the Republicans for their "emergency meeting" to defund NPR:

This particular emergency involved the lower end of the FM radio dial. Republicans, in an urgent budget-cutting maneuver, were voting to cut off funding for National Public Radio. All $5 million of it--or one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the federal budget.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ran the numbers and calculated the impact this emergency measure would have on government spending: "No effect."

One of the rules of corporate media balance is that if you criticize Republicans, you have to find an example of similar buffoonery on the other side. Milbank finds that in an effort to end the nine-year-old Afghan War, which nearly two-thirds of Americans now say is not worth fighting:

Democrats would have been in a good position to point out the Republicans' lack of seriousness, except they were engaged in their own trivial pursuit. On Thursday, the same day the Republicans were doing battle with Diane Rehm, the House was also debating a bill by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) ordering full withdrawal from Afghanistan by year’s end.

Milbank explains: "Neither a vindictive slap at public broadcasting nor a pell-mell pullout from Afghanistan would be good policy," though in the end he gives the Democrats more credit for opposing majority opinion on the war:

In the end, the Democrats proved somewhat more adult in restraining impulses. Party leaders opposed Kucinich's Afghanistan pullout plan as irresponsible, and most Democrats voted against it.

Well, thank goodness someone in Washington is being a grown up.

The desire to not debate the Afghan War seems to be a popular one at the Post. Today Fred Hiatt (3/21/11) cheers the fact that David Petraeus' Congressional appearances on the Afghan War were free of rancor--unlike his 2007 testimony on the Iraq War:

At a time when our political system is said to be incapable of rising above poisonous partisanship to promote the national interest, Gen. David Petraeus’s visit to Capitol Hill last week was instructive.

Hiatt adds:

Obama's escalation, when 73 percent of Americans want substantial numbers of troops brought home, would seem to open fertile ground to Republicans. But from their leaders on down, they haven't sought to plow there. In this instance at least, politics really has stopped at the water's edge.

For the Post, it seems, democracy is supposed to stop at the water's edge.

David Ignatius of the Washington Post (12/29/10):

I've seen Petraeus give many briefings over the years, and it's a bit like watching a magician at work. Even though you've seen the trick before, and you know the patter, you still get mesmerized. He has the ability to make people believe the impossible might be doable, after all.

That sounds bad, but then I remembered this from ABC's Martha Raddatz (6/23/10):

A warrior and a scholar, Petraeus is sometimes jokingly referred to as a water walker, since almost everything he touches seems to turn to gold.

Joke's on us, I guess.

USA Today had a piece yesterday (8/5/10) about new rules of engagement issued in Afghanistan by Afghan War commander Gen. David Petraeus. The new rules--much like the old rules--"are aimed at limiting civilian casualties," the paper's Jim Michaels reports in its own voice, explaining:

At the heart of counterinsurgency doctrine is the principle that winning over the population is the key to defeating insurgents. Civilian casualties can alienate the population.

That's the surviving population, presumably.

USA Today doesn't quote anyone skeptical of the Pentagon's claim that not killing civilians is a top priority, instead reprinting the official assertion of good intentions without comment: "We must continue--indeed, redouble--our efforts to reduce the loss of innocent civilian life to an absolute minimum."

Such deference is not, of course, extended to the official enemy, which as it happens recently released its own rules regarding protection of civilians:

The update comes as the Taliban's top leader also issued guidance aimed at limiting civilian casualties. The allied command dismissed Mullah Mohammed Omar's guidelines, surfacing last month, as propaganda.

"Mullah Omar's new directive has done nothing to protect the Afghan people from further harm," Brig. Gen. Josef Blotz, a military spokesman, was quoted in the statement.

"This is either a smoke screen to repair the Taliban's well-earned reputation for brutality, or insurgent groups are simply ignoring their leader," he said.

The United Nations has said insurgents in Afghanistan have caused more civilian casualties than international and Afghan government troops.

Since Omar's document was released, insurgents have killed 43 Afghan civilians and wounded 65, according to the allied command in Kabul.

The article lacks any statistics on how many Afghan civilians have been killed by the U.S. and its allies. According to estimates made by the U.N., Human Rights Watch, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Watch and other observers, at least 5,568 noncombatants were directly killed in U.S.-led military actions in the first nine years of the war. In 2009, when Petraeus predecessor Gen. Stanley McChrystal issued the rules ostensibly  protecting civilians, the U.N. reports that there were nevertheless 596 civilians killed by the U.S. and its allies, making it a more or less typical year.  Since these figures did not appear in the USA Today report, there was no call for a quote wondering whether such rules were a "smoke screen" or whether they were simply being ignored by troops on the ground.

The lesson of USA Today's article is clear: The intentions of official enemies are to be judged by their actions, whereas the actions of one's own government are to be judged on what it proclaims its intentions to be.

The Washington Post (6/23/10)  allows an anonymous voice inside the White House to spill the beans on the decision to replace Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus:

Said a senior administration official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations: "It's as seamless as it could be, not only in terms of operations but also because you put someone in who's widely respected. No one is going to doubt that he's the right guy for the job."

Indeed!

There's been a discussion (some of it neatly summarized on the Daily Show) of elite journalists' reaction to the explosive comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staffers to Rolling Stone freelancer Michael Hastings. One admission came via a Politico story, captured by NYU's Jay Rosen (6/24/10):

And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.

Rosen notes that this line in the Politico piece was subsequently removed, perhaps because it revealed too much:

Think about what the Politico is saying: an experienced beat reporter is less of a risk for a powerful figure like McChrystal because an experienced beat reporter would probably not want to "burn bridges" with key sources by telling the world what happens when those sources let their guard down.

This is revealing, perhaps, but completely unsurprising. Journalists have been admitting  to this sort of thing for years. Take one example (cited in FAIR's Extra! Update, 12/01) from an American University forum (10/1/01) where PBS correspondent Ray Suarez was asked about the failure to pose difficult questions to certain elite guests:

Well, yeah, access is like oxygen when you're a reporter. And if you're going to do something I guess that's going to jeopardize access in the future, you better be pretty sure that this person who is going to perceive what you are about to do to them as burning them is someone that you can do without in the future after you burn them. That's a tough straddle. It shouldn't be, but it is.

For an example of how a beat reporter normally operates, take ABC Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz's assessment of Gen. David Petraeus (Nightline, 6/23/10):

A warrior and a scholar, Petraeus is sometimes jokingly referred to as a water walker, since almost everything he touches seems to turn to gold.

Or recall the days when Donald Rumsfeld was considered a rock star by the Washington press corps. FAIR's Steve Rendall ran down the worst of that here:

"Sixty-nine years old, and you're America's stud," Tim Russert told Rumsfeld when he interviewed him on NBC's Meet the Press (1/20/02); Larry King informed him that "you now have this new image called sex symbol" (CNN's Larry King Live, 12/06/01). Fox News' Jim Angle (12/11/01) called him "a babe magnet for the 70-year-old set."

"I love you, Donald," Margaret Carlson announced on CNN's Capital Gang (12/23/01), where the Time magazine columnist appears regularly in the role of left-of-center pundit. Carlson's Time magazine colleague, veteran defense correspondent Mark Thompson, told the Chicago Tribune (10/22/01), "Although he has not told us very much, he has been like a father figure."

With Gen. David Petraeus back in the media spotlight after being tapped to take control of the Afghanistan war following General Stanley McChrystal's fall from grace, the corporate media are trumpeting the "successful" surge in Iraq (Extra, 9/10/08) that Petraeus oversaw and are looking to him as the man to turn around the Afghan war.

Columnist David Ignatius (Washington Post, 6/24/10) writes:

Gen. David Petraeus didn't sign on as the new Afghanistan commander because he expects to lose.

That's the boldest aspect of President Obama's decision: He has put a troubled Afghanistan campaign in the hands of a man who bent what looked like failure in Iraq toward an acceptable measure of success. Obama has doubled down on his bet, much as George W. Bush did with his risky surge of troops in Iraq under Petraeus' command.

Similarly, NBC (6/23/10) reports that the White House and the Pentagon are "hoping that by enacting this stunning change in leadership, by putting somebody like General Petraeus in charge, the one who engineered that successful surge operation in Iraq, that it could buy them some badly needed time."

But as Middle East expert Juan Cole (6/24/10) notes, Iraq is hardly a success story.  Over three months after Iraqi elections, their parliament remains deadlocked (Reuters, 6/24/10).  Violence is a daily reality (New York Times, 6/24/10), and protests have broken out denouncing Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for failing to deliver on basic services like working electricity (Reuters, 6/21/10).

Cole writes that, while there has been a decrease in violence compared to the height of the Sunni/Shiite civil war in Iraq, the surge was not the main reason for the decline in fighting:

The main reason for decrease in the virulence of the civil war (it is not over) was that the Shiites succeeded in ethnically cleansing the Sunnis from Baghdad. Based on U.S. military and NGO statistics, on patterns of ambient light from West Baghdad visible by satellite, on the on-the-ground investigations of journalists like AP's Hamza Hendawi, and on subsequent voting patterns, I don’t think Baghdad is now more than 10-15 percent Sunni, whereas it was probably about half and half Sunni and Shiite at the time of Bush's invasion in 2003.

Also missing from the "surge turned around the Iraq War" trope is any discussion of firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's role in the reduction of violence.  While acknowledging that extra U.S. troops did play a role in the reduction of violence, a February 2008 International Crisis Group study states that "the dramatic decline in bloodshed in Iraq...is largely due to Muqtada al-Sadr's August 2007 unilateral ceasefire."

And as Cole notes, Iraq is not Afghanistan:

The Shiite victory in the Civil War was thus absolutely crucial as an Iraqi social-history background for what success Petraeus' policies had.

No such major social-historical change has occurred in Afghanistan or is likely to. The Taliban and other insurgents primarily spring from the Pashtun ethnic group that predominates in the east and southwest of the country. Pashtuns probably make up about 42 percent of Afghanistan’s some 34 million people. Pashtun clans provided the top political leadership to Afghanistan from the 18th century, through the Durrani monarchy, and they look down on the northern Tajik and Hazarah ethnic groups (who speak dialects of Persian). Although probably only 20-30 percent of Afghan Pashtuns view the Taliban favorably, more may admire the Taliban as a group that stands up for Afghanistan's independence from the Western nations now occupying it.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are complex and multifaceted.  But don't expect corporate media to throw nuance into the debate; instead, look forward to more pronouncements like this one from David Gergen, a CNN political analyst (6/23/10):  "[President Obama]...put in place the best general we have right now and a man who turned around the war in Iraq and possibly can turn around this war in Afghanistan, who can take over without losing momentum."