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.

New York Times London bureau chief John Burns has joined other high-profile reporters (e.g., CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan) in denouncing fellow journalist Michael Hastings. Hastings' Rolling Stone expose prompted the dismissal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was relieved of his Afghanistan command following Hastings' revelations that he and some of his aides had used insubordinate language in discussing Obama administration superiors.

Appearing on Hugh Hewitt's conservative national radio program on July 6, the Times' former Baghdad bureau chief responded to Hewitt's question about how the Rolling Stone story had affected relations between journalists and military officials:

I think it's very unfortunate that it has impacted, and will impact so adversely, on what had been pretty good military/media relations. I think, you know, well, this will be debated down the years, the whole issue as to how it came about that Rolling Stone had that kind of access.

My unease, if I can be completely frank about this, is that from my experience of traveling and talking to generals--McChrystal, Petraeus and many, many others over the past few years--is that the old on-the-record/off-the-record standard doesn't really meet the case, which is to say that by the very nature of the time you spend with the generals--the same could be said to be true of the time that a reporter spends with anybody in the public eye--there are moments which just don't fit that formula.

There are long, informal periods traveling on helicopters over hostile territory with the generals chatting over their headset, bunking down for the night side-by-side on a piece of rough-hewn concrete. You build up a kind of trust. It's not explicit, it's just there.

And my feeling is that it's the responsibility of the reporter to judge in those circumstances what is fairly reportable, and what is not, and to go beyond that, what it is necessary to report.

Appearing two days later on PBS's NewsHour (7/8/10), Burns reiterated his criticism, and suggested that journalists ought to see to it that the Rolling Stone debacle wasn't repeated: "I think we in the press have to really look at cases like this and say, to what extent can we change the way we behave in such a way that this sort of thing doesn't happen again?"

By embarrassing the brass, Hastings harmed "military/media relations"--and presumably, in Burns' view, harmed journalism. But if the ideal of journalism is to serve the public by providing information to help them more fully understand events of the day, and not just to cultivate cozy relations with the powerful, it's hard to understand exactly what Burns is defending. Indeed, a review of U.S. journalism produced before the Rolling Stone writer mucked things up, when the warmer media/military relations championed by Burns prevailed, does not strike one as a model of public service.

There were the adoring profiles of McChrystal by journalists who wisely refrained from going "beyond what is necessary to report." As media critic and Hastings supporter Charles Kaiser documents on his website Full Court Press (7/2/10), "virtually every profile of McChrystal had either sharply downplayed the defects in his CV or ignored them altogether, including the general's central role in the cover-up of the killing of former football star Pat Tillman by friendly fire." Indeed, a little-noticed aspect of Hastings' expose was his reporting on unflattering aspects of McChrystal's career, including the Tillman cover-up and an Abu Ghraib-like torture scandal at another detention facility in Iraq that McChrystal supervised (FAIR Media Advisory, 6/25/10.)

Burns and other Hastings critics talk up the need to build trust between journalists and military officials--a questionable goal in itself, but all the more so when the resulting "trust" really just means journalists will continue to believe military officials who have repeatedly misled them. Take reporting on U.S. strikes that were ultimately determined to have killed and injured Afghan civilians. The rule for reporting such casualties is to take official U.S. denials at face value, to attempt to discredit Afghan sources who disagree, and to portray admissions of wrong-doing as "PR setbacks." The pattern was described last year in a FAIR Media Advisory (5/11/09):

Early reports of a massive U.S. attack on civilians in western Afghanistan last week (5/5/09) hewed to a familiar corporate media formula, stressing official U.S. denials and framing the scores of dead civilians as a PR setback for the White House's war effort.

It's a pattern that has frequently "fit the formula" at Burns' own New York Times (FAIR Action Alert, 1/9/02).

The habit of believing Pentagon sources even when they have  proven to be unreliable not only stretches the notion of trust beyond the breaking point, it tramples on the infinitely more important relationship between the reporter and the public.

Good relations between journalists and Pentagon officials have also paid off nicely in the way corporate journalism has truncated "debates" about what should be done in Afghanistan, almost entirely excluding from discussion the majority American view in favor of withdrawal. Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria (9/14/09) unwittingly summed up the findings of FAIR's 2009 study of the Afghanistan debate presented on the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, stating in his lead: "It is time to get real about Afghanistan. Withdrawal is not a serious option."

The corporate media whose deference to the military has failed the public so often in the course of the Afghan War did so again in reporting on the Rolling Stone article. Media discussions (including Burn's and Hewitt's) missed Hastings most significant findings. As a FAIR Media Advisory, "Media Missing the McChrystal Point" (6/25/10), pointed out,

The real significance of the piece is in the criticism--voiced by soldiers in Afghanistan and military experts--of the war itself. "Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it's going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm," wrote Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings.

It's no mystery why Hastings dire reporting on the status of the war failed to make it into the media discussion. But in accurately reporting truths likely to anger the powerful, Hastings Rolling Stone expose upheld the best traditions of journalism. By the same token, his detractors, including Burns, have shown themselves as opponents of those traditions and perhaps more than a little confused about who they work for.

It's not that surprising that some in the corporate media, driven either by admiration for ousted Gen. Stanley McChrystal or disdain for Rolling Stone's scoop, have rushed in to defend or explain away his behavior. In Saturday's Washington Post (6/26/10), anonymous military sources tell the newspaper that the comments from McChrystal and his staff were supposed to be off the record:

The command's own review of events, said the official, who was unwilling to speak on the record, found "no evidence to suggest" that any of the "salacious political quotes" in the article were made in situations in which ground rules permitted Hastings to use the material in his story.

The Post Karen DeYoung and Rajiv Chandrasekaran seem to think some of this military complaining is persuasive. They report that Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings took "minor liberties with the facts," based on the Post getting their hands on the fact-checking emails between Rolling Stone and the military. The magazine asked if McChrystal indeed had voted for Obama--which is something he told Hastings. The military handler responded, "IMPORTANT--PLEASE DO NOT INCLUDE THIS--THIS IS PERSONAL AND PRIVATE INFORMATION AND UNRELATED TO HIS JOB. IT WOULD BE INAPPROPRIATE TO SHARE."

Rolling Stone published this fact, in spite of the all-caps warning that it would be "INAPPROPRIATE TO SHARE."  But how does reporting a fact someone else doesn't want reported qualify as taking "liberties with the facts"?

One gets the impression that many corporate media figures believe the real problem here is Michael Hastings. The right-wing Media Research Center has singled out CBS reporter Lara Logan for approval for her comments on CNN's Reliable Sources. Logan seems to believe the military's argument that the exchanges were meant to be off the record ("Something doesn't add up here"), in part because she's apparently not had the same experience with McChrystal and his staff: "I know these people. They never let their guard down like that."

Logan shows most clearly where she's coming from with this:

I mean, the question is, really, is what General McChrystal and his aides are doing so egregious, that they deserved to end a career like McChrystal's? Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has.

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."