x Conrad Fink Morris Chair of Newspaper Strategy and Management Professor of Journalism Grady College of Journamlism and Mass Communication |
MICHAEL F. ADAMS • KAREN HOLBROOK • GEORGE BENSON • BETTY JEAN CRAIGE • CONRAD FINK • JAMES COBB • TIM BARTHOLOW
Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Wednesday, October 24, 2001.
Fink: With only filtered, arm's-length war coverage, public should be worried
Late one sweltering night, deep in South Vietnam's swampy Delta, I squeezed into an armored personnel carrier for a briefing on how, in a few hours, men would die. At dawn, a South Vietnamese battalion and its American advisers would attack a Vietcong unit a few miles away, and into my reporter's notebook went all the details. I saw the maps, the order of battle -- I was in the huddle as the quarterback, a tense, young U.S. captain, called the play. And there, in the dull glow of a battle lamp and in that particular dank odor of men in combat, grew a closeness, a trust between soldiers and reporter.
That was 1962. Now, fast-forward to last week in Washington, D.C. This time, we see on television that the briefing is in a spacious auditorium, brightly lighted and air conditioned. The briefing officer, freshly showered and shaven, is a well-rehearsed, confident four-star general. But he delivers only a few sketchy, highly sanitized details of a raid launched -- and already concluded -- by U.S. Army Rangers thousands of miles away, in Afghanistan. This time, there is no closeness, no trust -- only the military and press stiff-leggedly circling each other, bristling with wariness.
What happened to that trust between military and press, so strong in World War II, Korea and early Vietnam? Importantly, what does its disappearance mean for you, the newspaper reader, radio listener, television viewer?
It's easy to trace the disappearance of trust. Although nobody ever proved a single soldier was killed in Vietnam by news coverage, military officers and civilian policy-makers came out of that war convinced that reporting -- graphic, bloody, unrelenting -- undercut support back home for the war and forced U.S. withdrawal. For their part, reporters grew cynical over obvious disparities between Washington's claims of success in Vietnam and the failures they saw with troops in the field.
Then came major official evasions, distortions and lies that, when revealed, embarrassed officialdom, angered reporters and demonstrated to you, the public, how dangerous it is for policy-makers to operate in secrecy. President Johnson, we now know, used what may -- or may not -- have been a minor battle in the Gulf of Tonkin to pull Congress and the public deeper into the war. President Nixon, in a later but not unrelated scandal, looked us straight in the eyes and told us he wasn't a crook, a claim that didn't stand up well. President Reagan talked one foreign policy game and played another under the table. He later said he involved us in a Latin American civil war because that was in our nation's best interest. Only he couldn't share with us the details.
Which is precisely where we are today on Afghanistan -- especially clueless on what really is happening but vaguely aware that major decisions are being made in our name in secret. And that's why you, the media consumer, must be very alert.
It's not only correspondents who are prevented from learning first-hand what's happening in and around Afghanistan. You are too. It's not only reporters who are asked to sit quietly while crucial decisions are made for our nation's future. You are thus outside the information circle, too. Be aware you're getting only superficial coverage from reporters who are being fed a very sparse news diet built, in the name of patriotism, around those sanitized briefings in Washington. You're not getting much operative detail from reporters restricted to filing dispatches not from the battlefield but, rather, from an aircraft carrier somewhere ''in the Arabian Sea'' or a transport plane thousands of feet above the action.
Mission security and the safety of our troops are Washington's arguments for arm's-length dealing with the press. Nobody can argue with protecting our troops. And everybody, reporters included, realizes new technology changes things. Even innocent cell phone calls could alert listeners throughout the world to reporters' exact positions and, of course, the location of troops they're covering. Crank up a laptop these days and anybody, enemy included, can come on line. But working out ground rules for use of such technology should be no more difficult than the military and press agreeing, for example, on how reporters were to use the old-fashioned telegraph to inform the American public but not the enemy in World War I and II.
So far, reporters on the Afghanistan story generally are accepting Washington's information hold-down. Our polls tell us you, the public, agree. But you should be as unhappy about this as are reporters. Seldom in recent memory have you been kept so in the dark about major involvements by your country overseas.
And do understand that it's not simply sensitive tactical information -- where company B is dug in for the night -- that's being withheld from you. Strategic moves and alliance building -- political and policy decisions of likely long-lasting nature -- are being decided out of sight. Even our best journalists are unable to provide you with the details, so you better start your own winnowing and sifting of bits and pieces floating out of Washington. You might ask this: Are we being committed to long-term defense of far-off Uzbekistan in return for our bases there? Have we promised to prop up rickety Pakistan's military junta in repayment for its favor? And, just what is our deal, if any, with opposition fighters in Afghanistan? How deeply involved are we going to be, and for how long?
Official silence on those questions makes me nervous. It should make you nervous, too.
Published in the Athens Banner-Herald, Wednesday, October 3, 2001
Afghanistan is beginning to sound eerily similar to Vietnam
Beware of seductive whispers in the winds of war rising these days out of the east.
Maybe, goes one whisper, the United States can knock over Afghanistan's militant Taliban regime and install a ''viable alternative.''
Perhaps, goes another, we can supply weapons to the Northern Alliance, a rag-tag, anti-Taliban group in the northern mountains, and let them do the job.
Why, we might even prop up 86-year-old King Mohammad Zahir, exiled in Rome since 1973, and rally Afghan opposition around him.
Shades of Vietnam!
For those of you not around in Vietnam days -- and to remind you who were -- just such temptations sucked us into more war in Southeast Asia than we bargained on getting.
Our global war against communism -- and that was the right war -- lost its focus, and we slid into a local ''nation-building'' war fought the wrong way, in the wrong place.
Is our sense of mission in what should be a coolly calculated and broader war today against global terrorism becoming a narrow, angry concentration on one backward nation and the 17th century brigands who run it?
Are we, as in Vietnam, adding nation-building, a long-term and complicated business, to an earlier idea of hard-hitting, surgically precise raids to capture or kill terrorists, and then get out quickly?
Are we headed for a Vietnam-like scenario of Americans fighting on one front while others try to get Kabul's sewer system up and running? Will increasing wheat yields on the Afghan plains be our responsibility?
If we destabilize the existing political and social framework, will we become responsible for establishing a new one -- and making it work?
That's the role we slipped into in Vietnam, and it happened ever so gradually. We were seduced, ever so slowly, into disaster. President Eisenhower gave weapons and economic support to the French, already doomed in the 1950s to becoming big-time losers in their Indochina war.
After the French debacle, President Kennedy, whose high testosterone level sometimes got the better of him, bought into the argument that the American can-do spirit and our superior war technology could beat anybody, anywhere.
Into Vietnam went U.S. planes, artillery, small arms -- and American advisers. We had to show the Vietnamese how to use the stuff, you see.
Then, of course, our advisers needed supplies and support, and in June 1962, when most Americans had never heard of Vietnam, I broke the story out of Saigon for newspapers back home that there were, in this strange, far-off land, 10,000 Americans.
I was an Associated Press correspondent roaming Asia in those days, and the next time I returned to Saigon, in 1964, more than 250,000 Americans were in Vietnam, slogging through rice paddies and hacking their way through thick jungle in pursuit of an elusive enemy.
Just as elusive was political and economic stability. We first backed President Ngo Dinh Diem, then watched as he was killed in a destabilizing coup in 1963, plotted by, among others, an army officer, Nguyen Van Thieu (who died last week in Boston.)
Over the years, with body bags arriving from the rice paddies in increasing numbers, we pushed and prodded feuding Vietnamese political and military factions to unite and offer a ''viable alternative'' to farmers and villagers being courted by communists.
We offered American solutions to Vietnamese problems. We fought, valiantly but unsuccessfully, a guerrilla war with tactics developed for conventional war in Europe.
None of it worked.
Let's not repeat all that in Afghanistan. A long list of outsiders -- the British and Russians among them -- tried and failed down through history.
Yes, let's get Osama bin Laden and his pack of wolves, but with quick in-and-out raids.
And, yes, let's do all we can to alleviate the misery of Afghanistan's innocents. But let us do all that, carefully and calmly, with allies in a studied and broader military and economic effort that avoids all temptation to get into nation building where nations don't exist.
After all, we have a long road ahead -- and it may lead to places like Baghdad, Damascus and other far-off capitals where the sewers don't work well and wheat yields are low.
Published in the Athens Banner-Herald, Wednesday, September 19, 2001:
Our bombs and armor will be useless in a war against Afghanistan
Years have passed since, as a young foreign correspondent, I made my way overland out of Peshawar, in the old Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, then west through the Kyber Pass and on to Kabul, Afghanistan. But, as if that adventure were only yesterday, memory serves up sharp images that I think are crucial today in our talk of war in Afghanistan in search of terrorists.
I recall bands of tough, bearded and heavily armed Pathan tribesmen who, granted no mercy by history, developed a tradition of neither pleading for nor giving quarter on the battlefield. I think of a village society, then seemingly, just steps out of the Stone Age, compared to the West, and today even worse off, following years of successful war against Soviet invaders and never-ending war since then against each other. I remember traveling through mountainous terrain so rugged that my eye for the lay of land, sharpened earlier as a U.S. Marine Corps officer, saw this as a place where nobody, except perhaps the locals, could win a war. Nevertheless, into Afghanistan -- and equally inhospitable areas elsewhere -- we now must go. It's that or merely await the next terrorist strike.
Crucial, I submit, is how we go in. Forget conventional war. Forget precision bombs (amazingly imprecise at times) dropped impersonally from 15,000 feet. Forget our magnificent armored units sweeping across the sands of Kuwait and Iraq. Armor doesn't fare well in mountains, as the Russians learned, and Afghanistan has little infrastructure to take out, even if, as Zell Miller suggests, we bomb the hell out of them. Besides, and this is something our great nation never should forget, in those mud-house villages that we would bomb are women and children as innocent as ours.
Get ready, instead, to see small units of very brave young Americans launched deep into those mountains in fast helicopters to seek, find and kill the old-fashioned way. Sadly, get ready, too, to see some come out in body bags or not at all.
Whatever our military response, we first must build a tight anti-terrorist coalition of friendly nations -- and unfriendly nations that we can muscle into cooperating.
Although our cruise missiles and bombers may fly, as Washington's concession to American impatience for results, we will grapple successfully with the mountain primitive and his AK47 rifle only when we have staging bases on land nearby and, most important, only when intelligence assistance from the Pakistanis help us find him. Beat up the CIA and FBI all you want, but the reality is that few Americans can sneak through the bazaars of south Asia without drawing a crowd. Nor can most Americans penetrate the tight-knit ethnic communities, often built around family ties, that support terrorists here in the West. We need skilled local surrogates cajoled or bribed to spy for us, and among them will be men and women you wouldn't invite home for dinner. For the dirty war ahead, we must stop thinking only as Americans think.
In years spent east of Suez for The Associated Press, I saw the United States make many mistakes, in diplomacy and on the battlefield, because we analyzed our foes as if they thought like Americans. Americans couldn't believe the North Vietnamese really thought they would win. But the North Vietnamese did think that. Few Americans thought Saddam Hussein was crazy enough to take on the United States. But he was. Now we can't understand terrorists who envy us so much, who hate us so much, that they will die willingly to strike against us. So, a two-dimensional strategy is needed. Yes, short range, our assault teams must go in aggressively, find the murderous thugs, wherever they hide, and ensure also that those who harbor them pay a price, too. Long range, however, we must realize that Osama bin Laden and others like him are mere symptoms of a deeper problem -- that our wealth is envied by many in the world and our frequent use of diplomatic, economic and military muscle is hated.
We will be under siege until the world's wealth, power and opportunity are hared more evenly. Obviously, the United States alone cannot rectify the world's economic disparities, any more than we can win alone militarily. But our best short-range military efforts will accomplish little unless we concurrently launch, with our allies, vigorous programs of economic and political assistance in a new, long-haul global effort of enlightened self-interest. And, let's be certain that religion -- ours or the terrorists' -- does not become operative in any of this. Ours must be a war of good against evil, right against wrong -- and not a war of our Judeo-Christian heritage against Islam. Terrorists scream ''jihad'' -- holy war -- but if we shout that back we'll stumble into global conflict involving millions, not mere handsful of terrorists skulking in tents in the mountains of Afghanistan.
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SPECIAL REPORT / September 11, 2001 : UGA Responds is produced by the UGA News Service, a unit of UGA Public Affairs.
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