Analyst Barnett Rubin has an eye-opening assessment of developments in Afghanistan. Well worth the read. He notes that despite optimistic accounts from the likes of Ann Marlowe and David Ignatius, the Department of Defense recently revealed that attacks have risen 40% in eastern Afghanistan over the last year. Even Khost province, what some have called the “crown jewel in the American counterinsurgency,” isn’t quite the peaceful Switzerland that it’s been made it out to be. As Rubin writes:
My source reports 269 attacks so far this year in Khost, up 22 percent from last year’s total of 220. So the greatest achievement of U.S. counterinsurgency in Afghanistan has been to hold the escalation in violence in Khost to a bit more than half of the national level of increase….Counter-insurgency is not graded on a curve; not succeeding is failing. So far, that’s still where the indicators point.
I don’t want to totally downplay what’s been happening in Khost, however, since the trend is moving in the right direction; and, for that, American COIN tactics apparently deserve some credit. The big question, though, is whether or not this movement — extremely modest though it may be — can be replicated in other provinces. Hypothetically, let’s say that American forces were to take over military operations from their less COIN-savvy NATO counterparts and implement their approach on a nation-wide scale. Would the country trend towards greater calm? Rubin, for his part, is pessimistic about the possibilities:
I doubt it, because Khost [is] such a small place with a relatively high level of education (it was called “Little Moscow” under the communists), and, second, the forces for such an expansion are not available, because the U.S. is stuck in a disastrous war in Iraq.
Debates like this one are largely missing from the foreign policy discourse in Washington. Thanks in large part to some world-class negligence from the American media, Afghanistan continues to slide off the map. To really dig into this kind of analysis, you have to comb the blogs and the web for a taste of what’s going on. Mainstream print media is going to be of only irregular assistance. Nor will cable news be of much help. Consider these numbers and weep – or scream, if you prefer:
Coverage of the war in Afghanistan has increased slightly this year, with 46 minutes of total coverage year-to-date compared with 83 minutes for all of 2007. NBC has spent 25 minutes covering Afghanistan, partly because the anchor Brian Williams visited the country earlier in the month. Through Wednesday, when an ABC correspondent was in the middle of a prolonged visit to the country, ABC had spent 13 minutes covering Afghanistan. CBS has spent eight minutes covering Afghanistan so far this year. (New York Times)
Eight minutes. Jesus. Maybe it’s time for the media to start giving a damn.