Lies You can Read in Newsweek
by James Norton

This article is unfair.

To take quotes from another publication's lead piece of international news and articulate the subtext is too reductive. It's cheap. It's a gimmick.

But Newsweek's lead piece of international news for the week of Dec. 3 is about a race of noble, technologically magnified supermen doing battle with dirty, barbaric savages running around in the rocks. It's about holy gods punishing filthy men. It's a beautifully crafted work of fiction.

The Department of Defense could not have written this article. Only trained journalists could so thoroughly eliminate any evidence of nuance, thoughtfulness or fairness.

To be fair: The United States has made amazing strides in its war on the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The amount of collateral damage — i.e., babies with their arms blown off — has been limited in comparison with most wars. The Taliban are an evil regime, even if some of their members aren't awful human beings. And Al Qaeda is a savage criminal organization. The premise of the war is just.

But Afghanistan has a history. It has an intellectual class — Kabul University was once one of the best in the region, with links to institutions of higher learning across the world. The Taliban at one point answered the desperate cries of a nation that needed rescuing from a band of lawless warlords, many of whom have returned to fight at the behest of the United States. Newsweek does not hint at these threads of truth. Newsweek is uninterested.

Newsweek has a glossy story to tell. Millions upon millions of Americans have read this text, and are basing their understanding of world affairs upon it.

Let's spill some ink on it. Black text is reprinted verbatim from the original article; blue text is the author's commentary.

A New Breed of Soldier
By John Barry
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

The Afghan battlefield isn't much different from the way Genghis Khan left it in the 13th century: parched plains, mud-walled villages, craggy mountains. The fighters, some of them descendants of the Mongol invaders, haven't changed much, either. Rugged men, bearded and battle-scarred, ford rivers on horseback and attack the enemy in screaming hordes.

And they've probably never seen a personal computer before, or enjoyed the new X-Box game system. They smell like rotten socks. They're not as intelligent as you and me, and they would plunder and burn your pastoral Minnesota hometown, given the chance. Afghans are a barbaric, ignorant, savage people.

They're armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers instead of battleaxes and bows. But when they corner someone in a dark hole they still pour oil in and set it alight. And they often plunder corpses after the battle is done. Only now, in addition to taking the shoes of the dead, they can dig gold fillings from their teeth.

Stealing fillings? Are these human beings? Only barbarians and highly mechanized, scientific Western states like Nazi Germany would do that. Thank goodness we're bombing the living hell out of the Afghans, because these guys are killers.

And as for that "pouring oil on people in dark holes" — heck, that may seem similar to American thermobaric weapons or flamethrowers — but it's not. Because our stuff is electronic.

The problem for the Afghans is that, as fierce as they are, they have never met soldiers like Mike and Dave.

In case you hadn't guessed, these are the Good Guys. The remainder of the article will empathize with them completely, while denying any trace of humanity to the people they kill. This will make it easy to follow.

*** Skipping ahead... ***

The Taliban, with God on their side and fire in their hearts, would rout them. Some imagined killing Americans in battle, and dragging corpses around before television cameras as Somali fighters had done in Mogadishu in 1993.

Of couse, some Taliban may have imagined schtupping Pamela Anderson Lee in a hot tub, too. But that's less relevant to this article. And either way, we're just sort of guessing as to what they were thinking. It's not particularly ethical from a journalistic standpoint, but it sure makes writing the story easier.

*** Skipping ahead... ***

The American military, however, seemed unnervingly capable of seeing them. Bombs fell from the sky as if they were riding on a string to their target. Taliban command-and-control links were largely cut, and supply lines were blocked. To many Taliban, the Americans must have seemed like creatures from another planet: out there somewhere, in the sky or across the horizon, powerful beyond comprehension.

To these primitive people, we are gods. They fail to comprehend our technology. They are quickly learning that they're beneath us, which is good. They're starting to understand their place in the world. Next, we bring in Disney films. Monsters Inc. might be a good place to start. Then: McDonald's. But no McNuggets until the Afghans prove they can handle their awesome power.

Now consider the Navy aircraft flying over Afghanistan. All of them can drop precision ordnance. And Navy officers can send a pilot data about new targets while he's in the air (or she — another revolution). The technology is hardly error-free, and bombers make mistakes. They hit a Red Cross building in Kabul more than once, as well as several homes.

Of course some would imply that the Red Cross strikes weren't entirely "mistaken." But they're probably not working for a publication as reputable as Newsweek. Although a small paper called The Washington Post reported this:

"We are not sorry for taking supplies away from the Taliban, and if the Red Cross thought those supplies were going to anywhere else than the Taliban murderers they are just plain foolish," says a senior US officer directly involved in the bombing."

And a cable news network of no real importance called CNN reported this:

"Although details are still being investigated, the ICRC warehouses were among a series of warehouses targeted by US forces because the Taliban used them for storage of military equipment," a Pentagon statement said.

But even if these statements were true, you can hardly blame Newsweek's team of writers and editors for not having heard about something as minor and hard to remember as the United States purposely targeting an international humanitarian relief organization.

And the "homes"? Well, no need to go into detail about that. It's unpleasant!

But such misfires are now so rare they make headlines.

That's how good things are. Rest assured: Other than the articles you've read, all the bombs are hitting unredeemable bad guys, or landing somewhere harmless. Because nothing would happen in Afghanistan without the press picking up on it — coverage is that good. Squads of safe, happy journalists operate near every Taliban unit, and they can unerringly see and report every piece of ordnance that falls.

Few appreciate how revolutionary this is: In World War II, bomber crews of the Greatest Generation felt lucky to hit the right city on a night raid.

They found Dresden, though, God bless 'em. Nice shot, Greatest Generation!

*** The article then goes on for a full page describing some of the toys weapons the United States has used. These include laser beams, saddle packs with GPS trackers, robot spy planes, and JSTARs, which are Boeing 707s outfitted with radars that can scan up to 19,000 square miles at a time. A JSTAR flying at a high altitude can pick up a moving vehicle almost 200 miles away. And that's awesome! ***

*** To its credit, the article then observes that the role of the US infantryman in Afghanistan has been almost entirely to call in fire from distant forces, as opposed to killing other infantry. That's actually pretty interesting, as it's pretty much unheard of in history. That — with enough detail to support it — would make a good one-page story. ***

*** Skipping ahead... *** Critics also wonder if Americans aren't too focused on winning battles, and not concerned enough about solving the more complicated problems that gave rise to them in the first place.

But these invisible, unnamed critics won't be given space to even briefly articulate any of these complicated problems. But we'll save that for another article. Maybe.

*** Skipping ahead... ***

Gen. Gordon Sullivan, for instance, was Army chief of staff in the immediate wake of the gulf war. At the time, he pushed "digitization," a project to share data between every soldier and every combat vehicle in the field of battle. "The news photographs of the Special Forces tell the story," he says now. "Look at the mikes and the laser designators and the GPS receivers embedded in their uniforms." Those are innovations that Sullivan and others "were just thinking about" at the end of the gulf war, he says. "People talk as if the revolution [in military affairs] is in the future ... It's now."

No one knows that better than the Taliban — at least those who are still alive.

Zing!

*** THE END ***

This article ran accompanied by photos of tough, lovable US servicemen, some of our vaunted hardware and a graphic to help explain the only real point of the story: US infantrymen can call down fire from the gods in the sky. But this genuinely awe-inspiring gee-whizzery was padded out to fill eight pages of the magazine.

One of the nation's two leading news magazines can afford to spend about six pages detailing another culture's inherent inferiority, making nostalgic references to the Greatest Generation and fetishizing gadgets at a level that makes the Asian member of the Goonies look Amish by comparison.

The popular alternative? That would be Time.

We may be in trouble.

E-mail James Norton at jrnorton@flakmag.com.