I remember following the sudden collapse of the Afghan National Government and Army in the midst of the US withdrawal very closely on Twitter. The mood was somewhat apocalyptic and the image of people trying to clasp onto US military cargo planes is my jarring abiding memory of that moment. Jane Ferguson\u2019s piece on PBS was very good I thought. The collage of footage is incredible and conveys the sheer desperation of so many people. I also thought it did a good job of contextualizing Biden\u2019s speech in terms of Vietnam and refuting his claim that this was nothing like that in such devastating terms. I can\u2019t imagine what it must have been like to be a western journalist in Kabul then. There were still some ANA forces who had not disappeared, there were the Taliban of course, as well as ISIS-K, and a great number of desperate people. I also remember the takeover of the Taliban as this great unknown: would the violent reprisals start right away or would they wait until the last US forces had departed? I read Jane Ferguson\u2019s piece in the New Yorker reflecting on that moment and her dilemma about going to cover it and risking getting trapped or worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I found the NYT two part piece fascinating. I can\u2019t imagine how much labor over so many years went into producing it: the result, however, is a systematic deconstruction of the Pentagon\u2019s air strike assessment criteria and the bureaucracy that surrounds it. The story is that the US government was negligently killing thousands of civilians without any accountability while maintaining a narrative that it was minimising civilian casualties. The series also did a great job of bridging the gap between the very technical and data-driven aggregated review of casualty assessments and telling the human stories of the people whose families were killed in the airstrikes. Both parts are necessary to dismantle the Pentagon\u2019s own sanitary narrative of surgical, \u201cprecision\u201d bombing campaign. When surviving members of families devastated by the airstrikes address the pentagon, crying out how such a powerful military could have thought that their house was habouring terrorists, Captain Urban\u2019s rigid and corporate responses ring very hollow. But if the investigation had not been so thorough, I as a reader naively would have trusted Captain Urban\u2019s statements because I wanted to\u2014I wanted to believe that the US military wouldn\u2019t have done this and some civilian casualties are inevitable. This piece is so effective therefore that is manages to make you reevaluate what you take for granted. There are also so many small, but devastating details: the woman from the US overseas development agency who said the children probably lived in the house but who was dismissed, or the disillusioned, anonymous US officer who could not distinguish the result of the US\u2019 bureaucratic bombing of Raqqa from Russia\u2019s indiscriminate bombing of Aleppo. I\u2019m very curious to know how one would cultivate sources in government or the military especially as the source has a strong incentive not to say anything and even if they wanted to how would you find them?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I remember following the sudden collapse of the Afghan National Government and Army in the midst of the US withdrawal very closely on Twitter. The mood was somewhat apocalyptic and the image of people trying to clasp onto US military cargo planes is my jarring abiding memory of that moment. Jane Ferguson\u2019s piece on PBS<\/p>\n