Azmat Khan’s Times pieces were done with the rigor of a social scientist, the care of a social worker, and the grit and determination of a professional reporter in her element. Khan had a tall order ahead of her. Not only did she have to demonstrate that the U.S. military was making errors that killed hundreds of civilians, but she also sought to prove that its disregard for Afghan lives was systemic in nature, as demonstrated through specific patterns of abuse that resoundingly discredited the military’s efforts to minimize its mistakes. This required an exceedingly thorough and systematic effort to document as many cases as possible, informed and supported by FOIAd evidence and additional documents. The logistical undertaking alone impressed me, and I wonder what interactions she had with academics to bolster the legitimacy of her methods.
If anything, I felt as if the format of a feature piece, however longform, was almost a discredit to the evidence that Khan collected for the story itself. Synthesizing the information into a different format, such as a report or a legal case, may have given more force to the quantitative data that Khan disperses through the article (e.g. “The Pentagon says x percentage of civilians were killed in this way, but the Times found that it was actually a much higher y percent.”). The breathing room of appendices or footnotes could allow Khan to make the case not only with scattered quantitative data points mixed with devastating individual testimonies, but also with the sheer volume of evidence that Khan could only allude to in the abstract throughout the articles. To be sure: the piece in the Times wasn’t intended to be comprehensive, as its purpose was to address a wider public that would not have the time or patience to comb through all of Khan’s findings. Perhaps I’m just let down that Khan wasn’t able to demonstrate the full extent of her work, even if that wasn’t the point of her piece. Letting data points go to waste is never satisfying.
On another note, I thought that a fleeting moment in Khan’s second piece could have been emphasized to a greater extent. She devotes the first couple of grafs of section 8 in her second piece to arguing that, much as the rules of war provide psychological comfort to warriors because they would feel like they are abiding by some kind of morality, those rules also make people believe that the wars their country wages are just. This argument gets to the heart of the issue, in my opinion, taking it beyond the standard accountability journalism that the rest of the pieces seems to engage in (e.g., the airstrike model hid the true civilian death toll, legitimized the “expanded use” of drone strikes, lacked any kind of accountability or investigations into wrongdoings, etc.) by mobilizing that accountability angle to raise a much more fundamental question about the nature of war: what myths or narratives do we create that allow us to feel justified in putting innocent lives in danger? The role of technology and the narrative of precision, as she effectively argues, are significant answers to this question. I would have liked this claim to be more strongly articulated throughout the pieces.
