Afghanistan News Should Come With Warning Labels Attached

Afghanistan News Should Come With Warning Labels Attached

Confusion, spin, hype, finger-pointing and the challenges of reporting from a dangerous war zone make it hard to sort fact from fiction. The truth will emerge, but slowly.

By Jonathan Bernstein

August 19, 2021, 8:30 PM GMT+9

 Two quick points about why you should be more careful than usual about what you think you know about the events in Afghanistan.

The first reason is familiar from any breaking news story; unfortunately, it comes up most often when there’s a mass shooting. See, for example, the warnings about misinformation in these “rules” for listening to breaking news.

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Afghanistan is much, much worse. If reporters get the number of victims and shooters wrong while covering U.S. stories for which they have almost full access, imagine how impossible it is to report from an unstable nation, one in which their own safety may not be at all assured. This is not to knock the reporters on the ground! To the contrary: They are doing heroic work, and many — most — do it well. It’s just in the nature of the challenge that they’re going to get some things wrong. And that doesn’t even get to rumors spreading through social media, which can get picked up by mainstream or partisan media.

It’s not just details. The situation may be different from neighborhood to neighborhood, let alone from city to city and village to village, and it may change rapidly and not always in the same direction in different places. An army of journalists fully shielded from danger would find it difficult to assess what’s happening. Even worse: The reporters who know the country the best may rely on sources who suddenly find themselves in different situations (and interests, and perhaps access to information) than they’ve been in for years. Good reporters will understand that, but it still may leave them with extremely difficult challenges.

Speaking of those sources, the other reason to be unusually careful is that the information environment after policy disasters is a lot different from what many of us are used to. We’re all used to partisan and ideological spin, and there’s some of that going on now. There are also fairly familiar stories shifting blame to the administration of former President Donald Trump and, in some cases, to the presidencies of Barack Obama and George W. Bush (and there should be some blaming of Bill Clinton’s administration for not getting ahead of the situation, too, but I haven’t seen those yet). And then there are the defenses of Trump’s Afghan policy. 

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But there are also a bunch of stories that seem to be coming from the intelligence community, from the military, and from the State Department, all attempting to shift blame — for the fall of the government, for the failure to understand what was happening, for poor planning — away from themselves and toward one of the other portions of the government. These aren’t partisan, and reading them as partisan means misreading them. But they certainly are spin, and may well be misleading or even flat-out wrong. Understanding what to make of such stories may require a fair amount of knowledge about the relevant agencies, or detailed information about policy, or both. But all of us can at least be aware that agencies do such things, and be careful about it.

Again, none of this is meant to criticize the reporters and news organizations involved. Just to warn everyone: This is probably one of the most confusing information environments we’ve seen for some time. We’ll know more in a few days, and even more in a few weeks. 

1. Adam P. Liff at the Monkey Cage on Japan and Taiwan.

2. Dan Drezner on Biden and U.S. allies. 

3. Travis Crum on the latest Democratic voting rights bill. 

4. Grace Segers on the reactions from Congress on Afghanistan.

5. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Smith on refugees and the economy.

6. Jonathan Cohn on public opinion about the size of the infrastructure bills now making their way through Congress.

7. Sarah Kliff on surprise bills for coronavirus tests.

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