Who the Hell Pays These People to Write?

Hilarious UPI commentary on Afghanistan. Let’s tackle this one by one.

• Kabul has about 3.5 million, not 2 million residents. Most live in unregistered housing built outside government control. Also, Iran helped us invade and topple the Taliban—it’s natural for them to maintain a presence there.
• I guess people don’t fear American bombers anymore, despite the random mis-targeting that has recently killed entire families.
• I guess, despite all published economic data to the contrary, the opium economy is 2/3 of Afghanistan’s total economy, not the 1/3 commonly cited by the national government, IFIs, and NATO.
• “An estimated $8 billion a year is needed to dig Afghanistan out of its narco-state status. But the funds aren’t available.” So, did President Bush not just pledge $8.6 billion in aid this year?
• “The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan throughout the 1990s and killed thousands of Afghans in a vain attempt to establish its dominion.” Wrong decade, wrong numbers (approximately one millions Afghans died during the invasion, most from Soviet/Najibullah massacres).
• We should send aid through hawala, even though in the following sentence the author says, “it wouldn’t take long to co-opt or silence government hawala circuits.” What?

Alright, so I’m already bored with this. Yes yes, Afghanistan is a messy place, and we’ve made a ton of mistakes. Reporting that is a good thing… Assuming you can get basic facts about the place right. This isn’t hard—I tend not to use random news feeds off Google, but established news agencies, like the NY Times, the CS Monitor, the Washington Post, Der Spiegel, and so on. And five minutes of searching for information on Afghanistan would reveal how very wrong that author is. And she’s paid to write this dreck!

In a similar vein is this LOL report on Helmand from the Post. It’s an “emerging epicenter” of the Taliban? Really? Griff Witte should know better, as he helped Steve Coll write the excellent book Ghost Wars. Look, Helmand was an “emerging epicenter” (what a silly term) in maybe 2005. But for years now the Canadians, British, Americans, and Dutch have all done the majority of their fighting in Helmand and Kandahar provinces. Helmand is “emerging” as a center for Taliban activity in the same way that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is “new.”

Now, what Witte says about the province itself is fairly accurate, and matches up with other reports from the south of the country. But his characterization of the conflict itself is disappointing and a bit misleading.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.