Lies, Damned Lies, and Ted Rall. Telling Lies.

Ted Rall, whose career Nathan accurately described as evidence the universe is fundamentally unfair (twice!), has a funny relationship with facts. Specifically, he doesn’t use them, and has made a name for himself as an “expert” on Central Asia despite lying like Natalie Portman’s character in the terrible Zach Braff film Garden State. Like when he described post-Akaev Kyrgyzstan as “disintegrated into chaos, anarchy and warlordism” (remember all those post-2005 Kyrgyz warlords?), or that the region is filled with food that was “Sawdust, mixed with urine.”

Have any of you visited that Central Asia? I certainly have—while the place was certainly poorer than San Diego, and sometimes the water didn’t work, my brief stay there was so incredibly pleasant and enjoyable I have since made the professional study of Central Asia my career. The food was incredible (my God I still crave good shashlyk and manti sometimes), and the people incredibly friendly and open. In short, I feel in love with the place; Rall seemed to exploit its poverty as a career springboard.

His treatment of Afghanistan is similar. In fact, flipping through one of his three tedious books on the country, I could turn almost at random to any page and point out factual inaccuracies about the place. It is telling he never quotes western or American interviewees by name—only semi-anonymous Afghans and officials quoted from news wires have real identities. This is because Rall cannot risk being fact-checked by a real publication. His entire presence would fall to pieces (see, for example, how Gary Groth complained about Rall’s poor quotation ettiquette, or his own admission of recklessly defaming the dead when he assumes—without evidence or reason—that they don’t fit his narrow worldview, or his paranoid rambling about the extreme right winger Internets—personified by Radley Balko and Andrew Sullivan, of all people—that got him fired from the New York Times in 2004).

Sigh. And so we arrive at his latest essay about how he was so brilliant he was the only one who predicted Afghanistan would fail in 2001, in that well-known bastion of investigative journalism, the San Diego City Beat.

This isn’t to mock SDCB (though I will, later). I know nothing about it, aside from it seems to be a perfectly normal lefty alt-weekly which means it is lazy, feigns wit, can’t really snark, and has a massive inferiority complex. It’s telling that Rall publishes his great big “look at how smart I am” piece there, instead of some place with, I don’t know, any readership at all. Even so, it’s fun to look at just how many facts Rall can get wrong in 3100 words. (Do I care that he’s right to be mad at some things, like ISAF’s non-chalance at civilian deaths? No—his refusal to allow competing facts to color his world view completely negate any virtue the few honest parts of his essay might carry.)

Let’s try a bulleted list, with the claim in bold and as brief an explanation as to why it’s a verifiable falsehood underneath.

• NATO came to Nurat on July 11.
  Rall here is actually referring to the Want firebase in Nuristan, that was attacked on July 13 and abandoned shortly after. He seems to have confused the two names.
• Residents of the Weygal Valley did not greet them warmly.
  Actually, people who live there and have lived there say the exact opposite. Rall seems to confuse “the militants based in Pakistan” with “the few dozen villagers living in the Waygal district center.”
• The village is under Taliban control—a state of affairs that the locals, disgusted with NATO’s indiscriminate use of air power, seem to prefer.
  Rall needs to show his work. Locals say they don’t in fact prefer the Taliban, but they were disgusted with the bombing of civilians nearby. Rall’s account of the incident, like his account of anything else, lacks accuracy to say the least.
• Routs have become so commonplace in Afghanistan that official spokespeople have even come up with a new word for the loss of a facility: “disestablished.”
  I must have missed the time Americans were being “routed” in combat. Examples, please, Mr. Rall? Oh right—there aren’t any. Also, can anyone find examples of ISAF or CJTF-101 using the word “disestablished?” Because they sure haven’t anywhere they actually say something.
• The basic components of a viable nation-state—security, infrastructure, cohesive central control—remain unestablished more than six years after the fall of Kandahar to forces of the Northern Alliance.
  Christ, I don’t even know where to begin with that one, aside from noting I cut it off since it was a run on. I’ll just say that, by the actual definition of “nation-state,” Afghanistan wouldn’t be one even with security, infrastructure, and a strong central government. And I thought the government was based in Kabul?
• There were two major jihadi training camps in Afghanistan during the late 1990s, but both were closed before 9/11.
  Huh. I’m sure the survivors of the Derunta camp outside of Nangarhar would be surprised to hear that. As would the former trainees at the Tarnak farm. As would those who attended al Farouq, and the airport training camp in Kandahar. Oh hell, this is just a flat out lie. I think Rall is going off testimony given by al-Qaeda operatives, who claimed that of course they didn’t train at al-Qaeda camps… umm, after they were arrested and taken to Guantanamo. Hrm.
• Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants lived near Kandahar during the late 1990s but had left by 9/11. On 9/11, Al Qaeda, the training camps and bin Laden were all in Pakistan—the latter in a Pakistani military hospital.
  Oh, so Rall knew where Osama was? Was this when he magically talked his way out of that Taliban bus-jacking he claims to have experienced in Kashmir? And since when had bin Laden escaped from Afghanistan before 2001? Last I heard he was in southern Nangarhar, during, you know, that battle we screwed up.
• When [the U.S.] did go in, and throughout the subsequent occupation, the best moral justification for the war in Afghanistan became: We’re getting warmer—neighboring Pakistan was the real front.
  Sort of. This is distorting the real history of what happened between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the U.S. A great deal.
• The “good war”…has never looked less winnable… So many Afghan provinces have fallen under direct Taliban control that NATO has been forced to offer them legal recognition.
  ISAF, the Taliban, and every single province in the country would be surprised by this.
• Last week I received a request for an interview by a news affairs radio program in Northern California. “As you are probably aware, it is not easy to find an American voice that advocates a US/NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan,” the producer wrote. “For example, I got an e-mail today from a progressive media group with a list of possible speakers, all of whom highlighted the purported reemergent Taliban/al-Qaeda threat.”
  God, that sounds about as honest and rigorous as Sonali Kolhatkar’s pathetic excuse for alt-radio and polemicism. Clearly, that nameless producer (there he goes again, refusing to name westerners who can fact-check his ass) was interested in the objective truth about Afghanistan, and not hunting around for someone, anyone, to shriek the party line that ALL IS LOST.
• I declared Afghanistan unwinnable in 2001 and have since authored three books explaining why. To my knowledge, I remain the only syndicated columnist or editorial cartoonist in America who thinks we should get out of Afghanistan as well as Iraq.
  Woops, this is true. Rall has written three books, and he is the only syndicated columnist or editorial cartoonist (oooh, authoritative) to demand we leave Afghanistan, at least near as I know. But that’s because even cartoonists and columnists are not so monumentally stupid as to think leaving Afghanistan in a lurch, or never bothering to address the source of Islamist extremism, could possibly be a good idea. Rall confuses being an idiot with having secret insider knowledge. Here’s a hint: you’re marginalized because you’re stupid and you lie.
• The first was the way Afghans of various political and ethnic affiliations treated one of my fellow journalists, a Russian radio correspondent who had served in the Soviet army that occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s. They loved him!
  This is where I question whether Rall actually visited the country, and if he did whether he actually went anywhere or talked to any body. Because my friends who have been to Afghanistan say that all the Afghans they meet—Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara—still seethe with hatred for Russia, and for Russians. In the south and east in particular, a Russian man walking around, especially if he reveals he fought for the Soviet Army in the 1980s, would be killed, and people would cheer. No questions asked.
• “Of course, [we kill] Americans, too,” they’d say, a little sadly. “After we kill them all, however, they are welcome to come back as tourists and friends.”
  Again , what Afghan says this? None I’ve ever met or heard of.
• “During Soviet times, under the Taliban, even during the civil war, no one dared break into a man’s home,” the old [Tajik] told me. “No one. Even if the Taliban came to execute you, they knocked on the door politely and waited for you to come outside.”
  Again, please show your work. Has every eye-witness account of the Taliban missed the fact that the Taliban would politely knock on the doors of Tajik greybeard when executing their family? And that the Tajiks would prefer polite-knocking-before-execution to their front door being kicked down?
• Like most Afghans, Jovid had never been outside the confines of a walled compound with reinforced bulletproof doors at night.
  Oh yeah, Afghans never leave their bulletproof walled compounds—Afghanistan is like Mad Max, only without Master Blaster or Tina Turner. It’s him! I finded him! It’s Captain Walker!
• He let out a grim chuckle and waved me toward the door. “Things don’t calm down here.” Except, of course, under the Taliban.
  Oh yeah, I keep forgetting how the Taliban were this beloved force for peace and stability, aside from their ruthless massacre of tens of thousands of people across the country.

Oh my God we are only like halfway through. I can’t handle this. There are individual sentences that are true, to be sure, but Rall, like his journeys everywhere else, seems to have had a unique experience about the country not a single other reporter claims to have had, despite his claims to always be around other reporters… from other countries, naturally, and all nameless so they can’t be verified independently. Whatever—Rall describes Mullah Omar in 1994 as a “village priest” instead of a semi-retired mujahideen commander, and neglects to mention that the “Pashtun-dominated” Taliban were brutal against the non-Pashtuns, yes, but that this was at least 60% of the country. But hey, they brought order, made the trains run on time (if Afghanistan had any), so the U.S. might as well just pack up and leave.

Honestly, he gets paid to write this shit. I won’t blame the editors at the City Beat chain of alt-weeklies for not catching that Afghanistan and Iraq actually aren’t the same in terms of size or population (Afghanistan is about 50% bigger in area and has between 6 and 10 million more people), or that Ismail Khan’s presence in Herat really can’t be described as “Balkanization,” or the insanity of claiming women preferred the Taliban to the Karzai government because rape wasn’t prosecuted as often. Actually, I will blame them for that. Basic geography, people! What the hell is wrong with you?

What is unforgivable is allowing Rall to peddle the outright lie that the war was about building a Turkmenistan—Pakistan oil pipeline—an idea discarded by Unocal in 1998, when Rall was busy sneaking into “Taliban-controlled Kashmir”—or that the only paved road in the entire country goes from Herat to Kandahar for supporting this mythical device. These are both outright lies—no one with Rall’s obvious news reading habits would write that thinking it’s true. And where were the editors?

Just a few months ago, there was a storm of stories about the paving efforts in Afghanistan, from the New York Times to the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal to the Atlantic Monthly to NPR to the freaking Weekly Standard—no editor even pretending to pay attention to the news could have missed the dozens of stories about road paving, the paving of the Ring Road, how paving is saving Afghanistan, and so on. It was pervasive. How did that slip past these people? Did they even care if what they wrote was true, or only that it was on message?

Rall’s piece never rises above the level of propaganda. I blame City Beat for being so arrogant as to think it can print provable mistruths without anyone noticing (or that what Rall, a man only the ignorant think an expert, would print such blinding truth they wouldn’t HAVE to fact-check him). More importantly, I blame Ted Rall for writing things he knows to be untrue just to pursue his irrational dream of being the uncontested master of Central Asia.

Indeed, Rall is a perfect example of how vicious propaganda is not just limited to the Right. Like his running mates Ingalls and Kolhatkar, with whom he must find good company, Rall knowingly twists the truth to suit his own agenda, which maximizes his own bravery at the expense of reality and everyone else, truth and consequences be damned. In the end, he is little more than a Taliban propagandist—a Michael Moore for radical Islam, if you will, all bluster and fury but missing the balls to own up to the fact he couldn’t sell shit if he wrote about his experiences honestly.

What an absolutely wretched, despicable man. The only comfort I can take from this is knowing this kind of crap is limited to low-circulation alternative press, which no one reads and no one cares about, because it’s a community of people who seem to care very little about the truth.

Tagged as: Afghanistan