Registan.net

I’m curious if it is simply assumed that when reporters do an embed with the Taliban they’re being given a very carefully choreographed performance. That is, to a limited extent, the conceit behind military embeds (though they have their own problems, to be sure). But what we tend to see from Taliban embeds, whether recently […]

We bombed another wedding, this time in northwest Kandahar. Alex Strick van Linschoten visited the hospital where the wounded were carried:
The bombing, they said, lasted from 4-9pm. Noor Ahmad, Hazrat Sadiq and Mohammad Rafiq all lay on beds in the hospital next to Abdul Zahir. Between 3 and 5 years old, they are the cousins […]

‘Smile, we’re killing (fewer) Pashtuns!’

Somehow, Ann Marlowe keeps finding gullible editors, this time by declaring all the concern over civilian casualties to be a myth, some lie concocted by the Taliban and a willing liberal media.
The American Army has not always done itself a service in its relations with the media, allowing the insurgents to […]

The Columbia Journalism Review has kindly run an essay of mine, kind of summarizing the last six months of tracking the roads meme.
This strange, fleeting idea that roads create security was a flash in the pan, one assisted by the hordes of adventure journalists who parachute into a war zone and think they’re getting a […]

The emerging role of propaganda in the Russo-Georgian War is one of my new-found favorite topics. And for contributing to its discussion, David Axe deserves a big high five. In a triplet of posts, he lays out in meticulous detail one of the may ways Georgia and its president, Mikheil Saakashvili, engaged in a rather […]

I have a new essay up at Columbia Journalism Review, this time discussing the role and rise of citizen propagandists, and why that’s such a big deal.
Although a lot of people were thinking clearly about the war in Georgia, these kinds of perspectives were lost in the flood of citizen propaganda coming from partisans of […]

Reuters:
KABUL (Reuters) - U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troopskilled more than 220 suspected Taliban militants in anoperation in southern Afghanistan last week, the U.S. militarysaid on Monday, the biggest recent toll of insurgent deaths.
Several residents told a Reuters reporter by telephone thatmore than 70 civilians were killed in air strikes by foreignforces in the Sangin […]