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Fear and Loathing in Afghanistan
Judah Grunstein
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20 Oct 2008
I just finished reading Nir Rosen's Rolling Stone piece on his gonzo "embed"
with the Taliban, and to be honest, I find the reaction to the piece as revealing
as the article itself:
Does it take cojones to go where Rosen went?
Yes. (Spencer Ackerman.)
Does it blur some legal
and ethical lines? Yes. (Dave Dilegge.)
Does it blur some factual lines? Yes. (Joshua Foust.)
Does it
provide valuable source material for students of
counterinsurgency? Again, yes. (Andrew Exum.)
But does it shed light on the subject? There I'm not so sure. Compared to Dexter Filkins' NYT Sunday Magazine piece last month on the Pakistani tribal areas, for instance, Rosen's piece falls short, mainly because the story
coming out of his article, as is obvious from all of the above, is increasingly centering on Rosen.
As for Afghanistan and the
Taliban, we get some glimpses -- of their internal divisions and
contradictions, of their violence and resilience -- scattered among the
anecdotal evidence of smoking coalition trucks and
Taliban talking points. But the real analytical heft is in the Kabul
interviews. Those basically confirm the emerging consensus that
Afghanistan is slipping out of our grasp and by default -- but only by
default -- into the Taliban's, and that pouring more troops into the
country will do little to change that.
Unlike Vikram Singh and Nate Fick, who toured the country last month,
Rosen thinks we've already reached the tipping point beyond which even
a coordinated and well-funded stability and reconstruction operation
will no longer work. I happen to find that takeaway compelling, but less than fully supported by the piece.
In all fairness to Rosen, he can't control how people respond to his writing, and apparently some analysis, including that of Singh and Fick, ended up on the cutting room floor. We need people like Rosen who are willing
to go where the story is. But it's unfortunate when that ends up becoming the story.