Setting the record straight, again

Some updates on the entry I posted about the killing of Afghan civilians in Tulkan Bazaar.

In light of what the writer of the National Post story has told me, I would like to amend what I wrote with the following:

He did follow up his initial information, citing a senior a Canadian officer who said in morning orders to other officers that "we have received an intelligence report indicating that 26 people have been hanged in Talukan (sic)."

I apologize to the writer for this mistake.

Nonetheless, the story was still wrong. The initial military intelligence report was wrong (it was later updated and agreed with the account I received from my sources). The story was based on inaccurate information, which is a risk all journalists face when relying on outside sources rather than being able to get the information directly. This leads back to the entry I posted on October 8th on being a skeptic. In this case, a little rational thought, a basic understanding of the Taliban, and some healthy journalistic skepticism would have sufficed to conclude that maybe this was not an accurate description of events. But the National Post likes attention grabbing stories. A headline that reads “Taliban Murders 26 collaborators” sells more papers than “Taliban Executes 5 collaboraters”. The word ‘murder’ itself is misleading and culturally biased. The writer deserves credit for not using the word in his copy. Whoever wrote the headline on the other hand…

I’d like to emphasize here that I do not condone what the Taliban did. My point is that the way it’s described along with the factual errors in the Post story gives the impression that the Taliban is some sort of barbarian gang terrorizing the local population. This is not the case. First of all, the vast majority of the fighters are locals. They’re certainly not boy scouts but the reality is that they have massive support in the villages. They have a system of governance and, in a way, a system of law and order based on tribal rules. What I think the National Post story does is create the illusion that the war in Afghanistan is a fight between NATO the good and some evil monsters. Canadians need to understand that the Taliban is not a monolithic evil entity that needs to be wiped out of existence. They represent an ideology that has followers, some more extreme than others, and if NATO is going to have any success it will need to figure out who’s who, who it needs to fight who can be convinced that the foreigners aren’t here to destroy the Pashtun way of life.

What’s interesting to me is that no other newspaper outside the CanWest family covered this story, even though the information (incorrect as it was) was available through the military. What’s more, CanWest circulated this one story to many of its other regional publications in Canada which perpetuated the misinformation, leaving Canadians less informed about the realities of Afghanistan and the Taliban. This is unforgivable, especially now, when Canadians need as much accurate information as they can get to decide whether or not they want their sons and daughters dying over here.

Some people reading all this might think that I have it out for the National Post and in a sense I do. Like I said before, this is not the first time they have done this and it’s really starting to piss me off. There are some very good Canadian journalists covering Afghanistan, putting their lives on the line to get the right story out (Steve Chao with the CTV comes instantly to mind, among others). Every time the National Post pulls out the sensationalist card, they undermine the work these journalists are doing. Not only that, they endanger their lives. The Taliban already mistrust journalists enough as it is and for any reporter trying to get their side of the story - a risky business to begin with – having to contend with bullshit stories like the ones the National Post likes to run makes their job that much more perilous.