It's Not Just Harper & Company, It's the Media Too

Have you ever thought how the collapse of the Canadian mainstream media played an instrumental role in today's Afghan detainee torture scandal? The parliamentary press corps appears to have Harper and Hillier under a microscope at this moment but who are they to interpret what happened and what went wrong and who is to blame?

Colvin's 16-page brief on the mistreatment, including torture and unexplained disappearance, of Afghan detainees unleashed a Tsunami of controversy. We're all going tsk, tsk, this and tsk, tsk, that. We should be asking why is this so controversial now, as 2009 draws to an end? The answer to that question explains a great deal about how these events came to pass at all.

As many of you have read by now, The Globe's Lawrence Martin has just this day written a nice piece encapsulating how Stephen Harper has subverted Canadian democracy. It's a good column but there's precious little detail that's new to be found in it, few insights beyond the obvious. About the most remarkable thing about Martin's article is that he's the first one to draw these painful links in the four years Harper has been abusing power. Let's hope Martin's is not the last.

But this item is about Afghanistan and about the torture of detainees and the role Canada's media played in enabling that to happen. One of the fantasies that Harper's minions have been spinning is that they had no idea about this until they read about it in The Globe & Mail in 2007. What, really? What kind of preposterous bullshit is that?

Most of what we've read about the Afghan mission from Canadian papers has come in the form of jingoistic journo-snot from third-raters like Christie Blatchford and the Star's Rosie DiManno, two complete duds in a field littered with unexploded reportage. They went out and got embedded with the troops and they talked to Captain this and Sergeant that and they came back and preached their Gospel to the Gullible, angrily reproaching informed, intelligent perspective as a rank betrayal of the troops. They did it, again and again and again, which proves that their editors were all for it.

These people weren't journalists, they certainly weren't war correspondents. They were like concert reviewers treating Canada's Afghan mission as though it was some sort of "gig." It's hard to fault them for that, at least initially, because Canada's involvement in America's Af/Pak war began in a way that sort of resembled a rock concert. We showed up over there as the roadies, providing rear echelon security in Kabul. Then their guitar section split to play in Iraq and we got invited to put in a cameo appearance with the band. We signed on to play one set, in Kandahar, that was clocked to end in 2007. Then we agreed to stay for another set, to end in 2009. Finally we got ourselves into a quasi-open ended committment notionally supposed to end in 2011- wink, wink. With wilfully blind journos like Blatchford and DiManno, the media lost the significance of the transition in Canada's role in Afghanistan and that suited Harper's and Hillier's purposes perfectly.

Colvin's 16-page blockbuster is replete with corroborative sources to verify his claims. Most of those sources - the UN, the US, the NGO stuff - were readily accessible to any Canadian reporter who could be bothered to enquire. And there were almost none of those, Graeme Smith perhaps being one exception.

The Canadian media couldn't see the war for the battle, they couldn't see the forest for the trees. They never really grasped the nature of an insurgency. They never understood the distinction between a political and a military war. They never delved deep enough to realize that the war we were fighting in Afghanistan was a myriad of political, military and criminal battles all being played out simultaneously. Instead they presented us a GI Joe war that never really existed.

Remember Operation Medusa a few years back, Canada's glorious battle to destroy the Taliban in Panjwai? Our generals boasted that they had thousands of Taliban trapped, surrounded. Our cordon was so airtight there was no rush to close with the insurgents. Our top general bragged that the Taliban were trapped and were left to chose whether to surrender or die.

While that battle was underway, I corresponded with Jonathon Landay of McClatchey Newspapers, a guy who has been in Afghanistan since he ran those hills with the Mujads fighting the Soviets. I asked Landay what he thought of this ridiculous claim that we had these guys trapped. He responded noting that this region was laced with vineyards and orchards all of which featured deep irrigation ditches. Landay predicted that the Taliban would just wait until dark, grab their weapons and anything else of value, and simply walk through our lines, undetected, through those ditches. He said it was what they've always done. He was right.

When Canadian units did finally move in there was no fighting. The bad guys were gone. So, since they weren't there to be killed or captured, the narrative changed. We'd already killed them all. Oh, who knows? Maybe Allah Raptures his people up too.

The point I'm trying to make is that the Canadian media were out of their league in covering the Afghan war from the start and they still are. Worse, instead of playing catchup and taking the time to learn what was really going on and what that really meant, they sent hack reporters over to cover battles and not the war, reporters who understood as much about war as Roxanne Pulitzer knew about playing the trumpet. And so they missed the war and, through them, we missed it too. And so Colvin's revelations caught us by surprise. And so Harper and his minions, civilian and military, thought we were so damned ignorant all they had to do was deny and viciously attack this man's credibility.

Had the media done their job, little if anything in Colvin's report ought to have taken us by surprise. Then again, had the media done their job and covered the Af/Pak war properly, Harper and his gang would have known that this issue was potentially explosive. They ignored it because our media led them to believe they could get away with it and that was not an unreasonable assumption.

And what does this say of the opposition? Nothing flattering. They could easily have made good the media's failure. They could have brought this issue out in public, if not in 2006, in 2007 in any case. They didn't have to wait until Mr. Colvin appeared in 2009.

This isn't criticizing from hindsight. This information was out there in 2006. People were chronicling it, people were talking about it, people were analyzing it and what it all meant when put together. People were taking the time to inform themselves about the Dostums and Fahims, the Hekmatyars and Haqqanis, the Karzais and the Gul Agha Shirzais, all that scum - on our side and on theirs.

The whole business is just a goddamned travesty. There are no clean hands from this filth.