Ann Jones, In Bed With the U.S. Army

Ann Jones, In Bed With the U.S. Army

As the Wikileaks document-dump week ends, perhaps the real significance of what happened lay not in the specific revelations in those 92,000 pieces of raw data from American frustration-ville in Afghanistan, 2004-2009 (much of which would have been no news to anyone reading TomDispatch all these years). It may simply be that, for the second time in a month -- the first being the McChrystal firing/Petraeus hiring -- the war that time forgot has burst onto the front pages of American newspapers and made it to the top of the TV news as a runaway story.
Given an increasingly unpopular war, the headlines spell bad news for Washington. Pakistani double-crosses, Taliban surges, Afghan corruption, the woeful state of the American-trained Afghan army and police, and -- a subject far less emphasized in U.S. than British coverage -- the unreported killing or wounding of large numbers of civilians by U.S. forces (as well as cover-ups of the same) are not what the Obama administration would have chosen for the week’s war news. The U.S. war effort was already visibly stumbling and desperately in need of continuing anonymity, so all-consuming news, including reports on spiking American and NATO deaths, certainly wasn’t on the Obama wish list. And it’s not just the public either. As reporter Jim Lobe notes, the Wikileaks story “can only add to the pessimism that has spread from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to the heart of the foreign policy establishment, and even to a growing number of Republicans.”
The release of these documents has certainly not helped bolster NATO allies, whose citizens are ever more eager to head for the exits in Afghanistan. But in all this, one thing -- quite unnoted -- has been missing: what these events have looked like through Afghan eyes. However striking the Wikileaks revelations may have been, in one way at least they paralleled the coverage we’ve seen for years. These documents came from relatively low-level American military and intelligence officers and largely reflect the war as seen through American eyes. What they deliver -- potentially devastatingly -- is U.S. military frustration over a situation that has long been going from bad to worse. In this morass of reports, not surprisingly, Afghans play a distinctly collateral role.
Reading these documents, we remain, as is generally the case in our news reports, embedded with Americans in the field, viewing a treacherous Afghan (and Pakistani) minefield of a world. TomDispatch regular Ann Jones approaches Afghanistan and the American war effort from quite a different perspective. She’s proven a rarity in the way she’s reported back to us in these years. She arrived in Kabul in 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to work with Afghan women on their problems. Unlike almost any other American who wrote about the experience, she embedded herself in an Afghan world.
Her moving book Kabul in Winter offered us a window into Afghan lives and worries, not American ones. Now, she’s arrived at a U.S. military base, bringing Afghan eyes with her. Among all the reporters who have embedded with the U.S. military, that may make her unique -- so prepare yourself for a look at the American way of war on the ground that won’t be like anything you’ve read. By the way, in Jones’s new book, War Is Not Over When It’s Over (to be published in September), she embeds herself with women who have suffered through trauma and nightmare in other global combat zones. It’s not to be missed. Tom