How the U.S. Media Present Afghanistan final part

When President Biden unfroze 7 billion dollars but.

 

It can be spun any way, but that won't change the fact that by freezing those assets, the United States enacted a policy of mass starvation. And yet there seems to be fewer media concerns about Afghan women and girls having enough food to eat, than there is about what clothes they have to wear.

Take the Wall Street Journal, for example. Between August 1, 2021, and February 16 of this year, the Journal posted over a dozen

articles, podcasts and videos about the dangers facing Afghan women from Afghan men and from the Taliban. And articles and podcasts on the famine and starvation facing millions of Afghans? A handful. Even then, reports weren't framed around the direct impact of the U.S. freeze.

Coverage in The New York Times follows a similar suit, where stories about Afghan women outnumber those specifically about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and the U.S.'s role in exacerbating it. Now, on February 11, President Joe Biden made

the announcement that the $7 billion would finally be unfrozen. But it wouldn't be given back to Afghans. Instead, half of it would be given in aid, meaning distributed by U.S.-approved organizations.

The other half, the Biden administration has decided that it will keep the money for itself, putting it in a compensation fund for victims of 9/11, meaning further punishment for a crime that Afghanistan never committed but has paid for two decades. Meaning Afghans are paying reparations to citizens of the richest country in the world while they are being starved.

Instead of using this moment following the U.S. exit to earnestly self-reflect on the criminal excesses of the war, on the toll it took on the people of Afghanistan, the American media collectively erased 20 years of history and rewrote the narrative to make the U.S. into a restrained savior.

 

The 20 years of US military occupation and a culture of violence.

 

The U.S. presence in Afghanistan didn't begin in 2001, but that's a good date to start. The single greatest source of violence in Afghanistan over the last 20 years comes from the presence of U.S. war and occupation. Rural Afghanistan, which is where the majority of Afghans lived, has been devastated by the occupation, which has seen drone air wars claim many lives, including of men and boys who have been indiscriminately and without contention or evidence labeled enemy combatants.

Then there is the question of violence against women in Afghanistan. There are cruel realities for Afghan women. Our job isn't to deny that. Our coverage, however, needs to take into account how 40 years of war and 20 years of military occupation create a culture of violence, and what it does to a society. When violence is normalized at every major level, then it is normalized in the most private of spaces as well.

Generations of Afghans - boys and girls, men and women - have gone through four decades of horrific violence, often related to foreign invasions, which disrupts not only institutions but also a country's cultural fabric and its interpersonal relationships.

When we chalk everything up to, "that's their culture," we have removed any and all responsibility of the US government and 20 years of context we, are also responsible for because of the dehumanizing coverage of the people of Afghanistan.

Another way of reckoning with the U.S. legacy in Afghanistan is to be clear that there was no nation-building, just like there was no saving of women or building of democracy. What we continue to refer to as a nation-building project creating institutions to better the day-to-day lives of Afghans was actually billions of dollars pumped unchecked into the hands of corrupt Afghan government officials, Northern Virginia defense contractors, warlords or it just disappeared.

Then there is talking to Afghans, not just those with families who worked with past governments or those who have worked with the U.S. military as contractors or those who live in Kabul. Afghanistan is home to over 38 million people, 74 percent of whom live in rural areas. Yet interviews with Afghans focus on major city centers or the diaspora. And when the U.S. war in particular has disproportionately impacted Afghans in rural areas, shouldn't they be at the center of the stories? I have to say that there is good reporting from many journalists. Their work, while functioning as the exception to how mainstream U.S. media has covered Afghanistan, offers better and more honest coverage that reckons with this country's legacy of violence is possible.

 

The U.S. media and the coverage of so-called terrorism and the "war on terror".

 

Now, there's a lot more we can put in here, and we will. One of our upcoming episodes will be about how the U.S. media covers so-called terrorism. The envision of the U.S. legacy in Afghanistan as a bumbling savior is rooted in a bigger story of how the U.S. media covers and engages with the myths propelled by the "war on terror."

Because that's the other thing about covering the war in Afghanistan. It doesn't exist in just the context of 20 years of military occupation.

Coverage of all wars, special ops, or whatever we want to call U.S. militarism abroad over the last two decades, has been built on deeply rooted assumptions and imaginings of Muslims, and Muslim societies, and about how American violence, while it makes mistakes, is ultimately good violence.

Like so many other societies in this world, Afghanistan doesn't have a single story to tell. But can hold this country accountable for the many stories it has denied the Afghan people. The many stories it's cut short.

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