Gap between U.S. perception and reality in Iraq, Afghanistan, author posits

Is the American public getting a full and accurate picture of how the wars are going in Afghanistan and Iraq? Peter Bergen, one of the most well-respected and incisive journalists of our time, suggests that they may not be.

Bergen (Source: New America Foundation)

In a free-wheeling talk at the New America Foundation on Friday (3/11/2011), Bergen said that while the majority of polled Americans are against the war in Afghanistan, 65% of Afghans themselves recently told pollsters that they think the country is going in the right direction.

And while Americans are given one media report after another about how Afghanistan is filled with exploding bombs, attacking hordes of Taliban and a lawlessness that pervades every corner of the war-torn nation, the real story is a more nuanced one. A frequent traveler to Afghanistan, Bergen says there is violence and an insurgency, yes, but that it is largely isolated and nothing like the bloody civil war and vicious urban warfare that gripped Iraq for several years until a U.S. military surge helped restore some semblance of order.

In fact, Bergen said, one is more likely to be killed in Washington, D.C. than in Afghanistan, according to official statistics based on the percentage of deaths per population. And, he added, far fewer civilians are dying in Afghanistan now than in Iraq during the height of the war there—or, notably, even now in Iraq, even though Iraq has a smaller population.

“Anyone in this room could go to Kabul now and have a fairly good time. There are restaurants and there are bars,’’ and the streets aren’t a shooting gallery with various factions trying to kill each other, while armed insurgents are also trying to kill U.S. and coalition forces. “The Taliban is not a very large insurgent group,’’ he said.

Iraq, in contrast, garners nary a headline, yet the war there continues, according to Bergen. He also said that one of the most important decisions in the Afghan war, by President Barack Obama to keep a large U.S. force there through 2014, has generated far fewer headlines than it should have.

Bergen made his comments during a discussion of his new book, “The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda,’’ which has been praised as required reading on the state of U.S. national security by a wide array of experts. The book looks back on a decade of war between America and al Qaeda, and the war on terrorism and two related wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To a packed audience in Washington, Bergen explained that he set out to write his magnum opus not just from the perspective of the U.S. military, political and intelligence establishments but from the perspective of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as well. One without the other, he said, would be like writing about World War II from the impossibly narrow perspective of President Franklin Roosevelt or Britain’s Winston Churchill.

Bergen said the initial draft of the book weighed in at 1,000 pages, joking that he considered changing the title to, “The Longest Book.’’

In the shorter, published version (473 pages, including index), he makes some trenchant observations, cataloging the strategic blunders made not only by the Bush and Obama administrations, but also by Osama bin Laden. The Al Qaeda leader, he writes, was warned by many associates not to launch the 9/11 attacks because the massive military response would deprive Al Qaeda of its safe haven and undermine its mission of creating an Islamic caliphate throughout much of the Muslim world. As a result, he said, Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are living on borrowed time, without a truly protected safe haven and a solid base of supporters around the world.

He was even more critical of U.S. officials, especially the Bush administration, for a lack of planning for back the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Foreign Policy, in fact, recently described the book as “a damning, step-by-step assessment of how a shadowy, often misinformed enemy managed to pull the world’s biggest superpower into a sometimes catastrophic and frequently damaging worldwide combat. So what have we learned from fighting this war? Bergen argues: Not as much as we should have.’’

During the question and answer period, I asked Bergen who was to blame for what he described as the American public’s skewed version of the two wars, especially the apocalyptic descriptions of the conflict in Afghanistan.

A veteran journalist himself and CNN national security analyst, Bergen was reluctant to blame the media for the fact that Americans aren’t necessarily getting a full picture of the two wars.

He and panel moderator Susan Glasser of Foreign Policy magazine suggested that a certain narrative has emerged for both wars that some, but not all, reporters tend to follow.

But, Bergen said, “If it’s not being well communicated to the American public that the Afghan war is nothing like the Iraq war, the media has to take some responsibility for that. The differences between Afghanistan and Iraq couldn’t be more stark.’’