Tag Archives: counterinsurgency

War Reporting: How to live and tell the tale

WASHINGTON–The War on Terror continues to claim the lives of soldiers, innocent civilians, and journalists. Safety training experts say war reporters have a lot to learn about protecting themselves while trying to get their story.  

“Too many times journalists are the only professionals on the battlefield or in a disaster zone quite unprepared for what they are going to encounter,” said Rodney Pinder, director of the International News Safety Institute. “International journalists do not appreciate the risks and local journalists have neither the means nor the opportunity to access safety training,” he said.

Since the start of the War on Terror, hundreds of journalists have died trying to cover the war. In 2010 alone, 46 journalists have been killed trying to report in hostile environments, including Iraq and Afghanistan. When compared to the Vietnam War, which claimed about 70 news media lives, these numbers reported by the INSI are shocking.

“Those who target journalists are professional killers – we need to be as professional in protecting ourselves,” said Pinder, adding that  hostile environment training can potentially save the lives of journalists, and help them save the lives of others.

INSI is an organization dedicated to the safety of­ journalists working in dangerous environments. Its goal is to “help journalists survive the story” by raising funds to provide training for free to journalists in need. Training programs come in around $3,000 a week and can seem cost prohibitive to freelance reporters. The program teaches journalists about the many aspects of personal safety, pre-deployment planning, conflict management, hostile crowd situations, ballistic awareness, safety from fire-arms, passage through checkpoints, coping with kidnapping, and basic first aid skills.

Technological innovation and smaller, lighter equipment, has made war reporting more dangerous than ever before. Now, more and more reporters are covering the news from the front lines, including camera operators. 

“Those in the military like reporters who­ embed in the battlefield because it establishes a trust between the media and those deployed, said Dr. Conrad Crane, lead author for the U.S. Army Manual on Counterinsurgency and director of the US Army Military History Institute, a part of the Army War College.

To live up to the networks standards of immediacy, fortifying this trust relationship between reporters and the military is necessary. But consequently, a reporter’s­ safety is often at risk­. However, despite how dangerous war reporting can be, it is an essential job that someone must do.

“Our job is to keep the outside world informed. Wars must not, cannot, be conducted in secret,” said Pinder. He believes that transparency in war reporting holds “the government and military accountable. Our reporting counters their spin and reveals actions they would like to keep secret,” said George Espers, a veteran Gulf War and Vietnam War reporter.

 “[War reporters are] the unsung heroes behind most of the news footage we see on our screens every day,” according to Pinder on the institute’s website.

 Being in a war zone is dangerous for anyone, but reporters can take certain steps to educate themselves before entering a combat zone. INSI is just one of many organizations dedicated to the safety of journalists. But at the end of the day, how to proceed successfully often relies on common sense.  

 “There is no guarantee in War. . . .Ask yourself, is this story worth the risk? No story is worth getting killed for,” said Espers.

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Will the U.S. effort to buy off Afghan locals ever work?

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military appears to be realizing the limits of the “buy and hold” counterinsurgency strategy that it used so successfully in Iraq as it struggles to gain local support in Afghanistan.

U.S. Marines have pumped millions of dollars into the Marja agricultural district in southern Afghanistan, either as compensation for damages or to pay off military-aged males so they don’t join the Taliban. But as The New York Times detailed in an article earlier this month, the strategy is riddled with problems and unproven assumptions. Locals who take the money in good faith are often beaten by Taliban forces, the article states, while others use the funds to purchase automatic rifles for insurgents.

Not that this comes as a surprise to many experts within the U.S. national security community.

“There’s an enormous moral hazard. What you’ve basically done is created a class of rent seekers,” lining up for free money from Washington, said C. Christine Fair, an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s security studies program and former  political officer to the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan in Kabul. “­You’re trading off some presumed level of security today for less security tomorrow.”

Defense Department officials say the practice, which has been employed for several years, is not a security trade-off but rather a way of building long-term stability. But they have yet to answer a fundamental question posed by many counterinsurgency experts: what happens when the United States leaves and the money stops flowing?

The goal in the Afghanistan theater still is to produce some system of governance that keeps militant radicals out of Kabul without a potentially antagonizing public show of American troop support – a near impossibility given the country’s history, some experts said.

The best-case scenario would be to create a government seat in Kabul, the Afghan capital, but also have urban areas with loose agreements with provincial leaders, said Seth Jones, an Afghanistan policy expert for the Rand Corporation. Jones, the author of “In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan,’’ has led numerous projects on stability operations and counterterrorism for the Department of Defense, FBI and the U.S. intelligence community.

“The question becomes how to deal with local actors,” said Jones. He added that development projects have proven successful in the past, but that they need to be done by local leaders such as Hajji Abdul Zahir, Marja’s newNATO-backed governor. ­

As the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan nears the 10-year mark, Washington continues to struggle with identifying any successful, or even promising, alternatives. Military brass have repeatedly stated that any long-term strategy will be based in local support and cooperation, but there is no indication that U.S. troops have gained the kind of widespread credibility on the ground that they need to achieve that.

In addition, there needs to be accountability built into the Pentagon strategy—especially given all of the U.S. taxpayer money being spent, Georgetown’s Fair said.

“These guys are never held responsible for conducting an evaluation of this program,” she said. “Just because they’re taking money from you, doesn’t mean they’re not taking money from the Taliban.”

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