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Posted on 12/24/2001 3:46:53 AM PST by tom paine 2

NEW YORK -- On Oct. 27, six days after the U.S. escalated the bombing of Taliban front lines, National Public Radio senior news analyst Daniel Schorr was pessimistic. "This is a war in trouble," he said during the "Weekend Edition" show.

On Oct. 31, the New York Times's R.W. Apple Jr. compared the war in Afghanistan to the U.S. experience in Vietnam. "Signs of progress are sparse," the newspaper's chief correspondent wrote in a news analysis.

"There does not appear to be a political force capable of replacing the Taliban," said staff editorial writer Jacob Heilbrunn in the Los Angeles Times on Nov. 4.

Five days later, the strategically important city of Mazar-e-Sharif fell to Northern Alliance troops aided by U.S. bombing sorties. The army overran Kabul a few days later. Three weeks after that, the Taliban's southern stronghold of Kandahar was taken. In Bonn, Germany, various anti-Taliban forces from Afghanistan were negotiating a deal to set up an interim government.

As was the case with some off-base guesswork in the early phase of the Gulf War, the American media were significantly off-target on Afghanistan. Analysts and commentators widely declared the Northern Alliance was a ragtag band with no chance against superior Taliban forces supported by the local population. They said U.S. air power couldn't be effective in a mountainous country like Afghanistan. They said bombing would inflame the Muslim world, especially Pakistan. They said the faction-ridden Afghans would never be able to form a government.

"The press likes to talk about Vietnam syndrome as it affects generals, but it affects reporters more," says Michael Kelly, editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

The pessimism was also striking in an Oct. 18 article in The Wall Street Journal datelined Peshawar, Pakistan. "Opposition Afghan leaders trying to fashion an anti-Taliban uprising say U.S.-led bombing has seriously undermined their efforts," the article began, going on to say: "Instead of a thankful Afghan population, popular support for the Taliban appears to be solidifying and anger with the U.S. growing. And rather than a relatively quick Taliban collapse, the U.S. may have to settle for continued governance by the movement, perhaps shorn of its top two or three leaders."

After Kabul fell in mid-November, Mr. Apple noted the shift in mood. "What a difference a week makes," he wrote on Nov. 16 under the heading "Letter From Washington." In an interview, Mr. Apple says his late-October column was "unduly pessimistic, but it was a reflection of the state of mind at the time. This is journalism, not history."

Paul Steiger, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, says, "The article accurately reflected what people on the ground in and around Afghanistan felt the day it was written. We can all be grateful that their pessimism proved wrong."

The errors in judgment are one reason U.S. news organizations, almost alone among American institutions, have seen their reputation slide since Sept. 11. According to a study by the Pew Research Center that was released in late November, the percentage of those surveyed who thought media coverage of "the war on terrorism" has been excellent declined to 30% in mid-November from 56% in mid-September. Pew is an independent research group that studies public attitudes on the press and politics.

The cautious military briefings of the first weeks along with limited access to the front lines made writing about the war in its early stages particularly hard. For a generation of reporters rooted in Vietnam and Watergate and now supplying much of the analysis and commentary, skepticism and distrust of Washington are the norm. Memories of deceit and failure breed pessimism, and can make experts misfire.

The war has also brought some first-rate journalism. Reporters have made accurate early calls on how the war would be fought, its unconventional nature and the problems of finding al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the south. There has been courageous reporting from the front lines, and the war has already claimed the lives of eight journalists.

It will take a comprehensive review of the media's war coverage to reach a definitive assessment of how the press performed. And that awaits an end to a war that, despite major victories and gains, has yet to achieve its principal goals of capturing the al Qaeda leader and his Taliban counterpart and shutting down the terrorism network.

Before the war proved them wrong, the press forged a variety of judgments that traded well on the media's exchange of stock notions and became pervasive. Reporters and commentators are already confessing their mistakes. Some concede knowing little about Afghanistan and international terrorism.

What follows are five of the most pervasive myths that permeated discussion of the battle for Afghanistan in newspapers and on TV and radio.

Myth #1: History repeats itself.

The failure of British and Soviet excursions into Afghanistan spells doom for American involvement, too. The U.S., as it did in Vietnam, will get bogged down in a quagmire, struggling on unfamiliar terrain to fight nimble guerrilla forces.

In the weeks following Oct. 7, when U.S. and British military forces began dropping bombs on Afghanistan but before the first significant military victory, commentators began to speak darkly about the war's progress. Like Mr. Apple, some raised the specter of Vietnam, noting that for all the bombs dropped on that country, successes were rare. Barely a day went by without a newspaper recording the views of Russian veterans of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

"Now, like the British and Russians before him, [President Bush] is facing the most brutish, corrupt, wily and patient warriors in the world, nicknamed dukhi, or ghosts, by flayed Russian soldiers who saw them melt away," wrote Maureen Dowd on Oct. 28 in her New York Times column on the op-ed page. A few days later, Mr. Heilbrunn in the Los Angeles Times declared the first round of the war a failure: "The United States is not headed into a quagmire; it's already in one."

An assistant to Ms. Dowd, Marc Santora, says the column wasn't pessimistic and was supposed to suggest that defeating the Taliban forces would require a "severe amount of force." Mr. Santora says there was a "moment of hesitation" in Washington that the column was designed to overcome.

Mr. Heilbrunn says he still isn't convinced that there is a viable political regime in place, especially if it doesn't have strong Western support. But he acknowledges that his earlier view was "too saturnine. It may not be completely wrong, but I thought the Northern Alliance was a fairly fictitious force that would inevitably begin to feud." And now? "I am cautiously optimistic, but that could be proven wrong, too."

One of the most prominent exponents of the quagmire theory was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and former adviser to President Kennedy. In a Nov. 2 op-ed piece in London's Independent newspaper, Mr. Schlesinger said perhaps U.S. military brass "should have reflected on Vietnam." He added, "We dropped more tons of explosives on that hapless country than we dropped on all fronts during the second world war, and still we could not stop the Vietcong."

In an interview, Mr. Schlesinger says he underestimated improvements in military technology, especially the ability to drop bombs with increased accuracy. "I rejoice that I was wrong," Mr. Schlesinger says, adding that U.S. experience in Afghanistan, coupled with the rapid success against Iraq a decade earlier, could put to rest the specter of Vietnam.

Myth #2: The Taliban regime is popular.

With support in the countryside, especially among the southern Pashtuns, the Taliban can call on an army imbued with religious fervor. Because the Taliban brought law and order, the populace embraced the regime's restrictions.

Within the U.S., few were able to agree on how many troops the Taliban had at its disposal. On CNBC, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey put the number at 45,000 during comments on Geraldo Rivera's former TV show "Rivera Live!" on Nov. 5. The Wall Street Journal said 60,000 in a news story on Nov. 20. The Pentagon hasn't released an official estimate.

In the weekly New York Observer, freelance columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote a 1,500-word critique of the U.S. effort entitled, "Why Are We in Afghanistan?" The Nov. 19 piece said, "We are mapless, we are lost, and we are distracted by gusts of wishful thinking," to believe Afghans would switch sides so easily. "Moreover, as hellish as the Taliban are, it appears that the ordinary people of Afghanistan prefer them to the brigands and bandits with whom we've been trying to make common cause."

The week the column appeared, gleeful Kabul residents shaved their beards and displayed posters of Indian movie stars to show their delight in being rid of the Taliban. Mr. von Hoffman says he still thinks declaring war was a bad idea -- because "there is by definition no way to say you've won" -- but also pleads ignorance.

"Nobody knew anything about Afghanistan, myself included," Mr. von Hoffman says. "It turns out there really wasn't an army there. Turns out we probably still are clueless." He conceded that "in the prediction business, ... you almost never get it right."

Myth #3: High-altitude bombing won't work.

There are too few targets. And bombing could turn major cities into death-traps for special-operation forces.

The use of air power was a significant component of U.S. victories in Iraq and Kosovo, but its use in Afghanistan was immediately criticized by commentators from both ends of the political spectrum. On the right, Charles Krauthammer wrote in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post of Oct. 30 that the war was going poorly because it "has been fought with half-measures." Why, he asked, had the U.S. "not loosed the B-52s and the B-2s to carpet-bomb Taliban positions?" William Pfaff, in the biweekly New York Review of Books of Nov. 29, wrote that the bombing was creating too many humanitarian problems, such as refugees.

Mr. Krauthammer says he was 100% correct. After the intensity of front-line bombing was increased, victories came to the Northern Alliance and as a result other Afghans flocked to the anti-Taliban cause, he notes. The column "was prescient and had an effect," Mr. Krauthammer adds. Mr. Pfaff says in an e-mail message that he was skeptical about the war-winning capacities of special forces, "having once been one of them myself, a long time ago. Obviously I was wrong."

William Arkin, an NBC News military analyst and former Army intelligence analyst, went on CNBC on Oct. 10 and told Mr. Rivera: "I think sooner or later we're going to have to bite the bullet and get in there in a big way or we're going to have to admit some kind of a defeat." Oct. 29, Mr. Arkin told Mr. Rivera that 70 bombing missions a day in a place the size of Texas weren't having the desired effects on the ground. He told Chris Matthews of CNBC's "Hardball" on Oct. 23 that the war could last "into the winter, and beyond."

Mr. Arkin in an interview says he was reflecting the mood of his sources at the time. "I'm doing reporting here and people seemed to be nervous and disgruntled about the way the war was going and that's something that needs to be aired," he says. Mr. Arkin says he still thinks air power is an ineffective way to secure the ultimate goal of killing or capturing Taliban leader Mohammed Omar or Mr. bin Laden. "Look, did anyone question whether we were ultimately going to win? No. The question was how are we going to win and how long is it going to take?"

Given that neither of the two leaders has been captured more than three months after Sept. 11, Mr. Arkin says his critique is still appropriate.

Myth #4: The Afghans will make bad allies.

The ragtag Northern Alliance, which controls only 10% of the country through a loose and fractious affiliation of tribal leaders, won't be able to unite and fight the Taliban. In addition, the antipathy between tribes from the north and south will keep them from forming a unified administration.

An article in the Nov. 12 Newsweek described a demoralized Northern Alliance unit wearing running shoes, eating rice, beans and scraps of mutton, and with no easy ways to communicate. Jon Meacham, Newsweek's managing editor, says the article "reflected the reality on the ground at the time and raised questions a lot of people were wondering about in Washington and Afghanistan."

The Washington-based New Republic magazine offered one of the gloomier assessments. "Of all the proxies the United States has enlisted over the past half-century, the Northern Alliance may be the least prepared to attain America's battlefield objectives," the magazine said in an unsigned editorial that ran in the Nov. 19 edition but was written much earlier. Instead, the magazine called for ground troops as the only way of taking Kabul.

Peter Beinart, the New Republic's editor, says the Northern Alliance's change in fortunes came only after the U.S. started bombing Taliban front lines with the help of special-operations troops on the ground in mid-October. Mr. Beinart, though, concedes that the magazine underestimated the Northern Alliance's capabilities.

Doubts on government building appeared in the Los Angeles Times of Oct. 26. A headline noted in part that "U.S. airstrikes are seen as damaging to political goals, and attempts to form a government are called overly ambitious."

Even after the fall of Kabul, panelists on CNN's "Larry King Live" on Nov. 23 were pessimistic about the chances of forming a unified government. "I think we have to be very careful, Larry, not to get our hopes up," cautioned one of the panelists, Bob Schieffer, host of CBS News's "Face the Nation." Mr. Schieffer says in an interview, "I think I meant we had to be patient." He adds that there probably will still be problems in establishing a viable government in Afghanistan. "We will know when we have won, but we are not there yet." Indeed, the formation of an Afghan government remains a work in progress.

Myth #5: The Muslim world will boil over.

The U.S. will outrage Muslims the world over and cause the masses to rise up, toppling leaders like Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. The furor will also send the Persian Gulf states into turmoil. President Bush's comments about capturing Mr. bin Laden "dead or alive" will only deepen the anger.

It remains to be seen whether the cooperation the U.S. quickly wove together with many Muslim nations will fray if the war on terror drags on or sparks a backlash in any of the nations loosely tied to the U.S. effort. But some commentators saw an immediate threat that hasn't yet materialized.

What are the real-world consequences of the campaign, asked columnist Katha Pollitt, in the Nov. 19 issue of the Nation, a left-leaning magazine. "Thousands of new Taliban fans and recruits for anti-American suicide missions? A protracted war with a determined, hardy foe that draws in Central Asia, enrages the Muslim masses and destabilizes Pakistan or Indonesia or another country to be named later?"

Ms. Pollitt says in an interview that it's a good tactic to be cautious, especially about war and foreign policy, and that "a lot of innocent people" have been killed so far. "Nobody knows the future, but I don't think we've seen the end of the story. People are talking about war on Iraq."

In an Oct. 15 commentary on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," Mr. Schorr, the senior news analyst, said, "Whatever success the Anglo-American alliance is having pounding the Taliban into dust, it's having little success winning the hearts and minds of Islamic peoples." He noted anti-American rioting from Nigeria to Indonesia. "Most alarming of all, anti-American feeling is rising in Pakistan, where the Taliban came from, threatening the stability of the Musharraf regime," he said.

"I had to eat a little crow," Mr. Schorr says in an interview. "I have never been in Afghanistan and know nothing about Pashtuns and the rest of it." Mr. Schorr, who worked with legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow at CBS News, says this war has been harder than most to understand because it's not a conventional fight against a country and its government. He says his view was also influenced by the instinctive distrust of government, and in particular the military, typical in his generation of reporters.

That could now change, Mr. Schorr says, although he is wary of predicting that. "I don't want to predict how anything else will come out," he says.

Write to Matthew Rose at matthew.rose@wsj.com

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