Afghanistan - Journalism

A Canadian soldier in Afghanistan radios for assistance while others attend a fallen comrade. (Reuters photo)

Reporters Without Borders has a highly critical report on the dangerous occupation of being a journalist in Afghanistan. Recently, there has been an increase of violence against the Press in Afghanistan. President Karzai is doing very little to help combat it, and in addition, RWB reports international military forces are also guilty of obstructing the work of independant journalists. In other words, the public's ability to gauge the success rate of the international effort, is extremely compromised.

One must remember, reports from 'official', embedded journalists are highly edited by the military, and/or Defense Department. They are created to be Government-friendly. As we can presume, they can offer little to the public in way of a firsthand testimony as to how they perceive who's actually 'winning', or how  the overall international forces strategy really is working out. I say this for good reason, since on one hand, Pakistan continues to accept money and arms from the U.S., but then turns around and protects it's Taliban controlled Tribal Region. A no-win situation. Good for arms sales though...