Prejudice Western Media
As a suicide bomber struck an Afghan-NATO patrol thuggishly in the Afghan city of Khost on Wednesday, the embedded western media dutifully reminded the audience that “this eastern city is close to the border with Pakistan”. But so what? Isn’t many a Canadian and Mexican city close to the border with the United States of America? Doesn’t each and every country all over the world has cities of its neighbouring countries close to its borders?
Then, what if Khost is near Pakistan’s border? The intent of saying this is, of course, more than obvious. It is to drive home the impression that the suicide thug travelled down from sanctuaries of the Afghan Taliban that the failed commanders of the coalition armies in Afghanistan have been claiming ad nauseam exist in Pakistan. For years, the conformist western corporate media networks in deference to the wishes of their handlers of the coalition armies have been religiously rubbing this point of proximity in their reporting on the Afghan war persistently.
But will this fraudulent reporting of the corporate western media salvage the virtually lost Afghan war for the coalition armies’ war commanders and their political bosses? Certainly it would not, as didn’t their tendentious reporting save the Vietnam War for the American military commanders and their political bosses. Even then, the American war leaders sold the hogwash to the western media that the problem was not South Vietnam but the sanctuaries of Viet Cong guerrillas in Laos and Cambodia.
And the western media chewed it unquestioningly and peddled this canard on its network with worldwide reach. The declassified US documents clearly lay bare the hard fact that both the American military and intelligence knew that the Vietnamese insurgency was predominantly indigenous enjoying widespread public support, particularly in the countryside. But they kept this harsh reality under wraps all through the war and kept selling the fiction of Ho Chi Minh trail to the western media that parroted it out word-for-word on its networks.
None questioned this feed. None bothered to investigate independently the US military’s contrivance of dubbing Cambodia and Laos as the conduits of the North Vietnamese military infiltration and supplies in South Vietnam and as the sanctuaries of the Viet Cong guerilla fighters. For pretty long, the western media kept a blanket blackout of even the insensate massive American bombing of Cambodia and Laos, with which it pulverised the two poor tiny South-East Asian states savagely. The coverage later was wholly based on the American military spokesmen’s briefings.
Even the exposure of the My Lai massacre of some 500 innocent children, women and elderly South Vietnamese by the American army was no feat of any investigative western media reporting. The beans on the terrible mass murder and rape was spilled by three American servicemen who had tried to prevent this mass slaughter and rape, and who, incidentally, were very severely denounced by a large number of US congressmen as traitors.
Pakistan is now going the same way at the hands of the corporate western media. As the whole of reporting on the Afghan war by this media behemoth is embedded journalism, truth is getting smothered to put out to the world what the America and NATO commanders want to tell the world. And these are ruses, hoaxes and lies that they have to peddle and disseminate. Since they have picked on Pakistan as the scapegoat of their lack of soldiering and fighting and their collapses and debacles in the Afghan war, in the storm’s eye is this country in this corporate media.
Obviously at the behest of their military handlers, they describe an Afghan city or a region miles away from Pakistan as in its close proximity. And without raising an eyebrow, they lovingly lap up their handlers’ funny brief that “Afghan insurgents based in Pakistan’s tribal area” had hit a target as far away as Kabul, Herat or in the north that would take more than a day to travel. But so conformist has turned this embedded journalism of the corporate western media in Afghanistan that it glosses over truths that are not so ancient as to remember.
Its networks have only to look into their archives that even when the Soviet invaders occupied Afghanistan, eastern Afghanistan was a strongly-held lair of Jalaluddin Haqqani. And he was among the deeply-revered mujahideen commanders of the American warlords as well as the western media all through America’s proxy war against the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan to avenge its Vietnam humiliation. Indeed, they will be amazed to find how many times had they parodied the American war leaders and described Jalaluddin affectionately as “the human nobleness personified”.
The fact is that eastern Afghanistan was the Haqqanis’ unshakeable stronghold then; and it is their invincible stronghold now. All that talk of its bases in Pakistan’s tribal areas is just a tuck-shop gossip, a fiction that cannot change an immutable reality. Had indeed this corporate western media been a bit honest and independent in its reporting, probably the coalition armies would have been not in such a soup as are they now in Afghanistan. They would have fought on the ground, not on the media wavelengths.
