This week I travel to Afghanistan to begin my fourth stint as an embedded reporter for Talk Radio News Service, Inc. Long-time readers may recall that I was on the USS Kitty Hawk during the Shock & Awe phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This was followed in 2005 by a stint with the Marines at Fallujah and in 2006 with the Army outside Buqubah. This time I’ll be reporting on the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division stationed near the Afghan city of Khost.

I’ll be producing several news products. First, I’ll be calling in to stations and networks served by Talk Radio News Service. Next, I’ll be blogging through the Afghan Journal, which will be posted to this website and updated as often as circumstances permit. My objective will be to chronicle the actual work of the 4th Brigade Combat Team. I will also be conducting interviews. My subjects will be just about any “important” person willing to talk. By important, I don’t mean merely top brass or politicians. Those who have followed my written work know that I have a keen interest in the folks who, in Civil War parlance, “make the machine run”–grunts, NCOs, chaplains, doctors of the mind and body, guys and gals who keep the vehicles running, weapons clean, and food on the table. I don’t speak Pashto, so unless I link with an interpreter, I’ll be limited to interviewing Afghans who speak English. All interviews will posted on the TRNS website as podcasts.

Serious consumers of news from Iraq and Afghanistan understand what soldiers, reporters and and onsite civil affairs personnel have long understood: these conflicts are essentially political and not military. Combat shares center stage with reconstruction, development, and something akin to plain old community policing. Thus to win a political war is place clean drinking water, 24/7 electrical power and plentiful food and health care on the same level with security. Warriors must serve as cops, contractors, city managers, and civil engineers. Of course, combat matters–the enemy is all too real. But these wars are actually won inside of power plants, sewage treatment facilities, courts of law, and schools. In short, soldiers must fight with both swords and plowshares.

A few promises. I’ve learned a lot since my first embed experience, beginning with an increasing disinclination to use the word “I” once in the field. What “I” may think about such and such is far less important than what in fact is happening or what the interviewee h/herself thinks. Next, reporting from the Middle East in particular has recently been pockmarked by instances of reportorial fraud: fake anecdotes, “fauxtography” and the use of local stringers with divided loyalties. I’ve gotten compulsive about sourcing stories: any experience that tends to the dramatic, counterintuitive or controversial will have real names attached, or I won’t run it. If I do source anonymously, I’ll state the reasons why I must do so, and will forgive any reader’s healthy skepticism. Finally, anything running under Afghan Journal will be as free from opinion as I can manage.

I do have a point of view. I am heartily biased against the Taliban and the kind of world to which they would like to return the Afghan people. However, it does not automatically follow that the Coalition or Afghan government, their strategies and tactics, personnel and execution, multinational coordination or relations with the Afghan people are efficient, well managed or wise. Embedded reporting has its limits in a political war–reporters may be at a distance from the objects of that war, the people whose loyalties are at stake. Nevertheless, “Being There” does not automatically render one a Chauncey “Chance” Gardener–there remains plenty to be seen, heard and thus reported.

One last matter. If any of you have any Afghanistan specific questions, feel free to post them as comments to the Afghan Journal. I’ll do my best to answer. Look for posts to begin sometime in early May. 

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