Washington Post: The Wars In Iraq And Afghanistan Were A Training Exercise To Get Bin Laden

You know, I understand that the media today mainly wants to dispute whether or not the Bush administration deserves some credit in the wake of the operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. After all, it's a hell of a lot easier than asking if the ongoing war in Afghanistan is actually worth it. But wow, Washington Post! This was an actual sentence that you guys put in the second paragraph of an actual news story!

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have forged a military so skilled that it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor complication.

What? Are you guys actually contending that the whole point to a long war in Afghanistan and a long war in Iraq was to hone the skills of a SEAL team so that they could carry out a single raid and kill a handful of people? That's just extraordinary, given that these operations cost trillions of taxpayer dollars, claimed the lives of thousands and thousands of people, and strained our armed forces to the breaking point by putting soldiers through stop-loss hell.

By the Post's explanation, those wars were just like training for the New York marathon, except that you kill a bunch of innocent people along the way, and the trainers never get to go home to see their wives and children. I imagine that the people of Canada are grateful that it never occurred to us that we could "train" for the raid on bin Laden's compound in a much more cost-effective way by attacking Toronto for ten years.

(The "minor complication," by the way, was the loss of a single helo in the raid on bin Laden's compound. I guess we should have had some more wars, for practice, so that mechanical failure could have been prevented.)

If you're thinking to yourself, "Well, maybe that article gets better after that minor bit of bald nonsense," I'm sorry to say that it doesn't. The reporters, Scott Wilson and Anne E. Kornblut, go on to generically describe the past 10 years as a period in which a lot of legal wrangling happened over detention policy and torture, not so that the reader might understand those policies or that period of time any better, but so the reporters could just shrug and discuss that whole decade of our lives as this totally weird time when everyone was fighting over those things.

Benjamin Wittes, the research director in public law at the Brookings Institution, said that “the executive branch does not fundamentally alter its nature when a presidency changes.”

“It’s very easy to focus on changes in interrogation guidance or standing detention authority,” Wittes said. “But the truth is three successive administrations have really made a priority out of capturing, finding and killing Osama bin Laden, and there’s a lot of continuity in that.”

Oh, sure. It's so easy to get caught up in a discussion over controversial practices that began in one administration, were campaigned against by that administration's successor, and then more or less accepted once that new president made his way to the White House. The serious thing to do is to put that period of our lives behind us, and just be glad we can imagine bin Laden's corpse.

And Wilson and Kornblut are nothing if not serious. So when they encounter "some Bush administration officials" who say that "harsh interrogation techniques... produced essential intelligence in the hunt for bin Laden," they happily scribble that down, even if their own reporting contradicts those contentions:

Some, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were subjected to harsh interrogation techniques, including the simulated drowning known as waterboarding, although it is not known whether the courier, whose nom de guerre was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, surfaced as a direct result of those sessions.

Four years later, after Bush banned waterboarding and closed the CIA black sites, detainee interrogations revealed the courier’s importance and led interrogators to think he might still be in contact with bin Laden.

It is unclear whether that information emerged under duress, but White House officials say it was only one piece of a vast intelligence effort that included surveillance, eavesdropping and other time-tested techniques.

It's actually not as "unclear" as they make it out to be, you just have to face it and report on it, as Spencer Ackerman does at WIRED Magazine's Danger Room ("Surveillance, Not Waterboarding, Led to bin Laden"), instead of taking an over-the-shoulder view of a decade of war and controversy as if it were now, finally, in our rear-view mirror.

But like I said, it's much easier to talk about what administration is "up" and what administration is "down," and who gets political credit for what decision than it is to have a frank discussion on whether the war was worth it. Hilariously, we need only cast our minds back to last year's Summer of WikiLeaks to remember that then, the media was just sort of stupefied at the entire idea that anyone was still curious about the war in Afghanistan. "Ho-hum!" they said, "Didn't you realize that the war wasn't going well?" As the editors of the Wall Street Journal put it:

Among the many nonscoops in the documents, we learn that war is hell, especially for infantry, and that sometimes troops make mistakes; that drone aircraft sometimes crash; that a forward U.S. base near the Pakistan border was ill-positioned to defend against Taliban attacks and had to be abandoned; and that many Afghan officials are corrupt and that Afghan troops flee often under fire. Any newspaper reader knew as much.

Far from being the Pentagon Papers redux, the larger truth is how closely the ground-eye view in these documents reinforces what U.S. officials were long saying: that the war wasn't going well, the Taliban were making gains, and a new and invigorated strategy was needed to combat them.

And Washington Post readers got the same message from their own Richard Cohen:

The news in that massive data dump provided by the dauntingly mysterious Wikileaks (who? what?) to one American and two European publications is that there is no news at all.

[...]

Indeed, what would have been major news is if these documents supported any optimism. That would have been a stunning reversal of what is fast becoming conventional wisdom: The war in Afghanistan cannot be won as winning is now defined -- defeat of the Taliban, eradication of al-Qaeda and the preservation of a functioning central government run by someone like our close friend and cherished ally, Hamid Karzai. This is not going to happen.

But now, the Post has spun on a dime to tell their readers that the war was always going well, because the whole long slog was all just a precursor to the "Geronimo" mission. And as they pivot to this new position, the controversy of the last decade, bridged across two administrations, is just captured as a puzzling time in our lives that had everybody all worked up, and which leaves questions behind. Will those questions ever be addressed? The Post all but signals their intentions: We'll leave it there.

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