One of the more irritating habits of some journalists is to describe a recent event as “little noticed.” By this they mean that they alone appreciate its significance and can exclusively reveal it to the world. Frequently, however, the event has in fact been reported elsewhere but these reports have gone “unnoticed” by the egocentric writer.A similar phenomenon has been occurring in a cascade of reports in the U.S. media about the so-called “forgotten war” in Afghanistan, the latest from macho military TV and print correspondent Oliver North in the Washington Times August 10.(“Report from a forgotten war.”) The word “forgotten” suggests that North's report from the ground in Afghanistan is boldly reintroducing Americans to a war that has vanished from their minds.
But who has actually “forgotten” the war in Afghanistan? Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama was there in a blaze of publicity last month, and his Republican rival John McCain has visited four times, most recently in March. A Nexis search reveals a deluge of reports alluding to this “forgotten war” in recent years. Does a constant diet of stories about a “forgotten” war cause people to forget it?
The Paris-based International Herald Tribune, owned by the New York Times, appears to be vaguely aware of the problem. It published a lengthy analysis of the war August 4, followed by another long piece on August 7 on the “forgotten war.” By August 8, the headline on the second story had been changed to “nearly forgotten.”
But the main point is that even if the war has been forgotten by many Americans, it has not been forgotten by the other countries fighting in Afghanistan, where it is a major and controversial political issue. There have been heated exchanges on troop contributions in the German, Dutch, Danish and Canadian parliaments. The war is constantly in the news in Britain and Canada, whose forces are engaged in heavy combat, and also in Australia. David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Opposition in Britain and very possibly the next prime minister, has said, “Afghanistan is our absolute Number 1 foreign-policy issue.” (“Going to the country”, Sunday Times Magazine, July 20, 2008).
The U.S. media frequently fail to mention that a large part of the Western effort in Afghanistan is a NATO operation and significant numbers of allied soldiers are dying there. North's piece is a typical example. He reports the war as if only Americans were fighting and wrongly describes it as “Operation Enduring Freedom.” But that is only the U.S.-led counter-terrorism effort. The NATO force in Afghanistan is known as ISAF (International Security Assistance Force). The United States has about 34,000 troops in Afghanistan (15,000 in ISAF and 19,000 in Enduring Freedom.) The other NATO allies have about 30,000 in ISAF. North's report, like those of others in the U.S. media, suggests that what is being forgotten is not the war but America's allies.
