Afghanistan: Taking Apart the Latest "We're Routing the Taliban" Story
Saturday, October 23, 2010 at 7:17
On Wednesday, Carlotta Gall of The New York Times posted a glowing account of progress in the war against insurgents in southern Afghanistan, "
The unadulterated story of victory --- "The Taliban will have a hard time returning to areas they had controlled in the province that was their base" --- was accompanied by other cheers of We're Winning, almost nine years after the US had supposedly won in Afghanistan.
Specialist observers, however, thought that the real victory might be that of a propaganda offensive by the US military, and they were not ready to join in the celebration. Joshua Foust wrote, "This disconnect between military spin and ground reality is not only dangerous, it is insulting."
We asked EA's new Afghanistan correspondent David Fitzgerald to look over the evidence and give us an analysis.