GINIA BELLAFANTE Published: October 27, 2008
In early September Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee on the difficulties American forces face in Afghanistan. “It is my professional opinion that no amount of troops, in no amount of time, can ever achieve all the objectives we seek in Afghanistan,” he said. “Frankly, we’re running out of time.”
To watch “The War Briefing,” a “Frontline” documentary to be shown on Tuesday on most PBS stations, is to feel vividly the ticking of the clock.
Rigorously reported and somberly produced, “The War Briefing” is both a diagrammatic explanation of everything that has gone wrong over the past few years and a grim visual tour of a landscape that nature itself seems to have made impervious to the ambitions of outside occupiers. Factually the film reprises recent news reports (and includes commentary by journalists like Dexter Filkins of The New York Times) but at the same time it palpably delivers a sense of our narrowing options.
The film begins with “Frontline” reporters embedded with the Bravo Company, an Army unit battling assaults nearly every day in the Korengal River valley in northeastern Afghanistan. The territory is so vast, rugged and labyrinthine that Churchill, traveling with the British Army as a reporter in 1897, wrote it off as unconquerable. Soldiers live the horror and frustration of the maze, often unable to see the enemy.
“You can’t really pinpoint them,” one soldier says. “You just got to keep on scanning, keep your head on a swivel.”
The chilling effect of “The War Briefing” is to make American efforts in Afghanistan seem at once essential and futile, at least within the next few years. Military resources have been diverted from the war in Iraq — a country smaller than Afghanistan with four times the number of troops — but while both presidential candidates have committed to sending more forces to Afghanistan, commanders and analysts tell “Frontline” that extra support alone won’t sufficiently reduce violence or curtail the growth of terrorist strongholds in the region.
The government of President Hamid Karzai has been weak and largely ineffectual in expanding infrastructure and economic opportunity, the documentary points out. The border with Pakistan is porous and unmanageable, and it is in the tribal regions of Pakistan where Al Qaeda sanctuaries are thriving. Footage of the tribal violence in the border territory is gruesome (the results of a beheading are in full view) and more harrowing still, given the absence of bloody images of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as regular features of the evening news.
Moreover, the film makes it clear that seemingly sound tactical strategies in Afghanistan have only had the effect of belying larger goals. The terrain has made a heavy ground war next to impossible. But the air strikes mean heightened civilian casualties that, in turn, breed distrust, which makes necessary humanitarian efforts harder to achieve. “I don’t think that even the little kids like us,” one American soldier says in the film. “We try to help them out.”
The past year has been the deadliest yet for coalition forces in Afghanistan since the American-led invasion in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Emboldened by a flourishing opium trade, Taliban fighters have regrouped with the aid of Arab, Chechen and Uzbek militants traveling to the Afghan-Pakistani border and guiding the Taliban in advanced command strategies. And suicide bombings and roadside killings have increased, making once reasonably safe parts of the country outside Kabul now unviable.
As Michael Scheuer, a news analyst formerly with the C.I.A., puts it in the film: “We now have a country that’s infested with everything from the Taliban and Al Qaeda on the insurgency side, to bandits and warlords and narcotics traffickers. So you’re really fighting a beast with 100 heads.” And apparently we are fighting it with fewer than a handful of swords.
FRONTLINE
The War Briefing
On most PBS stations on Tuesday night (check local listings).
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