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The media as a security threat
Call it strange or call it symptomatic. These last weeks, Afghan War commander General David Petraeus has been on a "media blitz." He's been giving out interviews as if they were party favors. Yet, as far as I can tell, not a single interviewer has asked him anything like: "General Petraeus, twenty percent of Pakistan, which supposedly harbors Osama bin Laden and various militant groups involved in the Afghan War, and whose intelligence agency reportedly has an ongoing stake in the Afghan Taliban, is now underwater. Roads, bridges, railway lines, and so U.S. supply lines have been swept away. How do you expect this cataclysm to affect the Afghan War in the short and long term?"
In these last weeks, the Afghan War has once again been front-page news. Yet only a single reporter -- the heroic Carlotta Gall of the New York Times -- has thought to focus on the subject of how the Biblical-style floods in Pakistan might affect the U.S. war effort and the overstretched supply lines that play a major role in supporting U.S. troops there. While you could learn about rising violence in Afghanistan, the perilous state of the Kabul Bank, and many other subjects, reporting on the floods and the war has been nil, with even speculative pieces on the subject largely nonexistent.