20-year-long war: media silence
U.S. withdrawal from 20-year-long war: takes over full news cycle
I have similar media frustrations with when the U.S. is first deciding whether to invade somewhere. Suddenly all this news comes out of nowhere with no actual context provided.
Sometimes I wonder how different the U.S. would be as a democracy if our media spent as much time on day-to-day international news as they currently spend on celebrity gossip.
As I alluded to at the start of this thread, I've been frustrated with the lack of context provided by American media on what's happening right now in Afghanistan.
This interview partially ameliorated my feeling of having no idea what's actually going on there: https://www.democracynow.org/2021/8/18/matthew_hoh_afghanistan_war#transcript
It might be of interest to anyone who is feeling similarly.
@dynamic Ted Rall has some good insight on Afghanistan. https://rall.com/ scroll down and there are three recent articles.
@lwriemen
Thanks. I didn't listen to the podcasts, but what I'm seeing in the two articles seems to focus heavily on U.S. policy. What I'm most interested in is insight into what the experience has looked like from the Afghan side, who the players are over there, how things have changed over time, etc. Has he written about those kinds of issues elsewhere on the internet?
For example, I dimly recall seeing an article (like 20+ years ago, pre-2001) about how prior to the rise of the Taliban, women had access to "Western"-style education and careers. The impression that stayed with me was that this was a real-world situation closely analogous to the experience of women in Margaret Atwood's _A Handmaid's Tale_. I'm sure I lost some details along the way, but I find myself cringing whenever I see a news story that makes it sound like the U.S.-supported Afghanistan government was the first time that women had access to education, etc.