What am I missing here?

Okay. I gotta admit. I don't understand. Why is it that reporting from Afghanistan that involves casualties over the last few months always reads something like:

Militant Attacks in Afghanistan Kill 25

Yikes! Sounds pretty bad, eh? Let's look a little bit deeper into the numbers, shall we?

The killings [thirteen of those killed were insurgents, by the way...] follow three months of unprecedented fighting that has killed about 477 suspected insurgents, 47 Afghan police and soldiers, 134 civilians, and 45 U.S. troops, including 16 troops killed in a helicopter crash earlier this week.

Right. So what the numbers tell us is something more like this: the insurgents are getting their asses handed to them on a regular basis by the Afghan army and police. Civilians are being killed...but we are given no context for comparison with last year...and little context regarding who is doing the killing and who is getting killed. Afghanistan has ALWAYS been violent. The difference THIS year is that insurgents are getting routinely pounded - mostly by a well-trained (although still small) Afghan national army. SOMEhow those facts don't get into the story (if at all...) until about paragraph 9 of a 10 paragraph story. Am I surprised? Of course not. This is the same press pool that thinks suicide bombers and IEDs scattered across Iraq indicate a stronger insurgency than last year when US patrols were routinely being engaged by platoon-size or larger forces of insurgents. The insurgency has been forced back to a terror campaign. Yes, it is an EFFECTIVE terror campaign, but it is still indicative of their relative weakness when compared to last year. What the terrorists have REALLY mastered is manipulation of the media by staging limited numbers of spectacular attacks that are easy for reporters to cover. Reporters love a big boom and a quick story...and they love to second-guess the military. What they DON'T like is face the fact that sometimes the military really IS reporting the ground truth.

Update:

Here's yet another example of what I'm talking about. "Fighting leaves twenty dead in Afghanistan." Oh...by the way, that's 18 insurgents and 2 Afghan soldiers. Thanks for the descriptive title, guys.

Tags:

Afghanistan
Iraq
Insurgency
Media bias