When it comes to national security issues, everything is a lot more complex than it seems. That’s one of the major lessons I’ve learned during my time in Washington. What’s sometimes portrayed as a simple black-and-white situation often has a lot more nuance to it.
A perfect example is the current coverage of the insurgency in Afghanistan. Often the term “insurgents” and “Taliban” are used interchangeably. A recent BBC article reported: “Afghanistan’s most pressing challenge is the growing Taliban insurgency across the country.” What’s missed here is the fact that the insurgency in Afghanistan is composed of more than just the Taliban. It includes groups such as “the Haqqani network, foreign fighters (including al-Qaeda), Hezb-i-Islami, criminal organizations and some allied tribes and sub-tribes.”
In fact, according to Marc Sageman at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, even the Taliban is not a unified group. “The Taliban is deeply divided and there is no evidence that it is in the process of consolidating its forces for a push on Kabul.”
This is significant because saying a “Taliban insurgency is increasing” gives a completely different idea of the Afghanistan situation than saying “an insurgency composed of Afghan tribes is increasing.” The latter implies that the insurgency is a popular revolt, rather than a small, fanatical group trying to re-take power.
That’s not to say the insurgency is solely a popular revolt, but it is a complicated picture than the BBC article paints. The way the various factions are portrayed could have a major impact on public opinion in America regarding the U.S. role in Afghanistan. So it is not a small matter.
The question then is: Why is the reporting not to that level of detail? I think one of the main reasons is the sheer amount of information required to provide full context is too much to squeeze into a single article. It’s not practical to explain every detail in every single story.
Rather than using a formula that tries to explain everything, which too often means oversimplification, it seems that many reporters, therefore, decide to target the story to an audience with a certain amount of background knowledge about the subject.
So it is left up to the reporter to decide which information is required to tell each story to the targeted audience, and which can be left out. The decisions reporters make regarding what information to keep in or out will not always be correct, but it is exactly these decisions that make us journalists.