Okay, so here is why it is so difficult for the US to win wars in this part of the world. Between a people so willing to believe the first lie told (especially if it villifies American soldiers) and a press so mind-numbed and incapable of actual investigation into their own stories, it is truly impossible to get a leg up on the information wars over here. Here is the real story - but don't believe it if you really think the Taliban, killers of innocent men women and children everywhere they've ever been. (Feel free to read the inept media reporting here, first: UGH! or you can read the slightly better, but still errant and unthinking recitation of random "facts" here: BLECH!)
So I rolled with our guys the other day into Asadabad to help investigate the explosion of a grenade in a crowded shopping district in downtown. When we arrived, stories were already going around that the grenade had been thrown by American soldiers, allegedly in order to "disperse the crowds" that had gathered around an MRAP that had high-centered on a center barrier. (Let's dispense with Fact One: US Soldiers do NOT, and never have, used grenades on innocent civilian crowds as a means of dispersal.)
I had actually been at the trauma center at Camp Wright, next to Asadabad (A-bad, as it's called here), when the first casualty rolled in. It was a 14-year-old boy that had some pretty severe shrapnel wounds, possibly the same one mentioned in the NY Times story. Fact Two: OUR docs worked on many of the injured. When our team arrived in town, there were crowds of easily 300-400 in the two block perimeter around the point of detonation. We were working under the assumption that the grenade had likely been lobbed from a rooftop, but the ANP (Afghan National Police) were already helping spread the rumor - that came from no known source - that the soldiers attending the stalled MRAP had thrown the grenade.
The investigation turned up the spoon from a Russian hand grenade (amazingly, as reported in the NYT story - too bad they didn't find that out when they FIRST reported it the day of the incident) at a location on the other side of the MRAP from the explosion (Fact Three). Clearly, unless you are a hip conspiracy theorist, it is quite unlikely that an American threw a Russian grenade. Who uses Russian grenades? Oh, well that would be the BAD guys, the Taliban!
By the next morning, video from a camera was on the internet showing the entire incident. (See the video, and an excellent, corrective article on the incident here: YAY!) As we looked at it we noticed a few things. 1) Poor security by the team dealing with the high-centered MRAP. 2) A group of four or five soldiers huddled on the near, driver's side of the vehicle, just about 20-30 feet from where the grenade would soon go off in a crowd of about 30 people. 3) Most interestingly, a man in a blue "man-dress" sprints off in the upper right corner of the video just about 2 seconds before the detonation. His direction of travel and time puts him within a second or two from the location where the grenade spoon was found, approximately on the other side of the MRAP. This makes him, the ONLY person running from the scene BEFORE the explosion, a very likely suspect, who might have tossed the grenade over the MRAP (possibly targeting the troops massed at the driver's side), causing it to bounce past the troops and into the nearby crowd. So, if he threw it, he passed by the camera at exactly the right amount of time before a grenade he tossed would've cooked off before detonating. After this you see the hundreds of onlookers scattering.
Anyhow, at the same time we were releasing the video, the provincial council chair (allegedly our ally) was announcing that US troops had thrown the grenade, according to witnesses. Of course, over here what passes as a witness is someone who thinks it might have happened that way, whether or not they were actually in the province at the time. Score one for the insurgents - they got a story out well before we did and the town just took it for granted that the evil soldiers, who, by the way, have spent millions improving their little town, must have done this nefarious thing. Let's not take a look at the Taliban track record on human rights violations and suicide bombings at schools, hospitals and shopping areas.
Oh, and let's look at the FIFTY-FOUR "wounded" by the blast. First of all, there weren't 54 people in the immediate vicinity of the blast that didn't include the soldiers. The soldiers weren't hit, their vehicle wasn't hit and a car next to which the grenade blew up within a couple of feet wasn't hit. Sadly, a young boy was killed by it and another boy, I believe a relative of his, was standing on the other side of him and was only slightly injured. The young boy and another casualty apparently shielded much of the crowd from the effects of the grenade. Also, grenades don't typically have the power to injure more than a few people at a time, perhaps up to 10 in a tight space. If you watch the way people ran from the scene, it is likely that many of the wounded showed up at the hospital with injuries from fleeing! Many might have shown up simply for the money the Americans would pay for their injuries to try to assuage the Afghan anger. (No, really, this happens all the time here.)
The tragedy is two-fold here. The Taliban kills more innocent people and leaves many other maimed. The Taliban also gets people to believe that we did something so inane no soldier would ever consider it. And we lose the information war to a bunch of thugs, killers and theives. The good Americans, many of whom are laying down their lives daily to protect these people from the rages of Taliban fanaticism and despotism, are painted as evil - not only blatantly by the local leaders, but subtly by our own press, who does not even investigate before running with stories I'm sure they got in their anti-Viet Nam war days.
If we're ever to win this war - or any other in this war on terror, for that matter - we truly need an ally in the press. We don't have one currently. It's fine, I guess, for the West, now that the "facts" are entering the media mainstream, two days belated. However, in the mind of the Afghani, that is two days too late. The first story that came out and was poured forth on Al Jazeera is the Truth for them. Very little will convince them otherwise now. Thanks again, press. Thanks, Military Department and Administration for confessing and apologizing about the air strikes weeks ago, rather than investigating and showing that the Taliban puts those people in harm's way in order to get this kind of info victory.
If we don't get some competence and truth from the press and our own leadership, we won't win this war. We'll keep backpeddling until it is clear that the Taliban is a better source for at least a version of the truth than we will ever be. Get your burkahs and put away your kites, people of Afghanistan.
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