Afghan lives aren’t less important.
Throughout Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, coverage has framed the events in ways that undervalue Afghan lives.
One week before the U.S. finally withdrew its troops from Afghanistan, ending the 20-year-long war, the corporate press could not get enough of Afghan children. Or rather, the corporate press could not get enough of Afghan children being cradled, fed, and grabbed from crowds by U.S. troops. Such pictures were a theme of the U.S. military’s official social media accounts and establishment-friendly media boosted this framing of the military as a valiant force for good in the country and Afghan children as lives worthy of being shown to a large audience.
Then ISIS-K attacked Kabul Airport, resulting in the deaths of more than 90 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. service-members assisting the country’s evacuation effort. Shortly after this attack, Biden vowed revenge on the perpetrators and launched a drone strike which killed 7 children, the youngest of which was just 2 years old. It’s unlikely the U.S. government and corporate press will circulate these 7 children’s photos widely. Throughout Biden’s much covered withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, coverage from news outlets with the largest platforms have framed the war in a way that works to absolve the U.S. of guilt and devalue Afghan lives.
The first images of the evacuation to galvanize many of us in the United States were of Afghans clinging to and falling from U.S. planes leaving Kabul Airport on August 15. For many Americans, this was the first time in years, maybe more than a decade, that the war on Afghanistan was at the forefront of their minds. Being reintroduced to the war with such shocking imagery risked opening too many questions about the larger role of the U.S. military in the country. Since war relies on Americans having at least a passive assumption that our military is a force for good in the places it occupies, it was necessary for Americans to forget the chaos of the Kabul airport as soon as possible. Hence, the flood of feel-good stories and heart-warming pictures about U.S. troops evacuating Afghans.
In 2020, combined coverage of Afghanistan by ABC, CBS, and NBC made up just five minutes of programming. But these networks suddenly cared about the war when they had easy opportunities to depict the U.S. military as having concern for Afghan lives. CBS ran a fluff piece on an Afghan baby being named after the U.S. Military aircraft it was born on during an evacuation. ABC interviewed a U.S. contractor working desperately to get his Afghan collaborators out of the country. There was no such reporting on Afghan lives when the Pentagon relaxed its rules of engagement for airstrikes on Afghanistan in 2017–2019, resulting in the greatest rate of civilian casualties since the start of the war.
Then there were the Twitter accounts of the U.S. military and war-friendly outlets. Images of a marine giving drops of water to Afghan children or Afghan children playing soccer at a U.S. air base in Germany seek to bury the fact that the U.S. war on the country is the reason these children are now refugees and the country has such a long road ahead before its people can feed themselves without international aid. Also being buried is the fact that as an occupying military, some U.S. troops committed dehumanizing atrocities against the people of Afghanistan with little to no accountability.
Then came the suicide bombing on the Kabul Airport. Despite the larger number of victims of the attack being Afghan civilians — some of whom were killed by U.S. forces following the blast — outlet after outlet led with the news of the 13 U.S. troops killed. Some commentators neglected to mention at all that the attack killed dozens of Afghan civilians.
Some might argue that the U.S. press leads with the American troops killed because that’s what Americans are more likely to connect with. This argument is wrong for a few reasons. For one, it’s not the role of journalists to cater to an audience. It’s the role of journalists to report the facts as they are. The facts are that significantly more Afghan civilians died, so the larger number should be reported first. In choosing to depict the U.S. military which started the war as the greater victim of it, the press is choosing to fuel a culture of militarism which enables more war in the future, and as a result, more deaths of U.S. troops and civilians.
It’s also worth noting that when U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan were coming home from war with PTSD and amputations, the press never bothered to highlight those troops. That would have placed too much scrutiny on the war before the government was ready to end it. But now that the war is ending and Americans who usually tune out international news were given a glimpse of the devastation the U.S. caused, the press is working overtime to create a message that the loss of American lives is more tragic than the loss of Afghan lives.
Articles are now highlighting how many of the U.S. troops who died were proud to enlist in the military. For some it was “all they wanted” and they “loved their job.” Many of the U.S. troops who were killed in the attack were just infants when the war started. While most efforts for accountability for these troops’ deaths should be put on the military industrial complex and its politicians who sent these troops to war, there should also be scrutiny placed on the corporate press for its glorification of the role of the U.S. military and normalization of war following 9/11. Perhaps if joining the military wasn’t depicted by the press as such a great and noble act, these children might not have grown up in a culture which led them to view the military as their best life path and they might still be alive today.
It is also important for Americans to remember that while any death in war is tragic, deaths of troops in war should not overshadow civilian deaths. These civilians, many of whom are children, never even got to choose whether or not they’d be sent to war. Instead, the U.S. military made that decision for them and turned their lives into a constant state of violence and survival. Now as every U.S. outlet works to make sure as many people as possible know the names and faces of the 13 U.S. troops killed, the Afghan children killed in Biden’s “revenge” drone strike are getting no such honors. It is Afghans and other victims of U.S. imperialism who are circulating the names and faces of these children on social media. With Biden’s troop withdrawal finally complete, it is unlikely the press will stay focused on Afghanistan, leaving the U.S. voices who started the war to get the last say in what their role was and whose suffering deserves to be remembered.
