1. Blowing their noses. Afghans seem to have an unshakeable dread of facial tissue. So they will sniff and sniff and sniff until the flow stops, which can take hours.

2. Entering ahead of a guest. No matter how long you work with Afghans, they always wait for you to pass first through a door or gate. Sometimes they are downright adamant about it, so it’s best to just nod, smile and comply.

3. Taking small portions in a buffet. Our Afghan staffers eat three meals a day at the same dining hall, but they treat every visit as their first and perhaps last. They wander around studying the selections, then pile enough food on their plates to feed a small army. Lucky for them, there are only big armies here.

4. Eating at a table. Sometimes they have to, but they don’t like it. They prefer sitting on the floor. For every mealtime in our office, five or six guys would squeeze into the only open floor space, sit in a circle and eat with their hands from their plate and all the others. Any leftovers (a rarity) would go into the fridge, where they would languish and eventually evolve into new life forms.

5. Speaking in a normal voice on a cell phone. The Afghans don’t have a monopoly on this, but they are world-class practitioners. They seem to believe that yelling is the antidote for a bad signal or an inferior phone. Their lungs are as leathery as their skin.

6. Safe driving. Afghans have a simple driving philosophy—go until something or someone forces you to stop. And just as nature abhors a vacuum, Afghan drivers abhor a gap. Someone will always fill it, usually in competition with several daredevil rivals.

7. Drinking coffee. A few Afghans like a good cup of joe, but tea is the drink here – black tea, yellow tea, green tea, and even apple tea and pomegranate tea. And for the few Afghans who are coffee fans, they don’t touch the typical American brew. Even if it perks until it gels, they say it’s too weak.

8. Whining. They ride in pickup truck beds in freezing rain. They stand in endless line in stifling heat. They endure humiliating searches and inspections just to come to work. Their jobs keep them away from their homes and families for days or weeks. They will complain when provoked, but always in a matter-of-fact, low key manner. They may have invented stoicism.

9. Feminism. Too many mullahs tell illiterate Afghans that the Quran ranks women in the animal kingdom just above donkeys. There aren’t enough civil society consultants and NGOs in the world to counter that kind of propaganda.

10. Sitting on the toilet. They use ground-level holes with starting-block footrests to do their business. When a Western-style commode is the only choice, they stand on the seat. With luck, they leave scratches. On a bad day, they leave muddy shoeprints.

Afghans are tough, gracious and patient people. As I end my year at Kandahar Airfield, I hope that someday they learn what peace is like.

Plenty of commentators have plenty of theories about what will happen when the Afghans have to fend for themselves. However, recent Kandahar radio news reports and listener calls have focused on two potential scenarios involving Taliban intentions.

One scenario would have the insurgency wind down military operations but hold the public’s (read media’s) attention with terrorist attacks while reviving and replenishing in Pakistan until the Americans leave. Then the Taliban would launch a Pakistan-based blitz against Afghan security forces. The key to the outcome would be how well the Afghans are armed and trained to resist the resurgent Taliban threat. Another intangible would be the extent to which Americans would support Afghan security forces with air cover, drones, intelligence and special forces as “trainers.”

Another popular scenario holds that when the Americans go, the chief reason for fighting will leave with them. This is based on a suspicion that many insurgents are motivated by a deep resentment of foreign troops in their homeland or by a quest for revenge after suffering a grievous loss caused by foreign forces. So with no coalition forces to confront, many insurgents might lose their will to fight, drop their weapons and go home. The Taliban would presumably still be a nuisance, but a localized and manageable one.

The wild card in the game is, as always, the public mood when the pullout starts in earnest. If Afghans sense that their army, and particularly their police force, can protect them from intimidation, the Taliban will lose one of its most effective weapons – fear. If economic stability is emerging, that will further reduce the Taliban’s sway over ordinary citizens.

On the other hand, if Afghan security forces cannot assure protection at the local level, the Taliban’s ranks could swell with paid recruits fed up with the status quo or desperate to feed themselves and their families. Meanwhile, Afghans would have to tolerate the insurgents among them in sulking silence, left defenseless by an Afghan security apparatus that is too incompetent or corrupt to counter the assassinations, night letters and other Taliban intimidation tactics.

There are other scenarios that, like these two, are little more than guesses. If peace talks actually produce results, that would of course change everything. There is hope but little optimism that the current contacts will blossom into a durable peace.

The coalition has two years to get things right. The Afghan army is showing signs of competence. The key will be the local police. They are responsible for community law enforcement and protection of the citizenry. At the moment, they are the weak link in the Afghan security chain.

Read the article from the Los Angeles Times and then read my post titled “Our Shameful Tradition of Callous Abandonment” from Sept. 11.

There were no last-chance helicopters on a roof in Baghdad. Nevertheless, a tragedy looms, and all our government offers is bromides, indifference and lies.

If you’re not familiar with the news business, you may not realize that wire services shape media agendas from local to international news everywhere every day.

That makes the Associated Press (along with British rival Reuters) arguably the most influential news organization in the world. The AP stylebook is the industry standard, and editors unsure about a breaking story will invariably ask, “What does AP say?”

Now, in the vast arena of online journalism, AP is up against new challenges that can’t be met by the traditional wire service business model.

In a memo to the staff, Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor for U.S. news, announced a new initiative to keep up with what he called “changing user behaviors online.”

He said breaking news and just-the-facts reporting are no longer good enough for the web.

“AP wins when news breaks,” he said, “but after an hour or two we’re often replaced by a piece of content from someone else who has executed something more thoughtful or more innovative.”

Oreskes could have added more provocative, more sensational, more emotional, or more irresponsible. He graciously gave a pass to all the websites that, unable to beat traditional outlets with speed and accuracy, stoop to spin and babble to snag news consumers.

The AP’s dilemma, Oreskes said, is to find ways of catering to those “users” while still maintaining the agency’s high standards. The solution is vintage AP – a careful, measured strategy called “The New Distinctiveness.”

Much of it is a common-sense plan that seems to nudge AP toward new media reality. But one element might jangle journalist nerves, even while trying to sound reassuring.

Using the label “Journalism with Voice,” Oreskes wrote: “We’re going to be pushing hard on journalism with voice, with context, with more interpretation. This does not mean that we’re sacrificing any of our deep commitment to unbiased, fair journalism. It does not mean that we’re venturing into opinion, either. It does mean that we need to be looking for ways to be more distinctive and stand out in the field.”

There’s the rub; “context” and “interpretation” can easily morph into the “opinion” that Oreskes wants to avoid. When a competent AP journalist adds what is meant to be a line or two of explanation or background, that choice alone can be a subjective decision that tilts a story out of balance. Even if the added information seems harmless to AP professionals, it may offend legions of “users” if it doesn’t validate their personal worldview. That can lead to fewer page views, fewer members (AP is a cooperative) and eventually less revenue.

AP has a history of catching up late to media trends. It’s a bit tardy again, but its intentions seem noble. The agency wants to cater to the new breed of news consumer without sacrificing its reputation and core principles.

Maybe AP will find the alchemy for separating interpretation from opinion. If not, the venerated wire service could fade to irrelevance as a stodgy anachronism, or it might join the media lemmings who follow the pack over the falls into the odious morass of bias and nonsense.

The atrocious behavior of some U.K. newspapers came under intense scrutiny (including criminal investigation) after the News of the World was busted and then folded for hacking into emails and cell phones of celebrities and at least one young murder victim.
Government hearings on the matter have shown the Rupert Murdoch property was not alone in its invasion of privacy and other outrages in search of a story.

Tony Blair’s former spokesman, Alastair Campbell, was particularly caustic in his testimony to the Levenson Inquiry, a public inquest spawned by the hacking scandal that has morphed into a much broader look at British journalism.
Campbell, once a journalist himself, ripped his former profession for its “obsession with celebrity, a culture of negativity, and amorality among some of the industry’s leaders.”

“The impact of the story is deemed to be far more important than the accuracy,” he said. “Speed now comes ahead of accuracy, impact comes ahead of fairness, and in parts of the press anything goes to get the story first.”
Does any of that sound familiar?
Campbell also labeled Britain’s Press Complaints Commission a failure because it was stacked with “political fixers” more in interested than self-protection than self-regulation.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/11/30/world/europe/uk-phone-hacking-scandal/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

For U.S. journalists, the lessons should be obvious. American news media are not as free-wheeling and sensational as their British counterparts, with notable exceptions of course. It’s the trend in American journalism that is worrisome.

If professional standards erode, as many U.S. professionals say they are, the public and government may reach a breaking point and lose tolerance for media sensationalism, sloppiness and insensitivity.
The First Amendment stands in the way of some of the controls already in place in Britain and other democracies. However, politicians don’t like journalists, even as they patronize them in hopes of favorable coverage. Constituent outrage could tempt some populist media-bashers to craft a set of legal or regulatory end runs around the Constitution to throttle journalists and their employers.

The moral of the seemingly remote hacking story: American journalists who take their protection and privileges for granted do so at their own professional peril.

Stephen Colbert weighs in on CNN’s recent decision to lay off 50 employees— “nobody important, just editors and photojournalists” — by praising CNN’s use of iReporters, its name for citizen journalists. “Why buy the cow when you can have it shakily videotape its own milk for free?” Colbert asked.

The layoff announcement at CNN, where I once worked, was clinical and pragmatic. The world’s first cable news network was dumping staff to fit the “work flow.”

The statement talked about a three-year internal review of how things are done. The findings prompted another move away from skilled pros such as writers and video editors in favor of utility players who can, in theory at least, write, edit video, produce newscasts, lay out web pages and more, all at salaries lower than the ones paid to proven veterans.

Another conclusion relegated talented and often courageous videographers to the scrap heap of obsolescence in the new age of citizen shooters. All this is possible, the CNN statement said, because of advances in technology.

Here’s a question arising from all this: How many utility players ever played on an all-star team? Here’s another one: Name one artist who mastered painting, sculpting, music composition and choreography. Or let’s grab a cliché – “Jack of all trades and master of none.”

Since the day the wheel was invented, technology has provided tools for humans to do more and better work (in most cases). However, the tools have never done the work and still don’t; even robots need human programmers. So no matter how seductively the digital toys blink and glow, the CNN product will always be the creation of CNN’s people.

Furthermore, writing, shooting and editing are not assembly line tasks that anyone can master; as arts, they require talent that only some people possess.

Among the discards, the ones I know are experienced, talented, hard-working journalists who were intensely dedicated to CNN. To budget-minders, they are aging, expensive blots on the corporate ledger.

CNN and other broadcasters are banking on audiences accepting a steady degradation of the news product because of the viewing public’s tendency to tolerate, and even gravitate toward, inarticulate language, amateur camera work and faux-fact “reality.”

Why pick on CNN when others are doing it as well? First, because CNN is still the worldwide gold standard for 24-hour TV news. And second, because it posts record profits every year. Sensible cost management, including staff adjustments, is one thing. Sliding into the morass of one-man-band journalism is something else.

In my early years at United Press International, employees recited a cynical slogan to summarize that company’s personnel philosophy: “Hire them young, use them up, let them go.”

The phrase fared far better over the years than UPI did. Maybe there was a cause-and-effect at work. Maybe that corrosive corporate attitude relentlessly eroded UPI’s professional and financial foundation until it crumbled.

CNN and other broadcast centers seem to be betting that there’s no correlation between quality and sustainability. Good luck with that.

“It’s intended to be a news, information, and cultural station, finding a niche in the market for primarily local and regional news, and local and regional cultural affairs to try to give a local flavor to the listeners that they don’t seem to be getting from the other broadcasters,”

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2011/11/07/radio-nato-afghanistan

Editors Note: Public Radio International’s “Here and Now” program carried a piece that does a nice job explaining what we are doing here in Kandahar. (Yes, the reporter apologized for mispronouncing my name. But he got everything else right.)

Now comes a study from the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation (as reported by the Washington Post) that has a new runner-up on that list. It’s not newspapers or radio or even the Internet. It’s word-of-mouth.

So right behind Action/Eyewitness/On-Your-Side video meringue is the backyard fence or the office printer (formerly the water cooler). Person-to-person conversation is trusted more than radio or print journalism from traditional outlets or the web. That’s another black eye for contemporary news media, but it also raises questions about the public’s decision-making process.

The old telegraph game is a time-tested tool to illustrate how unreliable word-of-mouth can be as an information medium. Gather a group of friends and have one whisper a few sentences into the ear of another. Then each whispers his understanding of that message to the next person. At the end of the chain, the final message is usually nothing like the original.

Then consider the tendency of conversing humans to shape and sort facts to match their own perceptions, a parallel phenomenon to the preference for information sources that tend to reflect a person’s beliefs and ideology.

The result at the local level can be a nasty stew of fact, rumor, gossip and prejudice – hardly the stuff to nurture a well-informed populace.

The next Pew survey should ask whether that same level of preference for word-of-mouth sourcing also applies to national and international news. It would be an interesting study, but we may not want to know the results.

The dictionary will tell the critics what a Status of Forces Agreement is and why it is indispensible for American service personnel stationed in another country. When they finish their research, you know what they can do with the sock.

Iraq’s refusal to negotiate a SOFA deal apparently was the final straw in a long and torturous search for a deal to maintain a U.S. military presence there. Without SOFA, any American in uniform would have been exposed to arrest and prosecution by Iraqis with something other than justice on their minds. If that sounds far-fetched, Google Muqtada al-Sadr.

So knee-jerk second-guessers hastened to score some political points without knowing or caring about the risk of U.S. service members with no SOFA protection being unjustly hauled off to some Iraqi hell hole.

How could any GOP presidential candidate defend that position in a debate?

Beyond the partisan drivel, the issue did serve larger goals for both Obama and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The SOFA impasse gave the President cover for doing what he wanted to do anyway – get out of Iraq. And al-Maliki can play to his anti-American constituents (Shi’ite and Sunni) by saying that he stood up to the Americans and ended the “occupation” once and for all.

One other thing is clear: this is yet another unintended consequence of the ill-conceived Iraq war. The United States planted democracy in Iraq, all right, but it might be a bitter harvest in terms of American interests in the region. It’s a lesson to keep in mind as events unfold in nations emerging from the Arab Spring.