Our government is negotiating with the Taliban again.

This was an idea that Mitt Romney criticized in January 2012, garnering a lot of sneers from the foreign-policy establishment. They pointed out that there was a broad, bipartisan consensus in favor of peace talks, from John McCain to David Petraeus to the Obama administration.

And then by October it was clear that the negotiations were going nowhere. From the front page of the New York Times:

With the surge of American troops over and the Taliban still a potent threat, American generals and civilian officials acknowledge that they have all but written off what was once one of the cornerstones of their strategy to end the war here: battering the Taliban into a peace deal. . . . Now American officials say they have reduced their goals further — to patiently laying the groundwork for eventual peace talks after they leave. American officials say they hope that the Taliban will find the Afghan Army a more formidable adversary than they expect and be compelled, in the years after NATO withdraws, to come to terms with what they now dismiss as a “puppet” government.

Divisions between the Taliban’s political wing and its military commanders were one big obstacle, as well as the Taliban’s demand that the U.S. release five senior commanders from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the sole American soldier held by the insurgents, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Of course, back in 2008, as a presidential candidate, Obama denounced the Pakistani government for . . . negotiating with the Taliban.

We can’t coddle, as we did, a dictator, give him billions of dollars and then he’s making peace treaties with the Taliban and militants. What I’ve said is we’re going to encourage democracy in Pakistan, expand our nonmilitary aid to Pakistan so that they have more of a stake in working with us, but insisting that they go after these militants.

Sure, there was a bipartisan consensus in favor of negotiating with the Taliban, but that consensus didn’t extend to millions of Americans with no foreign-policy experience, who probably could summarize their sensibilities in just a few sentences: “They’re the Taliban, and they’re trying to kill our soldiers. Why do we think we can trust them to keep their word? And if we can’t trust them to keep their word on their end of the agreement, why are we negotiating with them?”

That key obstacle remains. Now we’re negotiating again. Why should we expect this effort at a negotiated peace to end differently than the last one?

Mitt Romney, back on January 16:

Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney said on Monday the United States should not negotiate with the Taliban and he criticized the Obama administration for efforts to broker secret talks with the Afghan insurgents.

The reaction:

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius:

He needs to be more careful before attacking anything that he thinks he can tag as belonging to the “Obama” administration, and therefore bad. Perhaps when the general election comes around, Romney will find a way to reconnect to the bipartisan consensus about the need, under some circumstances, to “negotiate with evil,” as his adviser Reiss put it.

Mother Jones:

It’s merely another instance of the Republican contender ducking nuance and going for the cheap, primary-season applause line when it comes to foreign policy.

Michael Crowley of Time:

Romney opposes talking to the Taliban. That’s a relatively extreme position. For some time now, it’s been widely accepted within the foreign policy establishment that any realistic endgame in Afghanistan will involve some kind of negotiated peace deal with our enemies in Afghanistan.

Fast-forward to today’s front page of the New York Times:

With the surge of American troops over and the Taliban still a potent threat, American generals and civilian officials acknowledge that they have all but written off what was once one of the cornerstones of their strategy to end the war here: battering the Taliban into a peace deal. . . . Now American officials say they have reduced their goals further — to patiently laying the groundwork for eventual peace talks after they leave. American officials say they hope that the Taliban will find the Afghan Army a more formidable adversary than they expect and be compelled, in the years after NATO withdraws, to come to terms with what they now dismiss as a “puppet” government.

The Taliban that won’t negotiate with coalition forces is going to become more amenable to a deal with the Afghan army? Eh, maybe they can bond over their shared stories of shooting at coalition troops.

The article mentions divisions between the Taliban’s political wing and its military commanders as an obstacle, and the Taliban’s demand that the U.S. release five senior commanders from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the sole American soldier held by the insurgents, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Skeptics and critics of negotiating with the Taliban were right, and the bipartisan advocates of this outreach — from President Obama to David Petraeus to Sen. John McCain — were wrong.

This is strangely reminiscent of the issue of how to respond to the uprising in Iran in 2009, when Republican critics said we needed to take a stronger, louder, more visible stance in support of those opposing the Iranian regime, and Obama took a “muted” stance that he later said he regretted. Obama was wrong, and his critics were right.

In the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt . . . sent along to the editors at the usual time, and reaching readers a bit later under our new distribution system (we’re working on it) . . .

A Bold New Form of Media Bias

In light of the Washington Post basing its front-page headline on a survey with an astonishingly small sample and an astonishingly high margin of error, it is good to sum up what we’ve seen from the press in recent weeks.

ONE: For about eight days, the Obama administration told the public that their best assessment of the murder of our ambassador in Libya and three other Americans was that it was the result of a spontaneous protest against a tape mocking Islam on YouTube. This explanation sounded funny from the beginning — even in a place like Benghazi, who brings rocket-propelled grenades and mortars to a protest? — and it seemed surprising that so many in the administration, including U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, seemed to dismiss the idea that a terror attack against American targets on September 11 was a serious possibility. Subsequent reports have revealed astonishingly insufficient security for a site with American lives and American intelligence. The administration’s sustained focus on the YouTube tape seemed to make little sense, outside of a desire to deflect from the continued pervasiveness of anti-American rage in the Middle East and signs of a resurgent al-Qaeda, themes that greatly complicate the argument of the Obama campaign. As of Friday, 17 days after the attack, the FBI had still not reached the consulate site to conduct a forensic investigation.

To their credit, certain places like CNN and ABC News have pursued this story with more vigor than their critics acknowledge.

On a related note, violent protests and threats of violence against American embassies continue, barely mentioned or acknowledged by most venues of the U.S. press. I guess it isn’t newsworthy until someone dies again.

TWO: Univision, a Spanish-language channel, has done an in-depth, detailed, long-form television journalism about the “Fast and Furious” program, showcasing that the violence from the “walked” guns was much worse than previously claimed by the government, and demonstrating the cost in human lives in searing images. (Moe Lane talks a bit about it here.) This report is much more vivid, detailed, and outraged than anything from almost all of the U.S. media, which accepted an inspector general’s report that claimed that repeated warnings and information kept coming up from the field agents but somehow mysteriously never reached the Attorney General. The report claimed that both Acting Deputy Attorney General Grindler and Counsel to the Attorney General and Deputy Chief of Staff Wilkinson were informed about the connection between the firearms found at the scene of fatal shootings and Operation Fast and Furious, but neither believed “the information was sufficiently important to alert the Attorney General about it.”

THREE: With unemployment above 8 percent for forty-four straight months and GDP slowing to 1.25 percent, BuzzFeed declares “one of the central mysteries of 2012” is “How did we stop focusing on the economy?”

FOUR: Day after day, our troops in Afghanistan are targeted and killed by the Afghan troops they are supposed to be training. This barely merits more than periodic brief mentions in the national press. As Walter Russell Mead puts it:

If George W. Bush were president now, and had ordered the surge and was responsible for the strategic decisions taken and not taken in Afghanistan over the last four years, the mainstream press would be rubbing our noses in his miserable failures and inexcusable blunders 24/7. The New York Times and the Washington Post would be treating us to pictures of every fallen soldier. The PBS Newshour would feature nightly post-mortems on “America’s failed strategies in the Afghan War” and every arm-chair strategist in America would be filling the op-ed pages with the brilliant 20/20 hindsight ideas that our pathetic, clueless, failed president was too dumb and too cocky to have had.

Ace of Spades observed something we’re seeing in this cycle that is different even from the hope-and-change euphoria of Obama’s 2008 coverage:

Let me explain why this is different than previous bias.

Previously, the press has been both biased in a partisan way and an in an ideological way, but usually the partisanship was driven by ideology. As you may have noticed, the press are great fans of gay marriage and abortion, and they shape their coverage to put the best possible face on these positions, and the worst possible face on opponents. (To the extent they feature contrary voices at all.)

That’s bias, of course. We’ve gotten used to that.

But in the Benghazi debacle, there is no possible ideological grounding to explain their bias.There is, I trust, no ideological movement that advocates for intelligence failures and the deaths of good-guy diplomats. There is no ideological movement in favor of reckless incompetence bordering on malice in providing security for consulates abroad (which, as a legal matter, are considered US territory).

There is no ideological movement — or at least there was not before — championing the government’s right to lie to the public about its failures in order to avoid accountability.

There is no room here where one can say, “Ah well, they can’t help but be pulled a bit to the left by their own beliefs.” Because no one champions the right of government to let people be murdered and then lie about it.

This isn’t ideological bias, then. This is pure advocacy for a political party. Obama’s embarrassment is not an ideological issue — or should not be. I hope we can all agree that a president should attend security briefings — especially as 9/11 approaches — and provide adequate warning and security for US government personnel. I hope we can all agree that the government does not suddenly gain a Right To Shamelessly Lie about its failures, simply because it finds it politically advantageous to do so.

But, as Nina Totenberg’s chuckle indicates, the press now in fact believes exactly these things — so long as the president we’re talking about is Democrat, and Obama in particular.

A reader responds to today’s Jolt, discussing how the media’s obsession with “narratives” drives out coverage of real, life-and-death news, by pointing the finger at cable news networks. Because two staples of cable news programming is A) lefty-righty talking-heads fights* and B) anchors interviewing reporters about their articles (“Michael Lewis, tell us what you learned in your time with the president . . .” “Mike Allen, what did you find while researching your article on infighting within the Romney campaign?”), my reader posits that cable news networks are now conditioned to perceive debate-ready news stories as the most newsworthy.

The example I cited earlier today, the horrific spate of green-on-blue attacks by Afghani troops and police against U.S. and coalition forces, doesn’t have much of a partisan angle. Sure, there are portions of both parties who might see the attacks as one more reason to pull out of Afghanistan now, but you don’t see many leaders in Washington calling for that. Viewers might find it worthwhile to watch an advocate for immediate withdrawal and an advocate for the current plan of gradual withdrawal discuss each option. The debate probably wouldn’t break down along straight party lines; there are plenty of Democrats who want all troops out of Afghanistan now, but there are also plenty of Democrats who will defend Obama’s policies to the bitter end. There are Republicans who believe we’ve done all we can in Afghanistan and others who think leaving now would be perceived as a defeat by the Taliban. In a presidential-election season, partisans might feel great pressure to align themselves with their party’s standard-bearer.

The crisis facing our embassies and consulates shouldn’t be a partisan issue, in that no one of any party wants to see angry Islamist mobs killing fellow Americans. But there are some real questions to be asked about how the administration has handled this — from their reaction to and perception of the Arab Spring to the specific decisions about embassy and consulate security to recent and upcoming foreign-aid decisions.

Those topics are worthy of debate. But the debate-worthy news shouldn’t crowd out news that doesn’t serve one leader, one party, or one preconceived “narrative.”

* As a guy who periodically gets the call for those lefty-righty talking-heads fights, I should point out that there’s nothing wrong with those!

There’s no point in spinning it; it’s a grim Morning Jolt today. Besides the latest on the continuing violent protests outside American embassies around the world, the Chicago Teachers’ Union seems determined to bring Rahm Emanuel to his knees . . . and today’s featured segment is a look at how the media’s obsession with “narratives” leaves some vital news stories relatively not discussed, serving the country poorly:

How Media Bias Leaves Some Life-and-Death Issues Unexamined and Not Discussed

Conservatives have griped, louder and louder, about media bias for decades now. Obviously, those complaints fall on deaf ears, or most folks in the mainstream media find them baseless, or unimportant. (Every once in a while, somebody acknowledges it, and says it’s a problem . . . and then nothing happens.)

But I would urge those within the MSM who think of themselves as among the best at informing the public to ask whether the obsession with “narratives” — think of prepackaged storylines, tropes, if you will, with noble heroes often within one political party and nefarious, retrograde, and sinister forces within the other — is doing a good job of keeping the public well-informed with the circumstances our troops face in Afghanistan.

Chalk me up as one of those folks increasingly wary about our involvement in Afghanistan. The problem is not that our cause isn’t just or the Taliban doesn’t deserve every bit of ordnance we drop on them. But I just find myself wondering what we’ll achieve in year twelve that we haven’t achieved in years one through eleven. If we had an ally we could completely trust, the entire situation would look different. But as the war continues, our “ally” looks less and less trustworthy.

At the end of August, when the press was obsessing over Todd Akin and whether Clint Eastwood had embarrassed himself at the Republican convention, there was this other news story developing halfway around the world:

Rogue Afghan soldiers and police turning their weapons on their allies are now the leading cause of death for NATO troops. On Aug. 28 a man wearing an Afghan army uniform opened fire on Australian soldiers in the southern province of Uruzgan, killing three and wounding two.

That attack brought to 15 the total number of NATO personnel killed in so-called “green-on-blue” assaults in August — and raises serious doubts about the alliance’s war strategy, which calls for close cooperation between foreign and Afghan troops as the Afghans gradually assume responsibility for their own security.

Of the other 35 international troops who died in Afghanistan this month, 12 were killed by Improvised Explosive Devices and nine died in helicopter crashes. Insurgent gunfire and a suicide bomber accounted for the remaining fatalities.

Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, told Danger Room he didn’t know why the Afghan troops turned their weapons on their foreign allies. He implied the “sacrifices associated with fasting” during the the Muslim holy month of Ramadan might have played a role — then quickly qualified the remark, saying Ramadan wasn’t exclusively the problem. In any event, “there is an erosion of trust that has emerged from this,” Allen said in a separate interview.

In a “normal” media and political environment, this would be a huge deal, with less focus upon which lawmaker or party should be blamed than a national debate on the more basic questions: 1) Is our mission in Afghanistan worth the price we’re playing? 2) Is our mission achievable with rate of violent betrayal on the part of the Afghan forces we’re seeing? 3) If we do believe that our mission is necessary, then how do we ensure the safety of our troops and weed out the infiltrators within the Afghan forces?

If this were occurring under a Republican president, the declaration of defeat and comparisons to Vietnam would be loud, incessant, shrill and ubiquitous. Because this is occurring under a Democratic president, you get intermittent coverage — the media checks the boxes, but there’s no steady drumbeat, no newsweekly cover pieces, no hour-long specials on the cable networks, few columns in the Washington Post and New York Times about it. None of the biggest movers and shakers have decided that this must be a national conversation, on par with, say, the national week-long dissection of Todd Akin’s unfamiliarity with basic human biology. We may cynically conclude that there’s no real pro-Obama or anti-GOP spin that can be put on this story — there’s no easily discernible angle to advance the cause of the Left — and so the story doesn’t quite disappear but it just bobs up and down every now and then.

I mention this because it happened again this weekend:

Four U.S. troops were killed Sunday near a remote NATO installation in southern Afghanistan when a member of the Afghan security forces opened fire on them, military officials said.

On Saturday, an Afghan gunman thought to belong to the local police killed two British soldiers in southern Helmand province.

The six casualties brought to 51 the number of coalition forces — most of them Americans — killed by their Afghan partners this year.

In case you’re wondering, President Obama did offer a comment on this in mid-August. Nothing wrong with his statement, but not many specifics, just a general sense of “we’re working on it”:

“Obviously we’ve been watching with deep concern these so-called green-on-blue attacks,” Obama said during a surprise appearance before the White House press corps. “We are already doing a range of things, and we’re seeing some success when it comes to better counterintelligence, making sure that the vetting process for Afghan troops is stronger. And we’ve got what’s called the Guardian Angel program, to make sure that our troops aren’t in isolated situations that might make them more vulnerable. But obviously we’re going to have to do more, because there has been an uptick over the last 12 months on this.”

Judging by what we’ve seen in recent weeks, those “range of things” aren’t really having success. There’s room for a much more complicated story than “Obama stinks” or “the Afghanis stink,” but the media has to set out to tell those stories.

But the desire to reduce every development in the news to “here’s the latest reason why our preferred candidate rocks and your candidate stinks” means that A) certain stories get ignored or downplayed and B) something like Romney’s reaction to attacks on our embassy are treated as twenty times as important as the actual attacks themselves.

So, if killing Osama bin Laden is a form of spiking the football, would these be fumbles?

The United States has for several years been secretly releasing high-level detainees from a military prison in Afghanistan as part of negotiations with insurgent groups, a bold effort to quell violence but one that U.S. officials acknowledge poses substantial risks.

But the releases are an inherent gamble: The freed detainees are often notorious fighters who would not be released under the traditional legal system for military prisoners in Afghanistan. They must promise to give up violence — and U.S. officials warn them that if they are caught attacking American troops, they will be detained once again.

There are no absolute guarantees, however, and officials would not say whether those who have been released under the program have later returned to attack U.S. and Afghan forces once again.

If they’re anything like the released Guantanamo Bay detainees…

…The Pentagon said on Tuesday that 61 former detainees from its military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, appear to have returned to terrorism since their release from custody.

I’m glad President Obama has proven much more ruthless than his 2008 campaign rhetoric suggested when it came to drone attacks. But in Afghanistan, the phrase “trust the Taliban” comes up disturbingly often in our policy…

From the first Morning Jolt of the week:

Don’t Worry, World! Harry Reid’s on this Koran-Burning Thing!

Ah. Swell: “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told CBS’s Bob Schieffer on Sunday that some members of Congress were considering some kind of action in response to the Florida Quran burning that  sparked a murderous riot at a United Nations complex in Afghanistan and other mayhem. ‘We’ll take a look at this of course . . . as to whether we need hearings or not, I don’t know,’ he added.”

This pastor, Terry Jones, has a jones for media attention that makes the Kardashians look like J .D. Salinger. He knows that there’s a good chance that tossing the Koran on a pile of charcoal briquettes will make the easily-enraged in far-off lands lash out in that time-tested tradition, killing aid workers, and he doesn’t give a damn. He knows there’s a chance that the Muslim tantrums might put our men and women in uniform at greater risk. He still doesn’t give a damn. He has never given a damn. What, he’s gonna go weak-kneed at the thought of a unanimous Senate resolution?

To quote the wise philosopher Alfred, “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” Or they want to watch Korans burn and see what else catches on fire, too.

Anyway, Reid is bad, but perhaps Lindsey Graham is even worse. He added, “I wish we could find a way to hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war. During World War II, we had limits on what you could say if it would inspire the enemy. So, burning a Koran is a terrible thing but it doesn’t justify killing someone. Burning a Bible would be a terrible thing but it doesn’t justify murder. Having said that, anytime we can push back here in America against actions like this that put our troops at risk we should do it, and I look forward to working with Senators Kerry, and Reid, and others to condemn this, condemn violence all over the world based on the name  of religion.”

Hey, er . . . what did the U.S. government limit that could “inspire the enemy” during World War Two? Weren’t we singing off-color parodies of “Whistle While You Work” about the malfunctioning genitalia of the foreign leaders we were fighting? If that and, say, our societal existence in absolute opposition to all of their values wasn’t sufficient to motivate them, wouldn’t say, the Dresden bombing be enough to give them at extra get-up-and-go? Were these guys really that “inspired” by anything we did? Isn’t that like arguing that our forces’ primary motivation in the Pacific War was to go get Tokyo Rose?

Where is this notion coming from that our actions can “motivate” homicidal maniacs? What, if we button up our pyromaniac pastors, the Taliban will stop trying to stir up Afghanis against outsiders? Isn’t that like trying to stop Son of Sam by banning dog food?

Doug Mataconis can’t believe the direction Reid and Graham are headed in: “Here’s your answer Senator. No, you don’t need to hold hearings and you don’t need to be looking into ways to limit the free speech rights of American citizens because of the insane reaction of people thousands of miles away who were obviously ginned up by demagogues. War or not, Terry Jones had every right to do what he did.”

. . . Jim Treacher put this well: “The President of the United States bombs a Muslim country, and some nobody in Florida burns a Koran. Guess which one’s to blame for rioting in Afghanistan?”