John Burns, from NYTimes, on the hazards--and responsibilities--of war journalism:
Sultan Munadi is dead, and a British paratrooper whose name we may never know. There may also have been other Afghan casualties, perhaps Taliban, perhaps not; that we also don’t know yet, for sure. But from where I am writing this, on a sunny autumn afternoon in rural England, the deaths of Sultan and the British commando seem like a grim black cloud darkening the landscape –- a harbinger, perhaps, for the increasingly grim news that seems to await us all from a war that seems to be worsening by the day, and heading for worse yet unless our political and military leaders can find a way to turn the situation around.
[...]
I’d like to enter a personal note about Sultan, who worked closely with me and my wife, Jane, during the period when we were establishing our Kabul bureau in the months after the overthrow of the Taliban in November 2001. We stayed in touch over the years, after we both moved to Baghdad, and he traveled to Germany on a scholarship, got married, and had two children. He was a man we, like many at The New York Times, came to love. He was gentle, honest, loyal, ironic, brave, and, an unusual but wonderful mix of innocence –- in the sense of having not a single cynical bone in his body –- and shining intelligence.
When Steve Farrell told our editors after his release that Sultan “did everything he could to keep us both alive, up to the last minute,” it is the Sultan we knew. In short, he was the diametric opposite, in character, of everything there is to loathe in the political manipulators, warlords, profiteers and drug barons who have strode the landscape in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s overthrow. God rest his soul.
Of the circumstances that led to his death, and that of the paratrooper, much that will help our understanding remains, at this writing, unclear; we will learn more as Stephen and others involved, including the raid commanders, if they ever do, give us their accounts of what occurred. But this much can be said with certainty. The New York Times, and other major news organizations, have no choice about covering these wars, and covering them comprehensively, if we are to be true to our tradition; with hundreds of thousands of American soldiers committed to battle over the course of the wars, more than 5,000 servicemen and women already dead, and closing in on a trillion dollars of American taxpayers’ money spent, how credible would be our claim to be one of America’s leading newspapers if we absented ourselves?
Go, read. It's striking, and right now I have nothing to add.
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