Left I on the News

Yesterday's Washington Post featured a major article on the alleged "increasingly sophisticated and nimble propaganda tactics" of the Taliban that has "alarmed U.S. officials." Ironically, the article itself uses as one of its examples the very real sophisticated propaganda tactics of the U.S. corporate media, specifically the very-well publicized Time Magazine cover featuring the face of a mutilated Afghan woman, under the headline "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan?" (but describing a very real event that occurred while the U.S. was in fact occupying Afghanistan).

If the original article wasn't a sufficient example of the sophisticated propaganda tactics of the U.S. corporate media, the Post continues the lie by alleging that the article featured a "woman whose face was reportedly mauled by Taliban members." But in actual fact, the article was exposed almost immediately as a fraud by a reporter who knew the woman in question, and who reported that the mutilation was done by her father-in-law after she had run away, and that the Taliban had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

And what about that "sophisticated" Taliban media strategy? Here it is:

U.S. officials and Afghan analysts say the Taliban has become adept at portraying the West as being on the brink of defeat, at exploiting rifts between Washington and Kabul and at disparaging the administration of President Hamid Karzai as a "puppet" state with little reach outside the capital.

Yeah, that's just such a stretch from, you know, reality.