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Tallying the enemy's dead as a metric of battlefield progress was discredited for a generation in the U.S. military after the Vietnam debacle, but the body-count measurement appears to have been revived by the Army in Afghanistan. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the 101st Airborne Division has been publicizing each enemy death - for a total of nearly 2,000 - over the past 14 months. That news has already renewed the debate over the wisdom of relying on such numbers. "This isn't going to do anything to convince the American public that we're winning...
...regular release of body counts - a Pentagon press release on Monday had the headline "Troops in Afghanistan Kill 17 Militants" - marks a reversal in U.S. military thinking. During Operation Anaconda, the first big battle following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan nearly eight years ago, General Tommy Franks slapped down reporters who demanded to know how many enemy fighters had been killed. "I won't talk to you about body count," he said flatly. That's because for decades, the very phrase body count had been deemed poison in the ranks due to its use - and misuse - during the Vietnam...
...notion of charting military progress by counting enemy dead was championed by then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who believed in analyzing all sorts of data to determine how the war was going. The emphasis on those numbers led to some commanders' emphasizing killing over winning and to inflated body counts - which often included counting civilian casualties as enemy dead. "The Army's selection of the body count as its primary metric may not only have contributed to losing the war, but in the end it proved so morally corrosive that it led to a crisis of soul-searching...
...Americans are assisting the Taliban in Afghanistan to justify and secure a Central Asian foothold against China; and the old chestnut that Israel's Mossad and the CIA were behind the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. While no press in any country is without flaw or bias, I count on fellow journalists everywhere to be more enlightened and sensible than average folk. But in Pakistan's case, sections of the media are reinforcing the nation's paranoia at a critical time when it faces a threat to its very existence...
Well, I'm a professional, and my job is to be a conduit. My personal opinion does not count. I don't use the word I. It's irrelevant. The only thing that counts is the guest. So is it harder to interview someone you don't like? You bet. But you gotta suck...