Afghanistan: the rough guide to roughness

ISAF Commander GEN David H. Petraeus and FOX News reporter Jennifer Griffin observe Afghan special forces soldiers. Image: isafmedia on Flickr

Over the course of this week Journalism.co.uk will be publishing extracts from a new book about media coverage of the Afghanistan war. Afghanistan, War and the Media: Deadlines and Frontlines is published by Abramis on 13 September. See all the extracts at this link.

Alex Thomson is chief correspondent and presenter of ITN's Channel 4 News. He is in the unusual position of being both studio anchor and roving correspondent. In more than 20 years with ITN, he's covered more than 20 wars and conflicts and won more than 10 domestic and international awards. He says that in future he aims to tweet live from the battlefield, a process the MoD's media minders will find it very difficult to filter.

I intend this as a user's guide to embedding as a correspondent, a sort of reality-driven manual perhaps, to what it is really all about and how it is set up and why.

But just before we engage with the joys of "MediaOps", the Green Book, Bastion, Lash and the joys of embedding with the Brits in their long-running Afghan adventure, can we just nail a large fallacy?

The only thing new about embedding is that rather nasty, ugly Americanism. The thing itself is – like hookers – as old as soldiering itself. Consider if you will, the travails of one Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), far from home, far from happy, and mightily pissed off with the recalcitrant locals in a place called Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

The point being not that history repeats itself (though it painfully does in this locale) but that Alexander was good enough to take along scribes who wrote up his observations en route. The embed was – even then – alive and well. Roll forward the centuries and the Pentagon have just come up with a very new, very nasty word for something very, very old.

Which is why I laughed out loud recently as the retired BBC correspondent Martin Bell pontificated about how he was some kind of "pioneer" of embed reporting when he donned a British soldier's uniform during Operation Desert Storm in Saudi Arabia in 1991. No Martin, sorry. You were, no doubt, a genuine pioneer of many, many things before and after your eminent BBC career. But you were not a pioneer of embed journalism nor anything like it.

So with embedding being as old as it is, what is the debate all about?

All manner of controversy about war coverage
It seems the mere invention of the neologism "embed" has sparked all manner of controversy about war coverage, bias, impartiality and various other ways in which the modern media might be selling their souls down the highways of Helmand and beyond.

It has though, never been any other way. I don't remember standing in some kind of no man's land when I was in Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Iraq, Somalia, Congo, Burundi or Kashmir in order to portray some kind of noble picture of Reithian objective war coverage unsullied by being with either side. That's if you are lucky enough to have just two sides – don't get me started on Bosnia.

No, that approach would be a rather obvious and bloody way of inviting sudden death by high-explosives or high-velocity round. Are there really people alive out there who seem to think you can stand around in the middle and attempt on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other journalism?

Well, astonishingly, there are. Or something like it. Chief among the carpers about embedding, of course, the indefatigable editors at MediaLens who get extremely hoity-toity at the entire concept of embedding. However, ask them how they would cover Helmand if they were off to the main bazaar, Lashkar Gah, at noon next Tuesday and guess what? Total silence from the normally electronically incontinent MediaLens email service. Which rather clinches the argument, simple though it is. You cannot stand in the middle on the battlefield for very long without incurring huge risk.

Independent coverage of Operation Desert Storm
That's not to say you shouldn't try, and our colleague Terry Lloyd died doing just that in Iraq at the outset of the last Western invasion of that country in 2003. I covered Operation Desert Storm for thee months in 1991, roving around the deserts of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq avoiding any Coalition forces in order to bring some kind of independent coverage to the invasion.

This is vital, critical and essential to all wars – including Afghanistan. As I write, I am putting together some more remarkable images about civilians and the impact on them of current Nato operations, all of it shot outside the embedding construct, on traditional independent grounds. But it is done by brave and resourceful Afghan journalists. Not by me, for reasons which we shall explore later.

What is critical is that we attempt to do this more and attempt to give more balance of airtime to independent journalism. There is certainly the grave danger that the relative ease of doing embed journalism and in relative safety, means there is simply too much of it and other avenues are not sufficiently explored. And here the critics of the mainstream media have a point.

So it can be done, it should be done and we will all go on doing it. But do not the parties to warfare also deserve to have their stories told? Do not the Taliban, Hizbe-e Islamia, a host of other Afghan militias and Nato have a right to their story, their war, their perspective being told? I know of nobody who says no to this.

Put simply, you should quickly arrive at where we try to be at Channel 4 News at any rate, which is yes, using embeds as and when we need to; talk to and film with the Afghan insurgents and also put local reporters into the civilian picture around places such as Helmand.

The risks of reporting Afghanistan are very high and very real
Don't get me wrong, I would love to go, but as I write a number of French journalists remain hostage in Afghanistan. I have no wish to join them. The risks are very high and very real. Still less, do I wish to be party to a hostage situation in which the Western reporter comes out alive, but his driver and/or translator get their throats slit back to the spine.
Only recently we had the example of a brave, independently-minded New York Times reporter who got captured by insurgents whilst trying to investigate a Nato airstrike which had killed civilians. He ended up coming home alive and well. But his translator – himself a hugely respected Kabuli journalist – was killed. That's not all. A British special forces soldier was also killed in his rescue operation.

Be in no doubt that is the reality of war coverage right now in Afghanistan. These are the simple facts of it. Like Iraq, it has simply become so dangerous that even if I wanted to cover the war, neither Channel 4 nor my employer ITN would allow me. The war is – like some other places such as Somalia, for instance – off limits.

Of course that is "wrong", limiting, it filters our coverage, imposes a bias in the coverage – of course all of that is patently true. But it is not of our making and as I have said till I'm blue in the face and my keyboard is melting, would that the insurgency in Afghanistan saw the value of journalists as journalists, rather than walking infidel ATMs of great value on the ransom market.

Just pray to whatever god you have or not, that this changes, for we can do little more. Failing that, having courageous and resourceful local filmmakers able to get to the insurgents and, indeed, the ordinary Helmandis, are the next best thing and as I write we at Channel 4 News have recently achieved the former with interesting results. And when I've finished writing this I shall be on the telephone to our redoubtable team who have been finding out from Afghan civilians what Operation Moshtarak actually means for them among the poppy fields of the Helmand River valley.

Me? Well I am freshly returned from another embed with British forces. Such things are planned and laid down many months in advance and from the outset there are politics in play. A lot of politics. No point in wrapping this up and anybody who says different has spent too long with their spin doctor.

The MoD has a war to sell
The MoD wants the most positive coverage set before the biggest audience. Obviously. It has a war to sell which is now longer than the Second World War. And it is not going very well. And they want to get out. And...And...They have soldiers dying who were at junior school when the invasion and occupation (for it is both, whatever the spin) began. They have a problem. And the drip drip drip of Wootton Bassett homecomings are not helping, as they also privately acknowledge.

Which means naughty things happen at times of stress. I cannot mention names here because I will never be allowed to by ITN. But pretty clearly the MoD knows who will be the biggest cheerleaders among the television media. Look at any academic analysis of , say, coverage of the invasion of Iraq and you will see it laid out for fact.

Some journalists and some television stations almost in their entirety lose their corporate head in times of war and it shows. The MoD rather likes that, of course. It should not be so in TV news but it is so and from Cardiff University to name but one, the factual proof, the statistics, the evidence is out their in spade loads. The MoD also studies these things rather carefully, I understand.

So our embed for the front end of Operation Mostarak never, ever happened. Promises were ditched. Deals broken. Suddenly other broadcasters were there but Channel 4 News was, well, put back a few weeks.

Now as it happened I was not to bothered because I'd decided – rightly as it turned out – that Operation Moshtarak was never going to be about front-end combat. It would be – critically – about holding the ground which Nato would, initially, occupy in a matter of hours because of overwhelming force. But holding it would be different and it still is. Very different.

Pathetic lack of protest over reporting ban
But I throw this episode out just to illustrate that the "who goes where" is controlled by the MoD and they do it rather bluntly and crudely, for obvious political ends, in terms of selling the war. Should anybody doubt this, please remember that this is the country about to ban all embeds completely during a coming General Election, with, it seems, no hint of embarrassment in Whitehall. And, it should be said, a pathetic lack of protest from the broadcast media and newspapers.

Once decided, this being Britain with its pathology of secrecy, control and censorship, you have to sign up to the Green Book. It is essentially a deal between the media and the MoD not to reveal anything that would compromise operational security ("OpSec").

I have yet to meet a journo who had any problem with this and I don't either. But, of course, it is never quite that simple. The military, it is written, cannot and will not censor anything for reasons of politics, taste, decency or embarrassment. Looks good in theory. In practice, though, something which is, say, embarrassing, could impact on morale and thus "Op Sec", could it not?

So you see , within the austere print and rules of the Green Book, lie all manner of elephant traps waiting to swallow you up when you get into the Theatre of War.

Or they do up to a point. Of course, in the age of the blog and the tweet in which we now live, all such control systems are frankly rather limited. I can perhaps make a small claim to pioneering in that, during a recent trip to Helmand, I more or less invented the "time-delayed tweet". We were out on a deep patrol with the British Coldstream Guards. It occurred to me that the Thuriya satfone was up and working and I could simply phone over tweets to the newsdesk and be, in tweeting terms, live from the battlefield.

There certainly was fighting all around. In the end I opted to delay the tweets simply because – with no external scrutiny whatsoever – I might not be able to judge that the things I would write might or might not affect "Op Sec".

Brave new world of online twittery
The brave new world of technology and online twittery can be a lonely old place these days. In the end I simply wrote down the tweet messages along with blogs, then relayed them all when I got back. The tweeters out there loved it. The MoD never said anything to me about it either way.

But they must be frantically assessing ways of getting their control systems up to speed to cover this issue. I for one will be trying to push this forward to actual live tweeting from the battlefield at the first opportunity I can get and it is very hard to see how media minders can filter this process.

In fact though, many of the potential pitfalls of the Green Book Rule don't actually crop up all that often. In my experience the further down the line you get from Whitehall, the nearer you are to the front line, the less any body gives a toss about censorship. They have a war on their hands. Frankly, they're just chuffed to have someone along who cares enough to tell their story. Soldiers want to be on telly. Officers want to be on telly even more. And some further up the ranks are almost a hazard in their desire to get their mug on screen.

So it is that I spent many weeks setting up a film about the teams whose task it is to defuse IEDs in what has – to a large extent – become the war of the IED: the Improvised Explosive Device or homemade bomb.

It is hard to imagine anything that could potentially be more sensitive to OpSec. Clearly Nato does not want to inform the insurgency just how it goes about its business here. But in the end everything was cleared. I'd suggested the chief Media Ops officer should absolutely fly down from Lashkar Gah to Camp Bastion to see the final cut in person and change anything that could compromise OpSec.

Filming without any media minder whatsoever
But first – to the film. In the end – irony of ironies – we spent our entire time with the IED unit without any media minder whatsoever. This, on the most sensitive news item to have come from Helmand possibly since the Brits arrived there (this time around). It illustrates precisely how all the best-laid Whitehall plans survive no contact with war whatsoever. There may be all manner of Green Bookery and other arcane malarkey in London – come Afghanistan and other factors soon somehow crowd it out. And hallelujah for that.

Not least – there's the question of trust. We had pivotal figure on this occasion in terms of the "Media Ops" officer in Lashkar Gah – Lt Col David Wakefield. His job is to somehow match the needs of media teams on the ground downwards, to the demands of Whitehall upwards. You can see how that is as near to defining the impossible as you can get. But he genuinely tried hard and worked effectively to get us what we wanted. He wanted the IED film made and he made sure it happened, after months of organisations asking for access but not getting it.

So much hangs on who your "Media Ops" boss is in Lashkar Gah. You can get people like Wakefield who either instinctively understand what we are about or at least try to. Or you can get people in that job who understand little, care less and frankly just want to get through their year of whatever of complete poisoned chalice and then move on to something, anything, better than this. And boy have we had them in Lashkar Gah in times past.

But again, the old human system will out. If you are getting nothing from the stuffed shirt in Lash – simply go find the tent of the commander of the people you want to be with in Camp Bastion, make your pitch and it will either happen or not.

That old excuse about lack of helicopter transport...
So it was on one occasion that we had been asking to get up to Kajaki Dam with the Royal Marines for a long, long time. The old excuse about lack of helicopter transport was trotted out. They are in short supply. But they are also a very easy excuse too.

Off I went one night to the requisite tent, tipped off by a sympathetic officer in Camp Bastion. Minutes later the deal was done and we were on one of two Chinooks leaving for Kajaki the next day. All of this a filming opportunity which the entire machine from Whitehall to Lashkar Gah had been telling us, could not and would not be done.

The reason – simple. He knew and I knew that the Commandos were going to have a major engagement 48 hours hence and we both wanted it on television. It happened. It happened yet again with little reference up to Lashkar Gah I strongly suspect, let alone to MoD in London, until it was simply too late to veto the whole thing.

So what does all this produce? Impartial coverage? Of course not. You are covering what British soldiers are doing, with them, featuring them, from their perspective. Of course it is biased. And so are filming trips with the Taliban for that matter. It is in the nature of the beast.

Do soldiers behave differently in front of camera? Of course they do. Does anyone doubt that? They get the brief before we arrive. They know. They are on watch. Their tongues are being monitored.

Does that mean the exercise is invalid? Well, I don't think so. I've just finished a long film which – over 16 minutes it must be said – painted a pretty unambiguous picture of a bunch of highly-trained, professional soldiers acting with great restraint. But it also showed starkly that they understand little or nothing of the people whose land they occupy. Thus, the job they are tasked to do is, pretty much, impossible.

Importance of human intelligence in counter-insurgent strategy
Worse, their Afghan Army "partners" – Nato's only exit strategy – fared scarcely any better. And you don't need to visit Sandhurst to suss that you cannot win counter-insurgent warfare without first rate Humint – human intelligence.

And the film showed also, that the other side, the insurgents, have that in abundance. Why? Because they watched our every move for one day. They then spent days two and three ambushing, sniping and rocketing our group of soldiers at will, with some accuracy, resilience and flexibility. They are good fighters. You need to see close up how they have held down the greatest arsenal this planet's ever seen, for years now, with few RPGs and Kalashnikov with lots of IEDs into the bargain. Of course, you saw all this from the perspective of the British and Afghan soldiers. But the point is - you saw it.

Extracts from the book will be published by Journalism.co.uk over the course of this week and there will be a launch event at the Frontline Club on 15 September: Who is Winning the Media War in Afghanistan?

Afghanistan, War and the Media: Deadlines and Frontlines (ISBN 9781845494445) is published by Abramis on 13 September.

Editor's note: MediaLens has been in touch with Journalism.co.uk and would like to state that it did respond to Alex Thomson's requests for comment. A statement from MediaLens is available at this link.

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