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NBC and CBS both used their chief foreign correspondents--Richard Engel in New York and Lara Logan in the DC bureau--to cover the three-way talks. ABC assigned the task Jake Tapper, its man at the White House. The purpose of the meeting, noted NBC's Engel, was "to launch a new coordinated strategy to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban." He dubbed Pakistan and Afghanistan with the dubious title "the world's most volatile nations," which must have come as a crumb of comfort to, say, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Sudan, Iraq, Georgia, Congo…
The fact that Obama persuaded Karzai and Zardari to sit down together counted as an achievement, NBC's Andrea Mitchell (at the tail of the Chuck Todd videostream) noted. The last time those two nations' leaders met at the White House, with George Bush, "they would not even shake hands." ABC's Tapper told us that "neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan has historically a record of working well with the other." "Relations have been tense," was the way NBC's Engel put it.
CBS' Logan aired some dynamic propaganda video from a Taliban Website showing attacks on US military supply lines inside Pakistan and a teenage bomber's attack on the Information Ministry of Afghanistan last fall that killed eight people. However there was precious little reporting about the Taliban itself. What is its ideology? What are its war aims? What is its base of support? Instead we heard mostly vague labels. ABC's Tapper referred to the Taliban variously as "terrorists" and "extremists." NBC's Engel called them al-Qaeda's "extremist allies," as if the Taliban was the junior partner, and "militants." "Militants" was the description chosen by CBS' Logan.
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