Read More of the Same Day's Blog

A busy day of news saw no consensus about the top story. NBC led with the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis en route to repair NASA's Hubble telescope. ABC led with a murder spree at the USArmy's Camp Liberty base outside Baghdad: a sergeant killed five of his comrades at a clinic for soldiers suffering from combat stress. It turned out that ABC's Martha Raddatz had toured that very clinic just days ago when reporting from Iraq. CBS kicked off with Defense Secretary Robert Gates' decision to replace Gen David McKiernan as the commanding officer of NATO and US troops in Afghanistan. It turned out that CBS anchor Katie Couric had accompanied Gates to Kabul and had interviewed McKiernan, unaware that he had just been fired. Afghanistan qualified as the Story of the Day.

CBS' Couric confessed that she had been unable to get the scoop from either Gates or McKiernan during last week's trip to the Afghan war zone. Her unidentified sources "close to the Defense Secretary" told her that McKiernan had demonstrated "extraordinary class" when he was replaced. She had interviewed him "shortly thereafter. He gave no indication his time in this troubled country might be coming to a close."

McKiernan had been commander in Afghanistan for eleven months but had been under pressure because unidentified "military experts," according to CBS' Couric, "felt his expertise in waging a counterinsurgency was inadequate." From the Pentagon, NBC's Jim Miklaszewski quoted McKiernan's "critics" as calling him "old army--focused more on conventional warfare than the counterinsurgency strategy desperately needed." Gates nominated Gen Stanley McChrystal as the new commander, a former Green Beret. "McKiernan's resignation will essentially end his 40-year military career," Miklaszewski predicted.

ABC covered the Afghan story in least detail even though Martha Raddatz thought it was "truly an earthquake." She mentioned it in passing at the end of her Camp Liberty report: "This does not happen very often that a top general is fired." CBS' Couric told us that it has not been since 1951 and Douglas MacArthur that a commanding general has been replaced mid-war.

Next, CBS' Couric continued with what had seemed to be the major story from Afghanistan during her trip. She profiled McKiernan's new tactic for troop deployment, "fanning out into the country setting up smaller operations in local communities." She filed some spectacular landscape videotape from Logar Province, perched on a ridge with snipers from the 10th Mountain Division overlooking the valley. The community-based tactic is based on an experiment in next-door Wardak Province that NBC's Jim Maceda covered last week. The problem is that Afghanistan is a huge place, even for 100,000 troops. Soldiers in Logar told Couric that they were the first Americans ever to set foot in some villages "and that is eight years into this war."


Andrew Tyndall 5/12/09 11:17:42 pm

© 2010 Tyndall Report