I think David Axe achieved this quite nicely in his trip to Afghanistan. His visit was clearly steered a bit by the PAOs, but he also did a great job of breaking out of that and offering an independent, and locally relevant, perspective on what’s going on. He wrote daily journals of what was going on PLUS many more pieces in various news outlets—in ten days. A much more impressive feat.

Heh. I’m jealous of these people.

“normally they do a better job of hiding just how tightly they were handled by the PAO.”

Yeah, this is the key point here, and I couldn’t agree more.

The other big thing is just looking at the trend lines. Are things getting better, or worse? I’d say things are trending worse, for sure. And what does history show us about foreign powers in Afghanistan? Nothing good, for sure.

All this, on a single week long embed shuttling between cities hundreds of miles away. Given the status of transportation in Afghanistan, he couldn’t have spent more than two days in each location. How can you possibly gauge independently how well a war is going from that? You cannot. He let the military feed him a narrative, and he repeated that uncritically.

If, on the other hand, he had spent his time interviewing local Afghans apart from his handlers and still came to the same conclusion, I’d give it more heft. When the British embeds in the south (Helmand, mostly) report good news, it is worth considering. Despite their similar emplacement with military units, they’re at least on the ground long enough to get a sense of how things are going, and a sense for cutting through the B.S. official source sling about.

If you’re going to declare a situation is going other than the universally accepted wisdom, you have to come up with more than a few days’ interviews on a brief jaunt through a conflict zone. Stephens’ work doesn’t pass basic muster on that count.