Military Mendacity

The triumphant mood at the start of the First World War swept across Europe. Armies marched off accompanied by fair maidens blessing them with flowers and to the cheers of the populace. The mass media fanned the fervour. The Germans believed they would beat the French in 40 days. The British believed 'it would all be over by Christmas.' How wrong they were. Very few cautious words were heard.

The French attacks at the start of the war were a disaster. Brightly uniformed troops charged headlong into massive artillery bombardment and machine gun fire. The catastrophic beginning was not reported as such by the media and the sorry story was to be repeated several times before the grim reality emerged.

Nothing much has changed. Earlier on this week there was yet another example of how bad news is spun by our so-called betters. As the Independent pithily put it in an editorial, it is acutely counter-productive. It also feels that the first impulse of 'the authorities' is to cover things up. It is only when alternative sources dig out what really happened that the truth crawls gasping for breath into the open.

"How often have we been here before? The wedding party bombed in July 2008: the US claimed there were no civilian victims, but an Afghan commission revealed that 47 had died; the seven children killed by Task Force 373 in an unprovoked and secret attack in June 2007, their deaths hushed up until revealed by Wikileaks; the three women, two of them pregnant, shot dead in February this year "by militants" it was claimed, until former Independent correspondent Jerome Starkey revealed that they had been killed by Nato forces. The list goes on.

Why this compulsion to mislead? The accumulated weight of mendacity, the insistence that the enemy is evil incarnate and our boys invariably heroic, is merely sickening. The attempt by US forces to rescue Linda Norgrove may or may not have been as urgent as claimed; it is impossible to judge. We cannot doubt that it was difficult and dangerous, and if they had pulled it off we would have been as glad as anyone. But why the need to obscure the truth about how it ended? Why go to such lengths to spell out the alleged cause of Linda's death when the miserable truth was bound to emerge? Why prevail on our Foreign Office to release a statement – "There is nothing at all to suggest that US fire was the cause of death" – which it would be required in short order to eat?

There is growing dismay about the war in Afghanistan on both sides of the Atlantic. It is questionable whether it was ever winnable, but it is becoming clearer by the day that we are not winning it: Hamid Karzai's government is in disarray, beset by corruption scandals and a banking crisis; the Afghan national army shows few signs of developing into a force capable of taking on the Taliban, whose grip on the country tightens by the day. Meanwhile Nato continues to produce its misleading statements." The Independent 12/10/10

This lack of truthful reporting is very dangerous for a democracy. Why it might lead a Prime Minister to declare war on another country based on a completely false premise. And as for Afghanistan? Bear in mind that most of the country is a no-go zone for journalists. Truthful objective reporting? Hardly.