04/08/2010

(Read the AP story)

Remarks by Tom Curley
President and CEO/The Associated Press
Joe Creason Lecture/University of Kentucky
Lexington, April 8, 2010

The issues of war, journalism and history converge in a way that impacts no news organization more deeply than The Associated Press. In fact, conflict and AP can be summed up in two words, Terry Anderson. The story of Terry’s nearly seven-year captivity and a lifetime devotion to international and conflict reporting is well known here and an enduring inspiration to everyone at AP. The format tonight, however, suggests you are expecting me to go on for longer than two words.

I am grateful for the invitation to participate in this conference and eager for the opportunity to attempt to add context to the coverage of ongoing conflicts, especially in Afghanistan.

I also want to acknowledge Joe Creason’s contributions. Any journalist of a certain age read Joe Creason, and we are better for it. He taught us much, especially through his passion for a larger sense of community and the ability to bring a story home in a way that was both penetrating and entertaining. I salute the University of Kentucky for keeping him alive for journalists of another generation.

While I have visited Kentucky often, I make no claims to particular ties. In fact, when this date for the conference was set, I fully expected to be walking on a campus that would be celebrating a national championship. So, now you know, I can be wrong. Turns out I can be off on timing, too.

One of my schools this year made a Final Four for the first time. Actually, it’s the Frozen Four – ice hockey. And I had no idea when we booked this conference that Rochester Institute of Technology would be playing at this very moment.

So while we ponder conflicts, let us remember the simple joys that Joe Creason reported or that our way of life allows through games or other endeavors we find rewarding, including conferences such as this one on one of the great balancing acts: how a free press serves a free people at war.

In recent years, the nature of conflict has changed dramatically. We at AP have made adapting our coverage to these new battlefield realities a priority, right up there with finding a successful digital business model.

AP next month will celebrate its 164th anniversary. Our claim to fame is that we are the country’s first nongovernmental institution to go national and then international. We were put in business to bring back news from foreign wars – in 1846, it was Mexico – and we still are.

Rather than talk about wars in the abstract, I’d like to set the scene for this conference with a collection of pictures dating back to the American Civil War. By way of introduction, war photography is never easy to look at, and it shouldn’t be.

(Run slide show.)

The last series of photos from Afghanistan is particularly difficult. The images were taken by AP photographer Julie Jacobson. I’m going to start off by telling you about them because in many ways they illustrate the challenges and the responsibilities that media have in wartime and in this war in particular.

For some time we at AP had been looking for a way to bring home the real story of war in Afghanistan in a way that the casualty figures and accounts of routine firefights were not imparting. That opportunity revealed itself last August when Julie, plus our text reporter Alfred deMontesquiou and videographer Ken Teh were embedded with marines in Golf Company 2nd Battalion in southern Afghanistan as they tried to wrest the small town of Dahaneh from the Taliban.

We had observed that much of the U.S. strategy – in almost the ninth year of this conflict – to engage the enemy seemed to consist of sending a couple of soldiers, isolated and vulnerable to attack, to draw out the Taliban.

On this particular day, Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard was the point man for the small group of American and Afghan soldiers as they patrolled the village. He had volunteered for the assignment.

They came under fire from a pomegranate grove in the distance, and a rocket-propelled grenade hit Bernard. It blew off one of his legs and badly mangled the other.

Jacobson, flat on the ground, 10 yards away, held up her camera and shot. She could hear him yelling, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” Joshua Bernard later died of his wounds, the third Golf Company fatality in four months and the 19th American to die in Afghanistan in August.

Battlefield images like the one Julie captured are rare and, as you might imagine, their distribution not taken lightly. For more than two weeks AP debated whether to release the image of the mortally wounded soldier. Once we decided that the value of informing the public overrode other concerns, we gave the Pentagon advance notice and personally visited Bernard’s family to let them know.

We did not release the image as a single image, but put it into context with the other photos you just saw. We also ran a package of stories and an extensive explanation of the reasons behind our decision to move the photos. In Julie’s journal, which we also released, she wrote:

“To ignore a moment like that simply would have been wrong. I was recording his impending death, just as I had recorded his life moments before, walking the point in the bazaar. Death is a part of life and most certainly a part of war. Isn’t that why we’re here? To document for now and for history the events of war?”

No story raised such a furor. We received more than 8,000 emails and nearly a thousand calls. There was hate mail. There were death threats. And, every once in a while, a message of support, usually from a military person, thanking us for showing the war as it is.

For AP, however, the mission was not just showing that death is a part of war – something that the Pentagon and the White House from time to time try hard to hide. Julie’s photos, and the stories that accompanied them, crucially illustrated that the U.S. appeared to have no better strategy in Afghanistan than to dangle our own soldiers out there and see if they could locate the enemy. Indeed, Joshua Bernard walked into history. August became the deadliest month for American troops up until that time in the Afghan war.

In my lifetime, I’ve seen the popularity of two presidents collapse in part over opposition to the management of wars, but in larger part over the failure to come clean about battlefield realities.

In Afghanistan, the strategy needed a rethink. It has gotten one. The latest strategy of focusing on securing and supporting larger population areas constitutes what President Obama on his secret visit there two weeks ago called a “clearer mission.”

The success of that approach remains to be seen, but you can bet that we’ll be following it closely. Americans and others around the world need honest answers about what is happening to their sons and daughters as well as the impact on their wallets.

To be clear, you can’t credit the journalists with this latest adjustment in tactics.

But the fact is that war coverage by a free and independent media with reasonable access to the battlefield forces policy makers and strategists to deal with the reality of what is happening on the ground instead of what they want the public – or even Washington – to think. Nowhere is truth more at risk – or more elusive – than in today’s wars.

It’s an old adage in the military that an army goes into any new war fully prepared to fight the same way it fought the last war. Commanders and their troops soon learn that things are very different. And to accomplish the mission, they quickly rewrite the rules of engagement.

Journalists with access to the battlefield and the freedom to report without official interference or unreasonable restrictions are an important part of this process.

With the revolutionary advances in technology for collecting, transmitting and consuming of news, this can make for an adversarial relationship between the military and the media. This is how it should be. And it is nothing new for us.

In the Mexican-American war, dispatches from the field were put on boats that sailed to Alabama and from there Pony Express riders raced the news to the nearest telegraph station to relay it to New York. The process took six weeks.

By the Civil War, use of the telegraph to relay news was firmly established and so was the pattern of friction between reporters and the military. Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war, was so dismayed by the spread of even accurate information that he took temporary control of the telegraph, imposing the nation’s first censorship on the press.

He soon relented but compensated for that by using the telegraph – and AP – to distribute his own official statements. In other words, Stanton invented the military press release, which endures to this day.

In every war that followed over the next century, press censorship was imposed in some form. In World War I, reporters in France were strictly limited in getting to the battlefield.

Instead, they talked to senior offices and wrote about “the big picture” -- not the fighting in the trenches. That often involved taking a limo out of Paris to interview a few generals and getting back in time at attend the opera.

Vietnam marked an important departure from these practices. AP’s Saigon bureau, like others there, had unprecedented access to the battlefield and an extraordinary freedom to report. What they witnessed, it turned out, was a far cry from what the generals were telling Washington and what Washington was telling the public.

Their reports back home were a critical factor in turning public opinion against the war. For the military, however, that translated into undermining the cause, and it led to blaming the press for defeat in Vietnam.

It also set the tone for an increasingly rocky relationship between the U.S. military and the media, which lingers to this day. The great irony of Vietnam, of course, is that journalists there could not have reported the war as they did without the cooperation of the military in providing helicopter and other logistical support to places that otherwise would have been inaccessible.

With Desert Storm in 1991 came the advent of “embedding.” Actually, only the word was new. Reporters effectively had been embedded as far back as the Civil War and most commonly during World War II. Embedding may now provide the best access to the field and to the military that the press can expect in today’s conflicts – especially given the extreme difficulties in culture, geography and language.

Embedding provides a good, solid look at the soldier’s life, which is important. But it doesn’t provide us much insight into the life and viewpoint of ordinary Afghans, who were telling many reporters as far back as 2002 that the war was going badly.

Fortunately, AP has a backbone of local reporters inculcated with western journalism standards but integrated into the local culture and ways. Some of them, like our longtime correspondent Amir Shah, often have better access on the ground than organizations such as the CIA.

Long before the opportunity to embed was offered in Afghanistan, we had reporters operating on their own to provide daily coverage. AP, in fact, is the only media organization to have a full-time, multi-format bureau in Afghanistan since the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. There were times over the years when we were the only organization with a full-time correspondent there.

Looking back at our coverage, it is obvious that AP and other reporters were documenting what everyone now sees clearly: the meandering commitment that let Afghanistan become a neglected war that would come back to haunt us. At key inflection points in the conflict, journalists were often already reporting the problems and chinks in the strategy that led to this.

AP correspondent Kathy Gannon has been there from the start and witnessed the wandering path of U.S. strategy for nine years – as well as the disinformation that was put out to suggest success that wasn’t really happening.

Kathy, in fact, was the only resident foreign correspondent in Kabul at the time of 9/11 and had Taliban sources. After being expelled along with all other reporters, she alone was allowed to return.

Long before anyone official acknowledged it, Kathy was documenting how the Taliban, nearly defeated after 9/11, resurged. She also reported how a disenfranchised Pashtun tribal population became willing to take up arms against the new U.S.-backed government and the foreign troops protecting it. One of her greatest challenges early on, she says, was getting accurate information from a mountain of misinformation the Pentagon was providing.

In one instance, military spokesmen told her and other journalists that some 600 Taliban insurgents were killed during Operation Anaconda in 2002, the military’s largest operation to that date. Only Kathy and other non-embedded reporters could not find the bodies, hard as they hunted – even going into the caves where the military said so many had been killed. It virtually was impossible, she knew, to escape with that many bodies or bury them with no sign.

The repercussions of this can’t be understated: While official reports were claiming a beaten down Taliban, AP was reporting just the opposite. The U.S. administration already was looking to Iraq, of course, and didn’t have the resources to devote to Afghanistan, which helps explain such official misinformation. It had to make Afghanistan a success to enable Iraq.

That news coverage portended the disaster that Afghanistan was to become and which it remains today.

Jason Straziuso was chief correspondent for AP in Afghanistan for more than three years – during the height of the Iraq War. His stories over that period provide a laundry list of the deeply troubling challenges that U.S. troops in Afghanistan now face as they try to turn back the page of time and recoup lost opportunities.

“That Afghanistan’s future would remain in doubt was almost unthinkable when the U.S.-led rout of the Taliban began on Oct. 7, 2001. The military campaign that captured Kabul resulted in a wave of optimism in a country that had known little except war for a quarter-century,” Jason wrote in one story documenting the rise in civilian casualties and the growing corruption that helped feed the Taliban resurgence.

That story appeared in October 2006.

Two years later Straziuso would write how the Marines of Bravo Company’s 1st Platoon were sleeping beside a pasture of poppies – not destroying them. In fact, they were reassuring villagers that their cash crop wouldn’t be touched – even though poppies provide the Taliban nearly $100 million a year to buy weapons to use against U.S. troops.

Poppy eradication had long been a pillar in U.S. strategy against the Taliban and a point of positive publicity in this country. It turns out, however, that mostly it just ruined the livelihood of villagers whose hearts and minds the U.S. military needed to win over.

Being on the ground and close to the action is essential for journalists to sort through the truths and mistruths of war. David Guttenfelder has been traveling with U.S. troops in Afghanistan regularly for several years now. He took one of the most famous photos of the war so far: the young solider rushing to defend his post wearing a pair of pink boxer shorts and flip flops. (This picture was in the slide show.)

Guttenfelder says the majority of soldiers and Marines on the ground “get it.” In this war, he says, they have a strong sense of mission and feel there isn’t much to hide. They often go out of their way to protect journalists from risk – even though, as Guttenfelder says, he’s unarmed and twice their age. They want the public to know what they are doing in these hardcore, isolated places. Guttenfelder has never been told he can’t go on an operation.
Obfuscation occurs above their pay grade.

Take a recent case over the issue of negotiations with the Taliban. Rumors had been going on for some time about the attempts at a political settlement with the Taliban, but nothing was confirmed. Last month Pakistan announced it had captured the No. 2 commander of the Taliban’s Afghan insurgency – a coup the U.S. lauded as a real breakthrough.
But was it?

Kathy Gannon along with AP Washington correspondent Deb Reichmann uncovered a back story that suggested otherwise. In fact, Gannon and Reichmann found Afghan President Hamid Karzai was furious about the arrest and how it stymied ongoing efforts at a peace process. Their reporting revealed the disagreement within the Obama Administration about pursuing peace talks with the very group that gave al-Qaida its base in Afghanistan prior to the 9/11 attacks.

Last year President Obama named General Stanley McChrystal to take command of all forces in Afghanistan. McChrystal has made reducing civilian casualties a priority. Under Obama the number of U.S. troops there has multiplied, and the strategic focus has shifted from routing the Taliban in remote rural areas to securing large population centers.

Support for the war has risen after the Marjah offensive and the sustained successes in taking out al-Qaida leaders operating in Pakistan. I believe our reporting there, at a very high risk to the teams of journalists on the front lines, is capturing how the military appears to be gaining traction with McChrystal’s policy focused on protecting civilians and taking out the bad guys.

The coming months will tell whether this strategy provides a true path forward or is just another turn in the bend of what so far seems to have been an aimless – and deadly – war.
How and whether coverage by AP and other media affects strategic thinking and counter-insurgency doctrine is probably something only history can tell. But the day-to-day impact on public perception of war is clearer. Guttenfelder receives dozens of e-mails during every embed – from family members of the military and civilians on all sides of the political debate who have seen his photos.

Says Guttenfelder: “I really think this micro-view of the war and the daily lives of those in it has a big impact on the way people view the war and their beliefs on if and how it should be fought.”

These journalists face the same risks as the military: Attacks and kidnapping, small arms and RPG ambushes on patrols and convoys, rocket and mortar attacks on bases, IED and mine attacks on vehicles. Last year AP, photographer Emilio Morenatti, traveling with U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan, lost his lower left leg when the Stryker vehicle he was riding in ran over a bomb planted in open desert terrain. Two soldiers in the vehicle also were badly wounded.

In this new era of warfare, journalists are targets, too. Today’s wars don’t have clear battle lines. It’s hard to tell friend from foe. Victory as we know it may not even exist anymore. In these conflicts, no one is going to hand over his sword and sign terms of surrender.
This relentless risk of harm separates war coverage from all other journalism we pursue every day. AP spends more money on it, per story than anything else we do. I am convinced, and I think all of you here today would agree, that it is more important than anything else we do.

Thank you.

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