Spinning Afghanistan

Naheed Mustafa at Registan:

There’s a general sense here that a massive PR push is afoot, to make things look as good as possible to as many people as possible. There’s a drive toward “good news” stories, which isn’t necessarily a problem except that because there are so few, they take on a disproportionate importance. And no one denies these stories are a deliberate part of the media strategy. They’ll help immensely when Afghans are left to clean up the mess after the internationals are long gone and the world can shrug it off by pointing to the good news and saying Afghanistan was doing ok when we left.