Embedding with the CF in Afstan

A thoughtful piece by Graham Thomson of the Calgary Herald--this is the part I found most interesting:

...
In fact, there are days the military seems to merely tolerate the media, as opposed to welcoming them, particularly when reporters start asking difficult and potentially embarrassing questions -- as was the case a few weeks ago when bad news broke.

In this case, we had no idea bad news was on the way.

The Internet connection hadn't been cut when two public affairs officers walked in and told us a Canadian convoy driving through Kandahar City had been ambushed twice in little more than half an hour. It was astonishing news that soon confused reporters and made them suspect the military's version of events -- and ultimately underscored the journalistic problems facing embedded reporters.

The attack on the night of Feb. 18 was the first time Canadians had been ambushed inside the city limits. Not only that, they'd been hit twice in what appeared to be a well-planned, brazen attack by the Taliban -- even though NATO officials had been insisting for weeks that the Taliban was a spent force.

In the military's version of events, the Canadians had pushed through a gauntlet of small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenade in the first attack. When battle damage forced them to stop a few kilometres down the road, they were attacked again.

No Canadians were hurt -- that's why the Internet hadn't been shut off -- but the news for Canadians was bad, nonetheless. In the confusion of the firefights, they had mistakenly killed two innocent Afghans.

And the news was about to get worse.

Almost immediately, accounts from the city contradicted the Canadian version of events. These came from eyewitnesses interviewed by local Afghan journalists and "fixers" hired by Canadian journalists who can't simply head into a war-zone city in the middle of the night to see what was going on.

The eyewitnesses said the Canadian soldiers were never ambushed.

According to this second version of events, the convoy had inadvertently stumbled into an attack by insurgents targeting a police checkpoint. The unlucky Canadians, at the wrong place at the wrong time, were hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.

However, there was no second attack.

Instead, the soldiers, who were newly arrived in Afghanistan and still jittery from the first firefight, mistook an Afghan police officer for an insurgent and opened fire, killing him and a civilian on the street.

People in Kandahar City were dismayed with the shootings, the third and fourth civilian deaths inflicted by Canadian soldiers in a matter of days. The local police chief angrily asked how Canadians could mistake a uniformed police officer for an insurgent.

When informed of the contradictions in accounts, Canadian public affairs officers shrugged and would only say the incident was under investigation.

When we asked if the soldiers' inexperience in-country was a factor in the shootings, the officials again said they had no information that could help us.

For embedded reporters, the experience was frustrating. Pressing the military for more information just resulted in more sympathetic shrugs and the well-worn response that the matter was under investigation.

Even though we were embedded, we did have the option of temporarily "disembedding" by having a local journalist, or a fixer, drive us into Kandahar City so we could look around for ourselves...

And I like his ending:

In some ways, the embedding program is a testament to the Canadian military's confidence in the professionalism of its soldiers and the value of its mission in Afghanistan. The embedding program satisfies, to a large extent, the needs of both sides.

Reporters get to show Canadians what is going on in Canada's first war since Korea. The military hopes the soldiers' stories will help win public support back home even when soldiers die in the line of duty.

It's just a matter of time before an embedded Canadian journalist dies in the line of duty, as well. I say that not out of any sense of bravado or because I think reporters deserve anyone's sympathy.

We're all volunteers in Afghanistan, after all.