Book review: Katherine Brown,Your Country,Our War: The Press and Diplomacy in Afghanistan

Your Country, Our War is a welcome addition to both studies of news media representations of the Afghan conflict and of journalistic practice in post-9/11 Afghanistan. In both areas, it joins the few scholarly works to include Afghan perspectives. Even among these, Brown’s account is unique and exemplary in its longitudinal focus. Brown’s analysis is based on interviews with political leaders, bureaucrats, journalists and editors from Afghanistan and the US, conducted in two distinct periods of time (2010–2012 and 2015–2017). Thus she takes into account the ever-shifting sands on which post-9/11 Afghanistan stands, and presents to her readers a narrative that encompasses the dynamic changes in Afghan society, the ongoing and mutating conflict, informative overviews of shifting US policies in the country as well as detailed accounts of the regeneration of journalism in post-9/11 Afghanistan.

While touching upon all these elements, Brown’s sustained focus in the book is on the nexus among the successive US and Afghan political administrations in the post-9/11 period as well as the news media and journalists of the two countries. Based on her analysis of their complex, evolving relationships, she argues that the elite US press, e.g. The New York Times and Washington Post, are undervalued components of US public diplomacy efforts in parts of the world where it is ‘entangled’ (p. 13). Thus she offers a fresh perspective on foreign correspondence by US elite news organizations that not only includes the questions of ‘whether U.S. journalists fairly convey information about the rest of the world’ but also extends to asking ‘how foreign audiences interpret those constructed narratives’ (p. 11, emphasis added). Her goal is to highlight the role that journalists play as ‘de facto diplomats’ (p. 155) and her central thesis is that ‘Digital technology has now accelerated a media boomerang pattern for foreign correspondence: News written abroad for an American audience travels back to the government officials, journalists, and citizens of the nation U.S. journalists are talking about’ (p. 123).

Based on her empirical data from the US’s ‘longest war’ (p. 3), Brown shows that US and Afghan journalists can simultaneously adopt a watchdog stance towards powers-that-be in their societies while at the same time adhering to certain cultural norms and consensuses defined by their national affiliations, i.e. journalists ‘detaching themselves from their government is different than detaching themselves from their nation’ (p. 155). This is very much in the vein of the findings of Daniel Hallin’s (1989) classic study of the US news media’s role in the Vietnam War, the previous contender for the US’s longest foreign conflict. Brown shows (ch. 7, 145–147; ch. 8) that the importance of nations and nationalism for news professionals may not have changed all that much in the globalized era. She argues against celebratory discourses about contemporary news reporting that see digitally circulated foreign news as the harbinger of cosmopolitan understanding among audiences worldwide. Instead, Brown concludes, ‘Through international communications, national identity can become more pronounced’ (p. 163).

This global extrapolation that Brown makes from what is essentially a bilateral analysis of the nexus between US and Afghan administrations and news media rests on her contention that ‘Once reported, information from U.S. news organizations becomes a global force. The international news net is interwoven, with the American product the single most influential strand’ (p. 162). Indeed, from the very outset (Preface, p. xvii), Brown is forthcoming of her view that the US elite news media can stand in as representative of Western news media in general. However, this US=West equation fails to take into account existing discussions of how soft power projections by middle power nations within the nominally monolithic ‘West’ can differ from that of a hegemonic superpower like the US; for example, when it comes to Afghanistan, a previous study has noted subtle differences in media representations between US and Western European news outlets based on differing domestic political rhetoric (see Verschueren, 2012). Thus, in Brown’s emphasis on equating the US with the West, one might feel trapped in the same ‘dizzying haze of Washington’ (p. 169) that Brown warns against.

There is another contentious point that arises from Brown’s emphasis on the ‘global impact’ (ch. 1, n 25) of the US elite news media. This emphasis belies the smorgasbord of news media with global reach that makes up the international news landscape today – from Al Jazeera to CCTV. Even if we limit our view to the Anglophone, Western-hegemonic context that Brown focuses on, we see that the importance of the BBC World Service only receives passing mentions (pp. 42, 156; in contrast see Gillespie and Webb, 2013). In addition, there is the question of the impact of global news agencies (or newswires as Brown calls them), e.g. the Associated Press, Agence France Presse and Thomson Reuters, on international news. This also receives only brief attention (e.g. pp. 29, 156) and, although the difference of news agency reporting on Afghanistan, which serves a global audience by default, in contrast to the elite US news organizations’ focus on US audiences, surfaces again elsewhere in her narrative (p. 134), it is not expanded upon by Brown.

Even within the discussion on US elite news organizations’ portrayal of Afghanistan, there is one significant critical paradigm missing from Brown’s account. Having discussed the fact that US foreign news tends to use ‘four conventional news frames’ of ‘security, diplomacy, the economy, and humanitarianism’ (p. 124), Brown hones in on two of these frames in US news about Afghanistan. Firstly, the security frame focusing on the ongoing conflict and the warring parties, and secondly, the failed governance frame focusing on the weaknesses of the Afghan government. What is absent here is a ‘humanitarian’ frame that myriad existing scholarly works have found to be salient in both US political rhetoric and the US news media’s reportage about Afghanistan: justification of the war as an effort to liberate Afghan women (Bush, 2001). This is surprising because Brown discusses instances of journalism – both in the Afghan and US news media – about women’s status in Afghanistan on several occasions.

These criticisms, however, should not detract from appreciating the deep understanding and sensitivity with which Brown presents the perspectives of Afghan journalists, particularly their ambivalences. Brown tells us how they acknowledge foreign journalists’ positive impact on journalistic practice and news reportage in contemporary Afghanistan yet feel aggrieved by the portrayal of Afghanistan as a failed state in US news. She sheds light on how Afghan journalists work in one of the most unsafe places to report news from, yet are proud to fulfill their societal role as independent journalists to uphold the values of a nascent democracy.

Illuminations, such as Brown’s, of contemporary Afghan journalists’ professional world are rare. Her eminently readable yet in-depth account should be cherished as it allows readers to have a long view of the complex role journalism plays in what is – with and without US involvement – one of the longest continuous conflicts in the modern world (1979 to the present).