How Headlines can Mislead -- MSNBC and Afghanistan

MSNBC.com put up a article today with the sunny headline "'We broke their neck': Coalition routs Taliban". Sounds like fantastic news coming out of Afghanistan, right? But then the article starts out by stating the following:

Coalition forces are routing the Taliban in Kandahar province, forcing its fighters to abandon bases they've held for years, Afghan officials say.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, half-brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai, told The Associated Press late Wednesday that he believed most of the insurgents had left before NATO and Afghan forces began an operation to wrest control of the province in July.

And, it turns out, that the statement included in the headline did not come from a military official, but from an Afghan police chief:

"We broke their neck," Hajji Niaz Muhammad, the police chief in the Arghandab District, told the Times. "There is no doubt they are very weak in this area now."

Compare this to the much more muted words of a British commander of the NATO forces operating in the country:

"We now have the initiative. We have created momentum," Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, the British commander of the NATO coalition forces in southern Afghanistan who has overseen the Kandahar operation for the last year, told the newspaper. "It is everything put together in terms of the effort that has gone in over the last 18 months and it is undoubtedly having an impact."

Trusting the hyperbolic statements made by Afghan officials is foolish enough -- incorporating such a statement into a headline to create an overly optimistic impression of the war is dangerously deceitful. It creates a false impression of overt success when the truth is far more nuanced. The article even goes on to make this very observation:

However, the coalition's experience in the former Taliban stronghold of Marjah offers a cautionary tale.

The southern Afghan town was seized from the Taliban eight months ago, but coalition forces are still trying to clear the town.

Years of Taliban control may have ended in Marjah, but the Taliban never left — they simply went underground, blending in among civilians, taking advantage of the region's terrain of agricultural fields and irrigation trenches to stage daily ambushes of American patrols.

The Marines have found bloody clothes and spent bullet casings and bombs meant to kill them. They've heard bullets flying overhead and seen muzzle flashes in tree lines. But finding insurgents is another story altogether.

The impossibility of stabilizing the situation is Marjah is the very reason that a more aggressive offensive was not launched in Kandahar in the first place. But now we're supposed to believe that everything is going swimmingly.

Why can't the American media be more honest about the prosecution of the country's wars? They paint black and white pictures where shades of gray are required.