Revulsion and pathos: Covering the war in Afghanistan - Features - Mass Media

Afterimage, March, 2002 by Mark Dunden

Since September 13, clusters of postage-stamp portraits of those who died on September 11 have been published in the pages of The New York Times, as the paper gives little obituaries to each person who lost her or his life. They extend and magnify the tradition of pathos and sentiment in memorial portraiture, help focus hatred on the prime suspect behind the attacks--Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida regime--and they serve as a daily reminder to American citizens of the necessity of George W. Bush's escalating war on terrorism. As the world's greatest military power bombs one of the world's poorest nations, however, war seems a somewhat inappropriate description of what is going on, since war implies a dual relation between adversaries. Like the Gulf War it is more an act of domination than war. (1)

Media coverage of the bombing of Afghanistan, both in the United States and in Britain, could not have been more affected by the particularly charged context of feeling in the West after the events of September 11, when atrocity and terrorism was brought suddenly and shockingly home to the world's greatest power. In beginning to understand the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center (WTC) towers that triggered the military response, as Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, we should have the courage to see the attacks not as a threat from a "purely evil Outside" but recognize in this Outside "a distilled version of our own essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and peace of the 'civilized' West was bought by the export of ruthless violence and destruction into the 'barbarian' Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Congo." (2)

The relentless and repeated video and still images of the exploding WTC towers, the succession of portraits and stories about those who died, the pictures of Ground Zero, have been followed by a generally controlled and limited photographic coverage of the war in Afghanistan. While abject images of dead Taliban in the British press disrupted any idea that this is a clean and sanitized war, there is much that has remained absent or underrepresented after over four months of bombing.

Portraits of Osama bin Laden have been a recurrent subject and focus of revulsion in the British press, from his appearance on a mock "Wanted: Dead or Alive" poster in response to Bush's frontier-style ultimatum to the blurry stills from the video showing him talking to an unidentified Saudi sheikh about how he masterminded the attacks of September 11. The most explicit headline, in relation to a still from this video that appears to show him grinning at the camera, was The Mirror's "YOU GLOATING BASTARD," December [4. Following the Pentagon's release of his most recent video broadcast, a subsequent article in The Times, December 28, compared the appearance, gestures and posture of bin Laden with earlier pictures and video footage of him. He is said to look tired and undernourished in the video, harrowed by eight weeks of bombing. That he still remained uncaptured at that point, his whereabouts unknown, is never discussed. Visible evidence of his change in bearing is sufficient for the writer to suggest that the B52 bombers have "knocked the stuffing out of bin Laden, stripped him of his arrogance." Arrogant, smiling, taunting, gloating, even gaunt, bin Laden's face in the media provides the focus for public contempt and helps maintain the illusory sense of a simplistic binary between a fundamental "evil outside" and a "just" and "civilized" West. But as the war continues and the longer he appears to have escaped and eluded the United States military forces, his face can also begin to serve as a reminder of the failure of one of the main objectives of the bombing of Afghanistan.

While initial coverage of the war was controlled and limited--night images of explosions over Kabul, a fascination with the weapons and military aircraft used, aerial "before and "after" images intended to confirm "surgical" strikes--as early as the second week into the conflict, The Mirror showed us the first faces of children wounded by a U.S. bombing blunder. On October 25 The Independent ran the critical headline, "Families blown apart, infants dying. The terrible images of this 'just war'." Underneath this visceral heading, the front-page picture showed us an injured baby lying on a hospital bed in Ouetta, Pakistan, her face badly cut after a U.S. attack on a village near Kandahar. On October 29, The Mirror rather defiantly gave the lead article and front page to its former foreign correspondent, John Pilger. His denouncement of the war as a fraud was accompanied by shocking pictures of dead children killed by U.S. bombs and the Christians massacred by fanatics at a church in Pakistan.

If such images of injured or dead children began to raise serious doubts about the justness of this war, the excesses of other newspapers' cover stories countered them. The Sunday tabloid, The News of the World, November 4, for example, provided a riposte to the war's detractors in devoting a front-page image to a little boy holding an urn that contained ash from Ground Zero--all he has to remember his British father by, who was killed on September 11. The bewildered expression on this child's face should remind us all, said the newspaper's headline, "Why We're at War."