One particular reason why moving the Canadian military mission to Kabul will be a Good Thing: without the prospect of fairly frequent deaths and ramp ceremonies to obsess over (which coverage has only undermined support for the mission), and with the much greater costs of being based in Kabul, the Canadian major media will rapidly lose interest in what the Canadian Forces are doing in Afghanistan. The media will then bring almost all their people home.
That indeed can only be a Good Thing. Those media, television above all and it has by far the greatest public impact, have done a generally miserable job reporting and explaining the Kandahar mission and all its aspects (though there have been some exceptions, most notably Matthew Fisher and Brian Hutchinson of Postmedia News).
Besides which our media’s almost exclusive focus on the CF and Kandahar has left Canadians miserably ill-informed about the war, and the country, as a whole.
In the name of God, go! Without you the public, politicians, and punditocracy will rapidly lose interest in the mission. Leaving the forces just to get on with their work. As was the case for by far the greater part of the CF’s some twelve years deployed in various major Balkan missions, first under the UN, then NATO.
Update: Once again our media media not on the job; as far as I can see none of them bothered to run this CP (AP) story rather relevant to extending our military mission:
Dutch government to investigate possibility of new Afghanistan mission
Now why might that be? Hell, the People’s Daily Online covered the news. How bizarre, and sad, that the controlled Chinese Communist media do a better job than ours on this.
Upperdate: By the way, the Dutch had attack helicopters in Afstan, a type that our Air Force does not possess useful though they might be–and is most unlikely to get given the pressures on the defence budget:
Adieu Apaches
Uppestdate: Please see Thucydides’ comment (he served at Kandahar) which is very revealing about our media’s general approach.
Mark
Ottawa
[...] Watch: Mark Collins shares his take on a positive side to any training mission moving outside Kandahar, via the Unambiguous [...]
There was Canadian media reporting in Afghanistan?? WOW, Who would have known.
I have one particular memory of Canadian media at KAF.
During a ramp ceremony where six of my comrades were being seen off, I happened to have a place close to the airplane, and across from where the media had a roped off area. The ceremony started and the camera lights went on, and the reporters filmed the first of the soldiers being brought to the plane. The first casket had hardly entered the airplane and the second one was still making its way between the lines of soldiers (Canadians and Allies) when the camera lights suddenly turned off and the media left the ceremony, probably to go get a coffee at Tim Horton’s on the boardwalk or Mr Greenbean’s beside the Army/Airforce Exchange.
I could only imagine what any one of them would have said if one of us were to stand up and walk out of a family funeral for one of their family members.
It was almost impossible to pry any Canadian media member out of the media compound, much less to get anyone of them to go outside the wire, which goes a long way to explain the crappy coverage you got for the eight long years we have been there so far.
Think about that when you next watch or read the “news”, and wonder to yourself what they missed, and what they deliberately ignored.
Thanks very much for the comment, for your service, and for that of the CF.
Mark
Ottawa
[...] based on this one here. Unambiguously Ambidextrous gets a nice [...]
[...] Earlier: Media out! Of Afghanistan/People’s Daily Online Update [...]