Say Anything Blog

By Warner Todd Huston

The Taliban suffered a big loss in Pakistan/Afghanistan this month and so did al Qaeda in Iraq, but the MSM has been practically silent on these great successes. It only goes to show that the media is so completely sold on the claim that the war is lost that they aren’t interested in doing any real reporting on the war.

Not only has Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki headed up a brilliantly successful attack on rebel leader and Iranian backed Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army in Basra, but it seems that Maliki’s hard-line against Sadr has convinced Iraq’s main Sunni block to return to their places in the Iraqi government. Sadr has called for a ceasefire between forces loyal to him and the Iraqi government. At this point, al-Maliki seems poised on a breakthrough in Iraqi affairs that could lead to more involvement and less bloodshed. This is all something that few expect possible only a few months ago.

The western press has reported the information above widely, if not enthusiastically, but that isn’t the only good news in Iraq. What seems to have been given short shrift is the fact that al Qaeda has been severely hurt in Iraq, even “decapitated.”

April 22, 2008: Between mid-March and mid-April, al Qaeda suffered major losses in Iraq. American and Iraqi troops killed or captured 53 al Qaeda leaders. These include men in charge of entire cities (or portions of large cities like Mosul or Baghdad), as well as men in charge of various aspects of terror operations (making bombs, placing them or minding the bombers). Most important, nine of the ten most senior men involved, were captured, and interrogated. This led to locating more al Qaeda staff, and assets. Hundreds of weapons and explosives caches have been discovered this year, as a result of interrogating captured terrorists. The result has been a sharp fall in suicide bomber attacks, and the ones still carried out are against soft targets (civilians), including the recent funeral of two men earlier killed by terrorists. This was part of an al Qaeda campaign to force Sunni Arabs to switch sides again and support terrorism. But these attacks have the opposite effect, causing more hatred for al Qaeda.

Of course that first bit of Iraq news is certainly good to hear about and the western news media has done some reporting on the matter. But, seeing as how al Qaeda is America’s chief concern, one would think that its decapitation in Iraq would be something that at least the news media in the U.S.A. would be highly interested in. But we’ve heard practically nothing about this good news from our media. And what holds for the unreported good news in Iraq is repeated in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the efforts against the resurgent Taliban there.

At the end of April the Taliban was handed a major set back in the Khyber Agency area of Pakistan, but little of this has been reported in the western media about it.

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This is all good news, of course. It shows that all the people in the Afghanistan/Warzistan/Pakistan triangle aren’t sold out to al Qaeda and the Taliban. This was a major setback for the Taliban and has sent them running back to their Warzistan strong holds.

But, it is a story that the western media are not doing much to cover, sadly. And it’s all because it is a success in the War On Terror, something that the western media does not want to advertise.

Read the whole thing.  It’s pathetic that our own media is so slack about reporting good news, and why?  Who are they trying to help?  Certainly not the US.