by Richard North, TCW
WHEN the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001, the attack on Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, the news reverberated around the world, with the Western media reporting every move.
It is an interesting reflection of the way of the world that when Pakistan decides to go to war against its neighbour Afghanistan, mounting air attacks in the capital Kabul, there is almost complete media silence in the West.
The one immediate exception is the Guardian which published a piece headed: ‘Pakistan targets militant hideouts in Afghanistan as conflict continues’.
It has to be said that the actions have been little more than skirmishes in a region that has a long history of instability, going back to the Raj and before, where the North-West Frontier was a continuous cockpit of turmoil.
This resulted in the British time of the infamous strategy of ‘butcher and bolt’, where troops would launch destructive punitive raids and then skedaddle before the tribes could assemble and extract their revenge.
As such, when Operation Enduring Freedom was launched, the news was not so much about the Afghan campaign as the role of the United States in it. Essentially, the US is news; primitive countries in the back of beyond are not.
It is the case that Israel has much the same effect. The punitive action against Hamas in Gaza has attracted hugely disproportionate media attention, in stark contrast to the murderous war going on in Sudan where hundreds of thousands are being slain or starved to death and the Western media can scarcely be bothered to report it.
This might be called generically the ‘Gaza effect’, defined loosely as a phenomenon where events attract disproportionate attention because of the identity of the participants. In the early days this was mainly a media effect, reflecting in the often wall-to-wall coverage.
Gradually, though, this has started to have real world effects, seen in the general election which produced five MPs who had stood on a Gaza ticket. Latterly, it has had a dampening effect on foreign policy when Starmer refused to support US/Israeli strikes on Iran, and initially withheld US access to British bases for fear of offending Muslim communities.