I’ll be on Al Jazeera at 7 p.m. tonight talking about the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Tora Bora report that both Marcy and I wrote about this weekend. But is that actually a symptom of a deeper media problem? In a previous post’s comment thread, Sean writes:

I remember you saying that you were on a panel talking on “the way forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” but I can’t imagine what would qualify you to be on a panel about a country you’ve visited for a couple of brief stints. And I’m not trying to pick on you here; there are all kinds of people talking a lot (and loudly) about Afghanistan who don’t really seem to know much at all about the country. To illustrate my point, how many of the people writing and talking about Afghanistan do you think can speak just one of the country’s languages? How many can even read a newspaper in Pashto or Dari?

I take the point, though. But I would say that if we’re talking about what the U.S.’s way forward is in Afghanistan and Pakistan (which is what my Netroots Nation panel was about), then, y’know, I don’t want to come across as an asshole or anything, but maybe I am qualified to give a perspective. If we’re talking about what Afghanistan or Pakistan should do to move forward, then I’m not remotely qualified.

The broader point is that people should expect actual country-matter experts on their panels or on their TV, and not just security reporters or other such narrow-slice people. I don’t really know how I can get around this problem. Should I say, “I’m not really going to do this appearance, you should try Olivier Roy or David Edwards” to use the two examples Sean suggests? I’m open to that. What I try to do when I actually appear on TV is to be very clear about what I don’t know and not bullshit, as I notice so much bullshit on cable news centers on presuming things that people don’t actually know. (Rule of thumb: if it’s in the New York Times, it’s true enough. I don’t accept that, no disrespect to the Times.) But what should I do to not be part of the problem? Serious question.

Prepare yourself for the next big Congressional spectacle: as I report over at the Washington Independent, the tentative plan is for Gen. McChrystal to testify on the Hill about Afghanistan strategy the week of December 7.

While there will be a round of Afghanistan testimony in the armed services committees on Wednesday with Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, McChrystal is right now not expected to be part of those hearings. While all caution that more specifics will be announced imminently, and it remains possible that McChrystal might be summoned to Washington earlier, McChrystal is currently scheduled to spend the latter part of this week in discussions with Afghanistan government officials about the strategy, ahead of a crucial meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels on Thursday and Friday. McChrystal is scheduled to attend that meeting, in which NATO allies will be pressed to contribute thousands of new troops to implement the general’s plans.

It’s the only thing happening that week that could possibly be bigger than the official release of the Clipse’s third full-length record, Till The Casket Drops.

Via Leah Farrell, fulsomely praised here, comes this scorched-earth post by Security Crank, whose blog I’m now putting in my RSS. The Crank is pissed at what s/he describes as a level of blind ignorance displayed by anyone who describes Afghanistan as a tribal society or who believes that a troop increase by itself will fix Afghanistan. A motley crue of pro/anti/neutral voices get the grapeshot: Selig Harrison, Dexter Filkins, Gareth Porter, the Kagan clan and Leslie Gelb.

From my perspective, Security Crank is most incensed by the assumptions that appear to animate an emerging effort to cultivate Afghan militias against the Taliban-led insurgency. I am going to have more on this in the very near future, so it happens that this is where my head is at. But watch Security Crank unload on Filkins’ recent piece about that effort:

I didn’t realize the Taliban were lead by a group of tribal elders. Yuck. This reads almost like a press release from ISAF: demonstrate one’s understanding of a SAMS course on Afghanistan, then talk about how it’s America’s job to reshape Afghan society into what we think our image of it should have been before the Soviets ruined everything. The arrogance such a pair of paragraphs requires—starting with the assertion that Pashtuns are tribal and form solidarity through kinship and ending with the assumption that we can repeat the Awakening movement in Afghanistan.

The both assertions have been discussed at length in a paper prepared by the Human Terrain System, which practically begs the Army to stop trying to repeat the Sunni Awakening in Afghanistan. “the desire for “tribal engagement” in Afghanistan, executed along the lines of the recent “Surge” strategy in Iraq,” it says, “is based on an erroneous understanding of the human terrain.” The reasoning is that tribes in both countries are structured fundamentally differently, and that Afghans, even Pashtuns do not primarily organize around tribal lines. (More on the tribal militia idea-that-just-won’t-die is here.)

Eh, I didn’t think that Filkins implied that it was America’s job to reshape Afghanistan society, nor am I getting that motivation from the effort itself. But it’s legitimate to note that all of us — myself most certainly included — are dealing with a country that we don’t sufficiently understand and too often pass off safe conventional wisdom as if it reflected deep and nuanced study of Afghanistan, when in fact all it does is reinforce what we already believe. (”Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires” or “What we need is a Pashtun Awakening.”) I remember getting pissed off when I read left and right voices in Iraq talk about how the Sunnis and Shiites were locked in a 1300-year old war there when in fact the last major significant sectarian clash in Mesopotamia happened 1300 years prior. That focus on first principles and emperor-has-no-clothes-ishness is enough to overcome for any overheated points about the specific efforts in question.

One last thing. SC wants to know why the media “ignored” the Human Terrain System paper s/he links to that undercuts the case for fomenting tribal revolt. “Do they not like having their assumptions about a neat tribal solution to all of Afghanistan’s problems challenged?” I’d respectfully suggest that very few reporters actually knew about it. I certainly didn’t, and I think I’ve got HTS on my radar screen as much if not more as most national-security reporters not named Noah Shachtman. None of my sources ever mentioned it to me, even those who aren’t happy with a Pashtun Awakening model. I’ve found that HTS does a pretty poor job of publicizing its product, certainly compared to other military entities. To be clear, I’m not offering excuses. I wish I had seen this paper before, and I accept the criticism that I should have. But this is just a reminder that not every media failure is motivated by avarice or intellectual dishonesty.