Well, it’s a panel? Because the whole point of a panel, of a news org going through the logistical hurdles of putting a bunch of people on together, is to sketch a broader picture than any one expert could on their own. If every expert has to be the same then just do a one-on-one interview and loop it until the subject drops out of the news cycle, save the production costs.
Two points. 1) the producers may expect whatever it is they expect from you, but your value is as a translator and bullshit sniffer, mediating between the deep experts and the audience exactly as you do here. 2) experienc of a country does not correlate to expert understanding of that country; there are things you can point to as indications of a natural curiosity about a place, but the absence of those things does not indicate the absence of expert knowledge or even curiosity; if I has a question about the US I would go with the answer from the American History prof of a university in Russia over some random Iowan.
You want to be part of the solution, then do your homework on your panelmates, and keep them from speculating outside their core fields. If there are too many panelists to keep track of them all, employ the Ledeen Doctrine.

You know what you’re talking about, and you admirably admit to the various potential outcomes of any move the country makes in foreign affairs and war.

The Afghans already know how to manage war, they cut deals and wait for the invaders to leave before they cut new deals.

Also there is no respect due the NY Times – see: War: Iraq, front page cheerleading.

What drives me nuts is the constant teevee appearances of people that were completely fucking wrong on everything about the Iraq War and now seek to opine on yet another war in the middle east.

Your opinions aren’t the problem, theirs are.

I think you’ve got it just right. You most certainly ARE qualified to comment cogently on matters pertaining to the American national security issues as they relate to Afghanistan and Pakistan. And exaggerating only slightly, Americans don’t particularly CARE about Afghanistan except to whatever extent it affects their perception of their own safety and well-being.

Some sort of tactical success in theater would require more extensive local and cultural knowledge, as that is how we might determine how to lighten that footprint as McCrystal et al keep suggesting, but when limiting the discussion of the most effective american approach to that region, you’ve got important expertise to bring to bear.

mikey

I’ve seen you on teevee a coupla times and I think you do a much better job than most making clear what you know and what you don’t. You’re one of the best commentators in that department: not talking outta yer ass. Keep it up. We need more like you on the television machine.

I sort of think you’re fucked if you do and fucked if you don’t.

Long time ago I was a Peace Corps in a town in west Africa and it could have been Afghanistan it was that long ago, years before the Russians invaded and a time when we had American kids doing hearts and minds in Afghanistan.

So one day at the end of the US fiscal year USAID had end-of-year money to burn off and they sent a CIA guy up-country to find a spending project. The guy’s name was Ed Lawless, if that’s not outing an agent thirty or forty years later, and he was about 6 foot five and when he got into town he spotted a white man riding a mo-ped and chased him in his CIA car until he got home and he bearded him, figuring a white guy on a mo-ped had to be a Peace Corps kid. Turned out the white guy was a German school-teacher sent by whatever the German equivalent to the Peace Corps was, and he was irritated. This was a German schoolteacher famous for dorkitude and nasty attitude all across northeastern West Africa.

The CIA/USAID guy subsequently stumbled on to the local Peace Corps, and we invited him to a meal of pounded yams and mutton, and he was upset because we didn’t have ways for him to spend end-of-fiscal-year appropriated money. He said, shit, look at the town market, you could build cement pillars all around it and put an iron roof on top, what the fuck are you kids good for anyway? And we felt low and mean but in the long run didn’t give it no nevermind. We weren’t dumb enough to try to put a roof on a bush-town African market with end-of-year money, and we were probably not finished laughing at this yahoo for following the fat German on his mobylette.

Not to speak ill of the New York Times, while the CIA was trying to figure out the difference between a German exchange teacher on a mobylette and a Peace Corps hippie, a certain American newspaper was fixated on the idea that the Sahara Desert was growing; it was called Desertification, and most of the newspaper’s sub-Sahara Africa reports were about phantom armies of Desertification refugees that were supposed to be flocking through our neighborhood, based on reports from somewhere above 14th Street and below 132nd Street probably.

Desertification was a big story in the early ’70′s, much the same as global warming is a big story today. Oh, sure, every now and then somebody would amble down out of the Sahara on a camel, but the big story there was that the local children would risk their lives darting between the camels’legs to grab new turds. If the New York Times had had a guy on the spot, he could have interviewed the kids and learned that camel turds were magic, and worth risking your life for.

Point is, Spencer, it is possible that nobody knows his ass from a hole in the ground about any of this, so a guy who sort of understands that is a better guy to have pontificating on the television than the other types of guys you find pontificating on television.

And forget about reading Pashto or Dari newspapers, if such things exist. I myself can read French like a Frog and lived for years in France, and it doesn’t help at all, I still can’t understand visceral takes on DeGaulle or Algeria, and I always run the risk of exposing myself as a clueless rube, the way any knowledgeable foreigner is a clueless rube in someone else’s country. There is no understanding politics that you didn’t grow up inside of, so a panel of non-Afghani experts can be nothing but a joke if what you expect is insight on Afhanistan.

But where there’s a war on, a panel of experts on kicking ass or getting ass-kicked is another thing altogether, and you might be of use there. Hang on with teeth and fingernails, no matter what these Pasto newspaper readers say.