# PBS Documentary on AFG "The War Briefing" Starting 28 Oct 08



## The Bread Guy (28 Oct 2008)

Link to PBS's "The War Briefing" page here - shared in accordance with the "fair dealing" provisions, Section 29, of the _Copyright Act._

*In Afghanistan, the Loudest Sound Is the Clock Ticking*
Ginia Bellafante, New York Times, 27 Oct 08
Article link

In early September Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee on the difficulties American forces face in Afghanistan. “It is my professional opinion that no amount of troops, in no amount of time, can ever achieve all the objectives we seek in Afghanistan,” he said. “Frankly, we’re running out of time.”

To watch “The War Briefing,” a “Frontline” documentary to be shown on Tuesday on most PBS stations, is to feel vividly the ticking of the clock.

Rigorously reported and somberly produced, “The War Briefing” is both a diagrammatic explanation of everything that has gone wrong over the past few years and a grim visual tour of a landscape that nature itself seems to have made impervious to the ambitions of outside occupiers. Factually the film reprises recent news reports (and includes commentary by journalists like Dexter Filkins of The New York Times) but at the same time it palpably delivers a sense of our narrowing options.

The film begins with “Frontline” reporters embedded with the Bravo Company, an Army unit battling assaults nearly every day in the Korengal River valley in northeastern Afghanistan. The territory is so vast, rugged and labyrinthine that Churchill, traveling with the British Army as a reporter in 1897, wrote it off as unconquerable. Soldiers live the horror and frustration of the maze, often unable to see the enemy.

“You can’t really pinpoint them,” one soldier says. “You just got to keep on scanning, keep your head on a swivel.”

The chilling effect of “The War Briefing” is to make American efforts in Afghanistan seem at once essential and futile, at least within the next few years ....

More on link


----------

