Photo illustration: Ed Johnson

What makes old people cynical is listening to the exact same lies being propagated year after year—and seeing them be just as effective as they ever were. I grew up during the Vietnam War, and I never thought I’d live to see the same hollow rationales, the same shameless appeals to patriotism trotted out to justify another such fiasco.

But here they are in this campaign, looking just as fresh and lively as ever.

To be sure, they have company. Near the end of the vice presidential debate last Thursday, the lies from Paul Ryan were coming so fast and furious—Obamacare will cause 20 million people to lose their health care! 7.4 million seniors will lose theirs! It contains 21 tax increases!—that I feared he was about to morph into some kind of iconic, fabled trickster figure, the Coyote perhaps, or the Lying Choirboy Scamp. Befuddled by the sheer quantity of falsehoods, the mainstream media predictably rolled over like an obedient Labrador and started debating facial expressions, leaving any number of reasonable questions unanswered.

For instance, left unexplained, so far, is how the ever-evolving Romney-Ryan economic plan now can possibly work, even on its own terms. Originally, the plan called for a massive tax cut for the very wealthiest Americans, the “job creators,” who could be counted on to invest the extra income and, well, create jobs. Now we are told that any such cut for the wealthy will be “revenue neutral,” thanks to all the loopholes they plan to close. But if that’s so, if the rich are not going to get a real tax cut … then where is all the extra investment income going to come from?

Or how is it that no one picked up on the old switcheroo involving just why it is that we need to attack Iran before it develops a nuclear weapon? For months now, we’ve been told that the mullahs in Tehran are so crazy they are liable to launch a suicidal nuclear attack on Israel or even the United States the moment they have such weapons.

Yet last Thursday, when moderator Martha Raddatz dared to ask the question no one else in the media seems capable of putting to a candidate—“let me ask you what’s worse … another war in the Middle East, or a nuclear-armed Iran?”—Mr. Ryan merely mentioned Iran’s hatred of Israel, repeatedly emphasizing a whole other argument for war:

“[I]f they get nuclear weapons, other people in the neighborhood will pursue their nuclear weapons as well.”

Say what?

Not 10 years after the neocon excuse for going to war with Iraq pirouetted effortlessly from rooting out “weapons of mass destruction” to building a model state to inspire the Islamic world, Mr. Ryan and his party are now talking up an exponentially bigger war … to maintain the regional balance of power?

Ms. Raddatz then failed to elicit any discussion of the fearsome costs of an invasion or even an air strike against Iran, despite asking directly, “Can the two of you be absolutely clear and specific to the American people [about] how effective would a military strike be?”

Crickets! Though at least Vice President Biden did blurt out, “The last thing we need now is another war.” Nothing on this Earth was going to compel Congressman Ryan to touch an actual fact or figure—just as nothing has compelled Gov. Romney to give us any hints about what a potential invasion of Iran is likely to cost in terms of blood and treasure.

Instead, the Republican strategy is once again to take a number of recent events and anxieties and wrap them together in a grand narrative of Democratic iniquity. To this end, the right’s spin machine has been working shamelessly to exploit the assassination of our ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans in Benghazi. They have done their level best to inflate this tragic incident into a classic non-scandal scandal, insisting that the conflicting initial reports about just what happened show that the Obama administration is somehow weak, or incompetent, or covering something up, or even anti-American.

These wild and often contradictory charges came fast and furious last Thursday from Rep. Ryan, who on at least three different occasions accused President Obama of apologizing or not standing up for “our values,” in the Middle East—thereby somehow empowering the mullahs to alter the laws of physics: “They’re spinning the centrifuges faster.” He went on to castigate Vice President Biden for failing to convince the Iraqis to let thousands of American troops remain in that wonderful country for years to come, while charging the administration with endangering the lives of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan and “los[ing] the gains we’ve gotten” there. Excusing his running mate’s own precipitous charges about Benghazi, he insisted that, “We should always stand up for peace, for democracy, for human rights.”

Standing up for peace, democracy and human rights might safely be described as a stunning policy reversal for the party that flayed Democrats who tried to do just that during the Cold War.

Much more alarming is hearing the same Big Lie of that era trotted out to justify still more endless and unwinnable wars. Ever since the end of World War II, it comes around every time we fail to bludgeon our way to victory: If only we had the will.

If only those un-American types in the Oval Office, or the Reds in the State Department, or those bums on the college campuses who don’t understand “our values” would just get out of the way. If only they would “unleash Chiang Kai-shek” from Taiwan. If only they would let Douglas MacArthur drop the “30 to 50 atomic bombs” like he wanted, to create a “cordon sanitaire” across the YaluRiver. If only they would let us invade Cuba, or stay the course in Vietnam, or in Afghanistan, no matter how corrupt and irascible the Karzai regime proves to be, or how many more young Americans are killed by the very Afghans they are trying to train, so that “we don’t lose the gains we’ve gotten” in that godforsaken rockpile. If only we can plunge into Iran!

Always and forever, it seems, there’s another mad scheme waiting—and suddenly this campaign has become about the next one, as much as it is about budget deals, or the economy. Here’s a good rule for a democracy: if we can’t discuss, fully and openly, just how a military adventure will work and what it will cost, we shouldn’t do it.

An ABC News producer in Iraq had just posted some breaking news from Baghdad. According to a press release from the U.S. military, five American troops had just been shot and killed inside Camp Liberty. The names of the dead were being withheld. The incident was under investigation. Details were fleeting.

Just a few weeks earlier, on her 20th reporting trip to Iraq, she had spent an afternoon at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, interviewing soldiers for a piece she was still working on about the recent dramatic spike in the number of suicides in the U.S. military.

Reading the post at her home in the Washington, D.C. area on Monday morning, Ms. Raddatz had a hunch. Yet another U.S. soldier might have snapped. She shot back an email to her colleagues. “This is a big deal,” she wrote. “Sounds like either a soldier shot fellow soldiers, or a contractor or a local.”

In the end, Ms. Raddatz’s instincts turned out to be correct.

Some nine hours later, on the evening news shows, CBS’s Katie Couric, NBC’s Brian Williams and ABC’s Charles Gibson all reported that—in the worst case of soldier-on-soldier violence since the start of the war—an unnamed American was now in custody after killing five of his colleagues and wounding three others. The killing spree, they reported, had taken place that afternoon inside a clinic dedicated to treating soldiers with psychological problems.

On Monday evening, CBS illustrated the story with a computer animation of a soldier bursting into a room and blasting away with a handgun. It looked like a video game. On NBC, Brian Williams fleshed out the story by interviewing a celebrated war veteran about the stress of combat in the studio in New York.

ABC News, on the other hand—in an impressive display of news-gathering—showed actual footage from inside the clinic. As it turns out, during her recent trip to Baghdad, Ms. Raddatz had spent an entire afternoon interviewing the clinic’s staff members for her report on how the military was coping with the recent uptick in suicides.

“It was just days ago that Lieutenant Colonel Beth Salisbury showed ABC News the very same combat stress control center where today’s horrific shooting took place,” Ms. Raddatz reported on Monday evening. “Salisbury, who runs the center, was not hurt in today’s shooting. But of the dead, two were on her clinical staff, and three were soldiers waiting for treatment.”

Ms. Raddatz went on to break the news that the soldier in custody was on his third deployment. “The sergeant being held for the murders is married and based in Germany,” she added. “ABC News has learned he had been having problems during his deployment. Initial indications are that he did not seek mental health treatment voluntarily, but that his unit had referred him for care.”

The gripping footage, accompanying her report, showed Ms. Salisbury, dressed in combat fatigues, walking past a concrete barrier into the clinic, past the check-in desk, past the waiting room and down a narrow corridor with fluorescent lights and plywood walls decorated here and there with what looks like the artwork of patients.

“Their weapons are taken for safety,” Ms. Salisbury tells the camera. “And we secure those here for the safety of our staff and themselves.”

When The Observer caught up with Ms. Raddatz by phone on Tuesday morning, those words seemed to be haunting ABC’s veteran war correspondent.

“You look back on these transcripts, and what they were saying at the time—the part about the guns?” said Ms. Raddatz. “To me, that was one of those moments where I was like, oh my gosh. This is the only place on the base where they wouldn’t have weapons. Where they wouldn’t be able to defend themselves.”

One eerie aspect of war reporting is that if you do it long enough, sooner or later the violence of battle is likely to catch up with some of your past subjects. Such has been the case for Ms. Raddatz recently. “When I left Kabul last time, I had interviewed the head of training for the Afghan army,” said Ms. Raddatz. “I interviewed him in his office at the base in Kabul. The next day there was a suicide bombing there. It blew out all the windows in that room and the paintings on the walls.”

On Tuesday afternoon, while continuing to report out the developments in Baghdad, Ms. Raddatz learned that one of the soldiers captured by ABC’s footage inside the clinic (footage which had not yet aired)—a naval commander with a Ph.D. in social work—was one of the victims killed in the shooting.

Ms. Raddatz found herself looking at a January 2009 entry on his classmates.com profile. “I have begun another deployment this time to Iraq where I will work in a combat stress center,” he apparently wrote. “Our son returned from Iraq in October. … Our son-in-law is in Iraq expecting to return late Feb early March.”

“I imagine he treated the guy,” said Ms. Raddatz. “And the guy probably stormed right back into that very office.”

Then she excused herself. She needed to finish her follow-up story for World News that night.

fgillette@observer.com

“It turned out I’d been on a patrol with one of them in Western Baghdad,” Mr. Engel emailed The Observer recently. “We sat down and had tea and talked about Iraq and mutual friends on this very remote Afghan mountain.”

Since the start of the conflict more than seven years ago, Mr. Engel has made numerous trips throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan and the tribal areas in between. Along the way, he’s been embedded with the U.S. military, survived firefights and reported on the resurgence of the Taliban.

But last month, on his most recent trip to the region, Mr. Engel did something he had never done before. He began scouring the capital city of Kabul for a good location to set up a new Afghanistan bureau for NBC News.

“We have some local staff who have always worked for us there,” said Mr. Engel. “Now we’ll have a fully staffed and operating bureau.”

“We’re still covering Baghdad,” Mr. Engel added. “We’re not downsizing Baghdad. But I’m going to be spending a lot more time in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

He’s not alone. In recent months, as the focus of the U.S. military operations overseas has shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan, Mr. Engel and other seasoned foreign correspondents are increasingly following their military sources back to America’s other war.

“I just got off the phone with a Canadian TV network, and they’re scouting out network office space in Kabul,” said Mr. Engel. “There’s a big migration. I’m starting to see some of my old friends—military people and journalists—I knew from Baghdad. It’s a lot of the same press corps as in Baghdad.”

As a result, in the coming weeks and months, American news audiences can expect to see more and more top writers and correspondents popping up there, from the mountains of Tora Bora to the poppy fields of Helmand.

On Monday, April 20, NBC News announced that Ann Curry would be traveling to Iraq and Afghanistan to report on how the countries are being reshaped under the Obama administration. At the end of the month, ABC’s senior foreign affairs correspondent, Martha Raddatz, plans to return to Afghanistan. And a recent email to C. J. Chivers—The New York Times’ veteran war correspondent—returned an out-of-office reply: “I am traveling in the Caucasus and Afghanistan and will have infrequent email access until I return in May.”

The New York Times—which this week won the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for its coverage in Afghanistan and Pakistan—has maintained a bureau in a house in Kabul with multiple beds throughout the war. Immediately after Sept. 11, The Times had a big team in Kabul. Eventually, many of the reporters switched over to Iraq. Reporter Carlotta Gall has remained in the bureau for essentially the entire time.

Foreign editor Susan Chira said that The Times now plans to fill those extra beds in the coming months. Many veterans of The Times’ Iraq coverage, including Mr. Chivers, Sabrina Tavernise, Richard Oppel and Dexter Filkins, will soon be filing stories from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“This is obviously the war that the president is focusing on,” said Ms. Chira. “And troops are being shifted to there so we intend to gear up. We’re not going to abandon the war in Iraq—there are a lot of troops there, and we’re going to cover it. Yes, we’re ramping up in Afghanistan and Pakistan and we’ve had a strong commitment there, which thankfully the Pulitzer judges recognized. But we won’t leave Baghdad.”

At the same time, U.S. broadcast networks will be hustling to set up shop. “We have all known for months that the focus was shifting from Iraq to Afghanistan,” Paul Friedman, senior vice president of CBS News, recently told The Observer. “We’ve all budgeted for it, and we’re all trying to figure out how best to get it done.”

Mr. Friedman said that back in the fall of 2008, CBS began talking with other U.S. news organizations, including NBC News, about the possibility of opening a joint facility in Kabul, which would allow everyone to share the costs of housing and providing security for their people. According to Mr. Friedman, the talks are ongoing.

“It would be preferable for us to be able to get the expenses down far enough that we can get our own people in there,” said Mr. Friedman. “I think the cable guys are talking about going their own way because they have different demands than we do.”

Tony Maddox, the executive vice president and managing director of CNN International, told The Observer that CNN first began scouting for a bureau in Kabul in the fall of 2007 (as part of a broader initiative to set up more foreign correspondents in cities around the world). These days, CNN maintains one full-time correspondent in Kabul and regularly rotates other reporters through the bureau.

In Iraq, the major U.S. news organizations house their bureaus in a handful of heavily fortified clusters scattered throughout Baghdad’s Red Zone. In Kabul, no such external fortifications are currently necessary. 

“We live in a house that serves as an office and a residency in Kabul in one of the better districts,” said Mr. Maddox. “It’s not got anything like in Baghdad. It doesn’t have any of the obvious outward security.”

A DIFFERENT WAR...

In obvious and in less obvious ways, covering Afghanistan is a very different proposition from covering the conflict in Iraq.

“In Baghdad you had a situation where half the city was Sunni, the other half was Shiite, and the two were firing mortars into each others neighborhoods and we were stuck in the middle,” said Mr. Engel. “In Kabul, the residents are almost all Sunnis. You don’t have a civil war situation. You have an insurgency that’s trying to impose its will and topple the government.

“It’s a different dynamic,” he added. “Right now you can move around Kabul without these long armored convoys and security consultants. In Kabul, it’s like the city is in the eye of the storm.”

Once you leave the city, however, the immediate reporting environment gets much more treacherous. The Taliban regularly set up impromptu checkpoints on the highways leading out of Kabul to the south and to the east, making driving around the country extremely dangerous for reporters. 

Another constant challenge of covering Afghanistan is trying to figure out how to report on the mountainous tribal region along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr. Engel said he recently rented a house in Pakistan and believes in reporting the story from both sides of the border.

“You need to cover all three areas,” said Mr. Engel. “The only way to do it is to be on both sides.”

Nic Robertson, a senior international correspondent for CNN—who was one of the few Western TV correspondents in Afghanistan on Sept. 11, 2001—said that changes in Pakistan have made it harder to report on the tribal region from that side of the border. It’s a shift in the regional dynamic that, in turn, has arguably increased the strategic importance of having a base in Kabul.

“It’s harder to get there from Pakistan now because the Pakistani government has to give you permission to cross through the tribal areas,” Mr. Robertson told The Observer. “During the days of the Taliban, for example, we used to go through Peshawar. You would get an escort from a couple of policemen from Peshawar through the tribal region up to the border point of Torkham. And then cross into Afghanistan. It was standard practice for any Westerners traveling through that region.”

“Now if you are going to, say, Jalalabad in the east—which might geographically seem logical to go from Pakistan—I think most people would go from Kabul,” he added. “Crossing the border area from Pakistan has become a much more troublesome thing for the Pakistani government to organize for Westerners.”

Back in February, ABC News’ Ms. Raddatz headed to Afghanistan to file a series of dispatches from the region. Before arriving in the country, Ms. Raddatz had planned to meet up with a neuroscientist from San Diego who was doing some work in schools near Jalalabad. 

The two cities are separated by a mere 95 miles of highway—making a trip by car tempting. But when Ms. Raddatz arrived in Afghanistan, her foreign editor said that there was no way she could drive to Jalalabad. It was way too dangerous.

A few days later, Ms. Raddatz flew up to Torkham on the border with a military embed. On the way back to Bagram, their flight stopped in Jalalabad to refuel. On the spur of the moment, Ms. Raddatz and her producer jumped out on the tarmac. As a result, Ms. Raddatz was able to spend the next several days in the field, visiting a bombed-out compound where Osama bin Laden used to live, and traveling to some remote villages by raft.

“It is a huge logistical feat to plan these trips,” said Ms. Raddatz. “You really need a great deal of help trying to get around on those helicopters, and you never really know. We got weathered out on an embed when I was there in January. Snow, fog, you name it. That’s a real challenge in covering the story. There’s no guarantee that you’re going to get anywhere. You might be sitting there for weeks.”

In March, Margaret Warner, a senior correspondent for The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, traveled to Afghanistan for the first time for PBS, where she spent three weeks reporting on everything from the U.S. military strategy to the rights of Afghan women.

“Here we are doubling down on troops and it seemed like a good time to go over and take a snapshot of where Afghanistan is right now after seven years of U.S. engagement,” Ms. Warner told The Observer. “What is the benchmark from which the Obama administration will now be judged? That was our overall concept.”

In Kabul, Ms. Warner hired a British security expert, who warned her not to stay in the capital’s five-star hotel, the Serena. “He felt to stay there was foolish,” said Ms. Warner. “It’s a bomb magnet.”

Instead, she set up shot in a private guesthouse. Reporting in Kabul, said Ms. Warner, went relatively smoothly. She landed interviews with General David McKiernan and with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Later, however, when she prepared to venture out of the capital to do a story about a U.S. heroin-eradication program in the violent Helmand Province south of Kabul, things went haywire.

On the morning Ms. Warner was to leave, the State Department called and said they had a credible threat of a suicide bomber in the region. The trip was postponed. The next day, she was cleared to go. But again, her flight was delayed because the pilots were worried about having to spend too much time sitting on the runway in an area rife with unpredictable attacks.  

By the time Ms. Warner arrived in the province, it was too late in the day to go out with the eradication team. She settled for an interview with a local U.S.-backed governor in the area. Even then, her private-security team remained nervous.

“They carried major weapons and had a whole procedure about what to do if there were attacks on the car,” said Ms. Warner. “It was much more heavy than we had in Kabul. They were very cautious. We couldn’t just get out and stroll down the street and talk to people.”

...AND A DIFFERENT NEWS BUSINESS

If the conflict is different from the one that began just six years ago in Iraq, so is the news. In that short period, technology has caught up, and the economy of the news organization has sputtered.

Ultimately, whether U.S. broadcast executives end up forming a partnership in Kabul, the bureaus they set up there are unlikely to look much like the bureaus of the recent past.

“In the traditional bureau model, you’d have a reporter who would have a producer who would have a camera person,” said CNN’s Mr. Maddox. “Then you need a driver. Then you would need someone to administrate all the costs, and then you hire a bureau chief. And suddenly you have six people in a long-term property commitment, when really all you wanted was a reporter somewhere.”

Those days, said Mr. Maddox, may be done. “It used to be that you couldn’t really operate a bureau without an engineer because of the equipment that was needed,” said Mr. Maddox. “We can now set up a bureau with the amount of equipment that you can carry in a backpack.”

He said that the lessons of Baghdad—that is, how relatively small, relatively inexpensive bureaus could evolve over time in a deteriorating security situation into massively expensive and perilous operations—would not be lost on executives trying to figure out their strategy in Afghanistan.

“I think there is an anxiety among many people who are going there: What can we do to avoid getting bogged down like we did in Baghdad?” said Mr. Maddox. “What happens if the temperature in Afghanistan goes up again? I think everyone now is going into the relationship with Afghanistan with a view to how they can eventually get out of it.”

fgillette@observer.com