Logan: "I would give up a toilet and a hot meal and a bed any day for a story that's real"
by digby
I think we may be getting past he point where anyone can say that CBS didn't know that Logan is a major hawk. Here she is at the National Press Club talking to Marvin Kalb.
Here she tells it like it is on Afghanistan in her inimitable way:
LARA LOGAN: What it means, what we originally-- go back to your original aims when you invade-- well, it wasn't an invasion. The Afghans are very quick to point out that they were actually the ones that toppled the Taliban with U.S. help. There were less than several hundred U.S. personnel on the ground at the time. But the original aim was to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban and to insure that they were never able to threaten the national security interests of the United States ever again. That clearly is not the case.
And when you're sitting down and you're avoiding the hypocrisy of not putting the Taliban on the terror list because you want to preserve the right to sit down and negotiate with them and they’ll bring out every academic in Washington that they can find who will tell you that every insurgency in history has been won through negotiation and settlement, you don’t win it on the battlefield. Well, tell that to the Sri Lankans. I believe they just won their insurgency on the battlefield.
So, I mean for me, if you're not-- people think when I say this, that I'm advocating for war, I'm not advocating for war. I think if you're going to go to war, you better go to war and you better win. But if you're not, if you're just going to loiter on the battlefield and mesaround with one disastrous political strategy after another, then get the hell out because you have no right to ask people to go and fight in your name because you're lying to them.
The best analogy I can give you, what you're doing to your U.S. troops on the ground, line up all hundred thousand or so of those troops, handcuff them behind their backs, give them a shove, send them straight into the Taliban guns. Because that's effectively what you're doing. The enemy is not in Afghanistan. The low hanging fruit, the expendable people, are in Afghanistan. The real enemy is across the border in Pakistan, and I'm not advocating for war in Pakistan. But there are a thousand things you could do to address that. As long as you are not going after the command and control and the true source of the enemy-- and by the way, we have the capacity and the information to do that and we have not because of our foreign policy towards Pakistan-- then you have no business being in the fight.
And when people say Karzai is not a strategic partner and he’s corrupt, really? So 30, 40 guys will strap on suicide bombs and they’ll go and blow themselves up in an attack on a U.S. base because they're pissed off that the government's corrupt? Give me a break. This is not about corruption. This is not about whether Karzai is a reliable strategic partner. That's an excuse. That's all it is.
MARVIN KALB: Cut it down to the chase. What do you think is really at the heart of the American effort now in Afghanistan?
LARA LOGAN: Get the hell out. That’s all we care about. It’s costing too much. We don’t want to pay for it, we don’t think the Afghans are worth a fight, it's their problem and we want to get out of here.
MARVIN KALB: And at this particular point, if the U.S. were to work out a way of getting out without having accomplished its original purpose, then it sounds to me that you think it’s just been a waste?
LARA LOGAN: Yeah, it has, it's been a waste. I mean, you have the locations. The Quetta Shura runs the Afghan war from the city of Quetta inside Pakistan.
MARVIN KALB: But to go in there, you're crossing a national border.
LARA LOGAN: You don’t have to go in there, there's plenty of ways. If you've got their phone numbers, as I know we have had for years, you don’t need to go across the border.
MARVIN KALB: What do you do?
LARA LOGAN: You take them out the same way you took out al-Loki and Nek Muhammad and all the others that have been killed that way.
MARVIN KALB: Well.
LARA LOGAN: And you do it, you target not just the Quetta Shura, you target the Miran Shah Shura, the Peshawar Shura, the Haqqani Network. You take 24 to 48 hours out of your day where you target all the people who you know where they are and you send a message to the Pakistanis that putting American bodies in Arlington Cemetery is not an acceptable form of foreign policy.
I've spent several hours now perusing her comments in various forums. And her worldview is eccentric. She's not political at least in partisan terms. What she is, is contemptuous of all academics, politicians and diplomats in the way I have often observed the military brass to be contemptuous of their civilian leadership. That's who she seems to identify with most closely. (At least certain members of the military --- she's critical of Petraeus.) And frankly at least half of what she says sounds like utter bullshit although she offers it up with such conviction I can see why people might back off questioning her.
But she is ideological, there's no doubt about it. In fact, she's right out of the cartoon Frank Gaffney school of Muslim fearmongering:
When I say an American perspective, I really mean from a western perspective because the world has been quick to divide this fight into American and non-American. And I don't believe in that division. I think the division is between western and non-western. I don’t want to put simply a religious name on it. It’s for people who believe in the way of life that we believe in, and people who believe in an alternative way of life that goes back centuries to what I call a very dark time.
She also believes there are white hats in the middle east but it's hard to tell if they change places or if she has an idiosyncratic way of identifying them. One thing is quite clear, she believes that we could "defeat" the Taliban, al Qaeda (and apparently Pakistan) if we had the will to do it with the only kind of ultra violence they can understand. We just haven't killed enough of them (and attached enough cheap movie dialog threats to go with them) to get our message across.
I think my biggest takeaway from all this is just how insufferably arrogant and conceited this person is, with a flair for drama that would make even Clair Danes in Homeland blush with embarrassment if asked to deliver these lines without laughing:
MARVIN KALB: How do you see that yourself? Do you find yourself more comfortable doing the war than the summit?
LARA LOGAN: Yes, without question, and more invested in it. It requires more of you, it asks you to find out who you are and it asks you what's truly important. I would give up a toilet and a hot meal and a bed any day for a story that's real. I can't stand to dabble in things that are not real. They don’t mean anything. I mean, politics is critically important, but it doesn't burn that fire in the way it does to be out there in the most impossible situation doing something that is truly the difference between life and death.
Oy ...
Lara Logan is obviously a very brave person. She likes being in dangerous situations and she's good on TV. So I get why she's so successful. But from what I've been seeing and reading these past few days I think she's probably always been a pretty mediocre journalist with an ego the size of Jupiter. She's not the first "foreign correspondent" to fall in love with herself and be convinced that time in the war zone gives her unique strategic insight. (It doesn't.) But her little "error" on the Benghazi story should make everyone go back and reevaluate her work.
It's interesting that while she compliments Richard Engel for his work she says she disagrees with his analysis. I've always thought Engel was one of the best of the TV guys. I'd be curious to know exactly what they disagreed about. And she thinks Dexter Filkins is great, which is true. But honestly, I don't Logan can hold a candle to either one of those reporters. She's not nearly as good as she thinks she is and probably never has been.
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