Several friends have commented on how it seems untoward to be celebrating a violent death, regardless of how evil the person is who has died. To me, the celebration seems healthy, and I’m glad that the person who wrought so much carnage can kill no more. It’s cathartic after a decade living with the knowledge that the person who planned the death of so many thousands finally met with justice.

Now maybe we can finally put to rest the non-winnable “War on Terror” and get on with life.

US Army photo by Staff Sergeant Jeremy D. Cris

They hunt at night and in packs: special operations forces that track down Afghan insurgents. They surround the house of their intended target, announce their presence, and give the now wide-awake inhabitant a brief moment to surrender. 80 percent do, the other 20 percent are shot and killed.

Night raids by specially- trained ISAF and Afghan forces are an integral part of the American strategy to weaken the Taliban sting. Some say the strategy is working. Carlotta Gall reported in the NY Times yesterday that the killings of top insurgent commanders deep in the Taliban redoubt of Quetta, Pakistan, are being attributed to the raids:

No one seems to know for sure who is behind the killings. Members of the Taliban attribute them to American spies, running Pakistani and Afghan agents, in an extension of the American campaigns that have used night raids to track down and kill scores of midlevel Taliban commanders in Afghanistan and drone strikes to kill militants with links to Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

I am currently sitting in front of a computer in Brooklyn and get my Afghanistan news through a hodgepodge of secondary sources. It’s impossible for me to gauge how effective night operations are and whether their impact against the Taliban is worth the inevitable civilian casualties. But the operations do lead to inadvertent slaughter. In one botched operation in February of 2010,  23 young Afghan men were killed in Oruzgan Province by hellfire missiles and rockets fired from an attack helicopter because of faulty intelligence given by a drone operator. The operator deemed the trucks a potential threat to nearby special operations forces, even though the trucks were seven miles away and no weapons confirmed.

More than anything, I’m curious about the logistics of these raids. Who are the men that participate in them? How do they vet the intelligence used to determine who is to be targeted and as a result potentially killed? When a Taliban commander is captured or killed, does anger against the heavy-handed home invasions justify the tactical gain? Are the numbers of deaths caused by the raids, be it Taliban or other, going up or going down? Special operations forces seem to be operating inside Pakistan; is this being done with ISI knowledge and acquiescence?

I’ve contacted an ISAF press officer in Afghanistan for more information. We’ll see if a blogger merits a response. Regardless, more to come.

Rupert Hamer, British journalist killed by an IED

One of my main career-related resolutions in 2011 is to finally travel to Afghanistan as a reporter. While the resolution may seem to suggest otherwise, my goal is to contribute to a relatively under-reported story while minimizing my exposure to unnecessary risk of injury or untimely death.  So before putting down money on a plane ticket, I wanted a clear view of the risks I’d be facing.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 22 journalists have been killed in Afghanistan since 1992. That’s number 10 on the list of the 20 deadliest countries for journalists. A sobering number, but well behind the 146 journalists killed in Iraq over that same time period.

This year, Afghanistan was tied for 10th deadliest country in 2010 with two dead: 25-year old American military journalist James Hunter and 39-year old British reporter Rupert Hamer of the Sunday Mirror. The annual total rises to three if you include Canadian reporter Michelle Lang, who was killed on December 30th of 2009.

While one shouldn’t draw too many conclusions from such a small sample, all three were killed by improvised explosive devices while embedded with the military in the South of Afghanistan; Hamer and Lang in Kandahar and Hunter in Nawa near Helmand. Both Hamer and Lang were in an armored vehicle that did little to protect them from the bomb blast that killed them. Hunter died while on foot patrol.

The obvious question is whether the stories they were covering were worth the risks of reporting in Afghanistan. Lang was embedded with a provincial reconstruction team of soldiers and social workers trying to repair war damage, Hamer was covering front-line fighting, while Hunter focused on the men in his unit. One answer is that these journalists died following their passion to cover a story they were convinced needed to be told. They were likely only too aware of the risks, even if none knew they would end up paying the ultimate price.

One a more practical level, reporters trying to draw lessons from the journalists’ deaths might be wise to stay away from military embeds in the South or other “hot” areas. There are plenty of non-military stories about Afghanistan to be told that don’t require traveling with the military. Yet that strategy too comes with risk, as David Rohde of the New York Times discovered.

The reality is that anyone deciding to travel as a reporter to Afghanistan faces the risk of death or serious injury. Perhaps that knowledge alone will prevent journalists from becoming overly confident, and push them to constantly weigh the import of the story against the risks it requires. After all, Afghanistan is likely to remain a war zone, and a vitally important story, for a very long time.

One of the most effective tools to calm that river, one that has been around for years, is the RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) reader. Also known as feed readers or news aggregators, RSS readers are web, mobile or desktop-based software used to subscribe to a web-site’s RSS feed. Every time that site publishes new content, you get it delivered to your RSS reader. You no longer have to check dozens of different sites for your news fix, the news comes to you.

There are dozens of great RSS readers available, and in the past I’ve used Newsgator, Feedly, and Yahoo Pipes. Unfortunately Newsgator went corporate, Feedly got annoying by constantly trying to take over my web browser, and Yahoo Pipes was too complicated to use early-morning, pre-coffee. (I’ll avoid talking about the mobile device readers here, but PulseNews for the iPhone works well.)

I’ve settled instead on Google Reader. It doesn’t have the slickest interface but it’s free, relatively easy to set up, isn’t likely to be phased out by Google, and is simple to modify. Once you’ve signed up, you are now free to create what is essentially your own personal newspaper.

Your next step is to find relevant feeds to populate that newspaper. Go to the website you wish to follow. Their feed is usually identified by the RSS logo ( ). Copy the feed you are interested in, click Add a Subscription on your Google Reader, and paste in the feed. If you’d rather not visit every site, another great way to find interesting feeds is to use Google’s excellent feed search engine to speed up the process.

You’ll quickly find that you now have your very own unmanageable river of information. So be sure to take the next step and break your main feed into manageable streams. As you subscribe to a new feed, Google Reader will give you an option to “Add to a folder…” This is the secret to controlling your streams. Create a folder for the feed or add it to one that already exists.

You are now ready to surf the web with, if not a laser focus, then at least more precision. Some final tips. Become comfortable with allowing articles in your reader to go unread. Think of your Google Reader as an observation deck on the banks of that river of information. Just dip in from time to time to see what it offers, don’t try to drink it all.

So until the next web technology comes along to displace the rusty but trusty RSS reader, happy reading.