The bad news on Afghanistan
Reported peace talks between top Afghan officials and the Taliban aren’t actually happening, and are instead part of a disinformation campaign intended to demoralize Taliban field commanders who wonder what their leaders are up to, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said Thursday (Oct. 21). Hersh, who spoke at Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies before a standing-room-only crowd, offered the phantom talks as part of a “gloomy” picture of the Afghan war that has few prospects for the United States exiting cleanly or soon. “It’s a terrible message to give you,” Hersh said at the end of his riveting, but sometimes rambling, 45-minute talk. “It’s a glum narrative. I just don’t see the plan. … I don’t see how he [Obama] is going to get out of this mess.” Hersh, a contributor to The New Yorker and one of the nation’s top investigative journalists, came to fame in the late 1960s for his...