Perhaps I could respond first of all to your comment about the lack of media attention. Since I have occasional contact with the media, I think perhaps I could comment on this.
I covered the first Gulf War with CTV, and I also then covered with CTV the Balkan crisis. One thing that was really interesting to me was the way in which the attention span of the media had shortened in that period of time. When Lloyd and I would be doing a talk-back at the end of a sequence of data in the first Gulf War, we would characteristically spend about 2 minutes and 40 seconds in that talk-back. By the time we had hit Bosnia, we were down to a minute and 15 seconds, a minute and 10 seconds. As a consequence of this, the amount of attention that can be paid to the detail is something that simply seems to be decreasing. The attention span somehow is decreasing.
Among the other controlling things in television there is, first of all, the traditional journalistic principle of “if it bleeds, it leads”--that it is far easier to talk about disaster than to talk about good things happening. Beyond that, of course, there is the problem of having to have visual materials. If you can't get the pictures, then you can't tell the story. All this makes reliance upon television as our dominant medium as a means of expressing and communicating complex ideas—as is certainly the case in Afghanistan—difficult.