Eight years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, President Obama faces a decision about what to do in that troubled part of the world.
It's a crushingly urgent moment for the young president and also the national media, still chagrined about the failure to more rigorously study claims that Iraq had to be attacked because of its stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
Perhaps two star network television correspondents had that history in mind when they marked last week's anniversary of the Afghan war with a watershed of their own -- shucking off their presumed impartiality to argue what they think should happen next in Afghanistan.
CBS' Lara Logan scoffed at "ludicrous" compromise measures, like the one reportedly proposed by Vice President Joe Biden, and urged rapid compliance with Gen. Stanley McChrystal's request for a major troop buildup. NBC's Richard Engel, in marked contrast, told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that the future in Afghanistan looked bleak and that "it's probably time to start leaving the country."
Logan and Engel are a couple of gutsy and celebrated war correspondents, who have earned respect for the many months they've spent on the front lines in both Afghanistan and Iraq. But just because they've earned the right to an opinion doesn't mean they help themselves by expressing it.
By offering their views, no matter how well informed, they risk obscuring their most powerful role -- as impartial eyes and ears in places most of us will never see. The blogosphere and cable TV bombard us, 24 hours a day, with self-appointed judges. That confers even more power on the rare few who merely seek to bear witness.
The correspondents' leap into the spin zone comes, ironically, just as both their networks were being celebrated for coverage that studiously played the question of Afghanistan down the middle.
Engel won an Edward R. Murrow award Monday night from fellow broadcasters for his continuing coverage of Afghanistan, which culminated Sunday night in a documentary about an isolated, much embattled U.S. Army outpost.
CBS was coming off a week in which it devoted almost the entirety of three nightly news broadcasts to the vexing political and military issues America faces as it tries to confront Al Qaeda.
Engel's reports from the far reaches of the Korengal Valley showed the problems rather than trying to tell about them. Baby-faced soldiers chased an enemy, usually unseen, while relying on sit-downs with village elders, whose sympathies looked as immovable as their craggy faces.
