CNN Broadcasts the Taliban Show

Last night CNN broadcast a "Special Report" about the Taliban . The wraparound featured CNN reporter Anderson Cooper introducing viewers to Norwegian freelance reporter Paul Refsdal.

Refsdal had gotten permission to stay with a Taliban commander who called himself Dawran. Dawran lived in one of the remote mountain hamlets of Kumar province and commanded a motley squad of novice fighters who spent a good deal of time talking on the Taliban version of the cell phone.

Instead of training in weapons and tactics, as American military squads regularly do, the Taliban fighters spent a fair amount of time praying and listening to inspirational religious messages from Dawran. How much of this was for the benefit of the cameras is uncertain, but one revealing scene that Refsdal filmed showed a militiaman bumbling the loading of a machine gun.

"I put it in backwards," said the machine gunner, with a little embarrassment.

There were long sequences when the Taliban leader was constrained to find impressive things to do. Dawran seemed to think it would impress audiences if he spent lots of time talking on his radio phone with other Taliban. The idea was to convey a mountainside full of enemy fighters.

He spoke in the Afghani language and the sparse translation provided was prosaic, as were the religious verses that Dawran injected routinely into his conversation. The dialogue between Dawran and his allies on the other side of the mountain was basically an "I'm here, you're there" type of conversation.

Cut to another exciting scene as Dawran cradled the standard AK-47 and said it was a "good weapon." He showed how you could push a little lever on the weapon to change function. This way, automatic. That way, one shot. Oooooh, bad! They may never have heard of that in Norway, where shotguns are the only ones known to civilians.

Refsdal's cameraman showed a closeup, the camera lovingly trailing the length of the rifle as if it were a Hollywood starlet waking up after a love scene. The plot was building to something, the planning of a major attack against U.S forces traveling through the Kumar valley.

The planning for the attack involved much radio phone chatter and many religious exhortations. Close up reaction shots of Dawran's men, as their leader seemed lost in dangling conversations, bespoke of confusion and uncertainty, of men who didn't want so much to fight as they needed to be paid.

Dawran's injection of frequent exclamations of Allah Akbar and prayers for the success of the impending attack was intended to embellish the image, long perpetuated in some quarters, of fanatical religious zealots unafraid to die for Allah. The purpose in perpetuating this image was more to defeat the enemy morally and psychologically, rather than on the field of battle. The image was contradicted by non-religious cursing by Dawran's men and foul language which would have been excised from Playboy Magazine. Nor was it an endearing trait that Dawran had drafted little boys into lugging machine guns along the mountain positions.

In the planning for the "major attack," one of the climactic points of Refsdal's documentary, Dawran spoke of an assault by eight different positions upon a NATO convoy of armored vehicles. Viewers never got a glimpse of any of the eight Taliban positions. U.S. military forces would likely be overjoyed at the prospect of so many Taliban clustered in a single place.

True to the Taliban advertising, Dawran's troops did attack as U.S. convoy. With Refsdal's cameras set up on the high ground, CNN viewers saw a widely spaced convoy of armored vehicles pass through the field of fire of a .50 caliber machine gun manned by one of Dawran's fighters. The machine gunner let go with a short burst as one armored vehicle went through the field of vision. Nothing. After an interval, another armored vehicle went through the pass to another short burst and the same result. Shortly after this sequence, Dawran excitedly claimed a direct hit and told his machine gun man he'd dispatched several "foreigners" to hell.

Surely, Dawran's militiamen were not his father's mujahedeen. Follow up inquiries to the U.S. and NATO military centers revealed that allied forces had reported no enemy contact by the convoy Refsdal filmed.