As the dramatic details of the rescue of the New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell emerged, there will have been both sympathy and anger among soldiers in Afghanistan.
Sympathy for the families of those killed in the operation — Mr Farrell’s interpreter and fellow journalist, Sultan Munadi, and a British soldier, one of his rescuers — but also anger that lives had been lost at all.
Hostage rescue missions are notoriously difficult. While soldiers fight and die, usually for each other, there will be a few who will ask why they have to do so for a journalist who had put himself in harm’s way.
Mr Farrell has been kidnapped before, in Iraq in 2004. For it to happen twice looks like carelessness. There is a suspicion among soldiers that journalists sometimes regard safety briefings and measures as restrictive attempts to control the story, rather than measures put in place to protect lives, and that certain war reporters enjoy being the story themselves. This suspicion will have been reinforced by Mr Farrell’s first response — a lengthy blog about the whole incident rather than a brief and dignified statement about those who lost their lives.
But the military must be very wary of being too suspicious of enterprising journalists like Mr Farrell, for the relationship between those who fight wars and those who report on them is deeply complex and symbiotic. The conflict in Afghanistan is one in which we are repeatedly told the battle for hearts and minds is key. Moreover, it is one for which public support is, at best, fragile. Neither the British public nor the Afghans themselves can make an informed judgment on what is happening without a steady flow of independent reporting. Indeed, so dangerous are parts of Afghanistan that journalists can only work from embedded positions, subject to the protection of the units they work with.
In such a climate can any reporting be truly objective? That Mr Farrell was investigating the sort of collateral damage incident that is undermining the progress being made by Nato forces is admirable. Those within the Armed Forces who would seek to criticise or restrict journalists such as him would do well to remember that those same journalists, reporting on kit shortages and under-resourcing, put a public pressure on the Government that the MoD has been unable to do.
But Mr Farrell and his colleagues should likewise recognise that their actions are guaranteed by the bravery of the soldiers they report upon and thanks for that should be today’s headline.
Patrick Hennessey, a former Army officer and author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club.