Aides to U.S. General in Afghanistan Slam Obama: Report

“Michael Yon has been all over the general.” As early as 2006, Yon was warning that the United States was falling behind in the Afghanistan war. The following year, when he felt he was being treated unfairly in Baghdad, he unloaded on “Public Affairs officers [who] stagger like sway-backed mules with shifting excuses.”

Last September, he was told to leave the British 2 Rifles in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. In return, he blasted the local British media officer Minister of Defence Bob Ainsworth as “Bullshit Bob.”

But that came after weeks of friction over Yon’s criticisms of the British lack of helicopters in the region. This time, Yon tells Danger Room, there were no early warnings. “There was no back story. None. Zero indication from the brigade company or unit level,” he says over an intermittent cellphone connection from Jalalabad, Afghanistan. “I’m mystified.”

Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, says there’s a simple explanation: Yon’s extended embed was holding up other reporters who wanted similar access.

“The problem is that there are more than 100 other reporters on a waiting list to get into embeds with the 5-2 and other units — especially in and around Kandahar — which is why embeds are established for defined periods of time. Since demand far exceeds supply, we try to balance the needs of individual reporters with our responsibility to provide information through embeds to a large and diverse a field of reporters,” Sholtis tells Danger Room in an e-mail.

Yon did ask the commander to stay, and the commander said OK, but he did so in ignorance of the fact that Yon’s embed had been granted under terms set by [the regional headquarters]…. Frankly, given Yon’s request, the commander was only faced with the choice of whether to be a nice guy or not. The region[al HQ], on the other hand, was faced with the choice of whether being nice to Yon was worth turning away a significant number of other reporters. They determined it was not.

Yon couldn’t accept that rationale. “McChrystal’s crew has declared an information war on me,” he posted to Facebook. “If McChrystal knew what he was doing, he would not be drawing attention to his staff.”

He called McChrystal’s aides “crazy monkeys,” and said that he had “compelling evidence of General McChrystal’s smear campaign” against him. “Official statements by his people — in writing — have been defamatory and libelous.”

I asked Yon what that evidence was. He pointed me to an e-mail exchange between Sholtis and blogger Herschel Smith. In it, Sholtis said Yon’s campaign to stay with the 5-2 “amounted to a choice to disrespect his colleagues,” and that contrary to the blogger’s claims in this case, “the most significant impediment to independent reporting from Afghanistan has been Michael Yon himself.”

It’s a pair of phrases Sholtis now says he regrets. But they’re hardly libelous.

Yon still has his defenders in the tight-knit community of military bloggers. Smith, for one, likens Yon to legendary World War II journalist Ernie Pyle.

But many of his biggest fans and advocates are now speaking out against him. “I swear, I really need to step up my game and start posting completely randomly made-up tweets or Facebook comments about public figures like ’so-and-so is the world’s biggest idiot,’” writes Milblogging.com founder J.P. Borda.

“Michael Yon has done some excellent reporting from both Iraq and Afghanistan, but if my count is correct he has now been kicked off four embeds. Each time he has excoriated those who booted him and blamed them for his predicament,” blogs Blackfive.net’s Hanson. “There comes a time when you have to look in the mirror and accept responsibility. It is not a collection of incompetent public-affairs officers or some conspiracy to silence truth telling, it is his own fault.”

Yon, for his part, says he’ll remain in Afghanistan — but not as an embedded journalist. “I’m still reporting,” he says, but now I’m outside the wire.”

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