The Rout of Doubt
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Tuesday, December 11, 2001, at 3:24 PM PT
Experts are usually careful not to make forecasts that can be quickly proved wrong. But catching up on back issues of the New York Review of Books, I came across an exception to that rule, an article titled "Afghanistan: The Moving Target" by the foreign policy writer William Pfaff. This short piece now stands as a nearly comprehensive catalog of the pessimistic clichés that dominated public discussion of the war just six weeks ago.
What this suggests to me is a new noun, pfaff, for warrantless doom-saying about American military and foreign policy. Through the early weeks of the war, the papers and the networks were full of it. Another sorry example was R.W. Apple's front-page news analysis piece in the New York Times of Oct. 31. Headlined "Afghanistan as Vietnam," it painted a similar picture of looming debacle, exactly three days and two weeks into the conflict. "Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word 'quagmire' has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad," Apple wrote.
At the time, my colleague William Saletan shrewdly dissected the way this kind of weasely language expresses a defeatist viewpoint while simultaneously attributing it elsewhere. In Apple's analysis of the war, signs of progress were "sparse." The war was going "less smoothly than many had hoped." Two weeks later, when the signs of progress were plentiful and the war was going more smoothly than many predicted, Apple wrote another analysis deriding "the naysayers and the what-iffers," "the armchair Clausewitzes," and "the pessimistic prophets" who once thought the war was going badly. Wonder who he could have been thinking about.