Afghanistan, Tina Fey & Foreign Correspondence: War Reporting in Post-9/11 Literature

Introduction

On August 30th, 2021, the United States military officially withdrew their final troops from Afghanistan and ended Western involvement in the state after close to twenty years of war. Front pages of newspapers across the globe were plastered with images of Afghan families, men, women, children crowded in Kabul Airport, at best, and hanging from departed airplanes, at worst, in attempt to escape what many assumed would be the beginning of a new Taliban regime there. Indeed, the Taliban reclaimed control of the state, and the effectiveness of Western and transatlantic-organised intervention abroad was called into question.

The relationship between Europe and the United States has taken many forms over the years, with strong moments of unity, weaker moments of disagreement, and often through its history has been marked by opposite tendencies of isolationism or interventionism. These transatlantic relations have come in the form of trade agreements the US and between individual states in Europe, as well as negotiations and joint plans with the US and the European Union as a whole. Arguably, the most famous product of transatlantic relations has been the creation, operation, and involvement in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, or NATO. Especially since February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, NATO has been in the news and on the agenda again after a few years of doubts on the organisation’s usefulness and relevance: Ukraine’s plan to join NATO is said to be one of the triggers of the invasion, and since then, both Sweden and Finland have opted in after years of not being interested. However, looking back in history just a little further, NATO was in the papers in 2021 too, in relation to a different war: part of NATO’s fight for relevance in the time preceding current events was its role in the US’s ‘war on terror’ and in Afghanistan since 2001. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, the US, NATO allies and partners invaded Afghanistan because the Taliban government there was harbouring those behind the organisation of the attack, from the al Qaeda terrorist group. Over the course of those twenty years, over fifty countries joined the US’s (international) military mission in Afghanistan at some point.[1] However, despite NATO being involved under a United Nations security mandate and leading the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from 2003,[2] it was the mainly the US operating militarily in Afghanistan. That said, the presence of cameras makes events and happenings such as this not simply local, but global events.[3]The transatlantic relationship, while friendly, did not seem a priority and indeed marked a period of drifting away from a previously solid cooperation for a common goal – or, perhaps, against a ‘common enemy’ that had kept the parties together.

The ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan was plagued by military, political and social controversy, with information and opinion often shared via news coverage and built upon by fiction media. While many states and parties supported the early days of Western presence in the country, the US’s subsequent military action in Iraq was strongly frowned upon and lost them the support of many allies at the time. The ‘unwinnable war’ was no longer a case of justified security measures but was seen as exhausted and simply futile.[4]Besides losing international and political support from many sides, public support – and perhaps even interest – also began to wane. A significant part of public involvement with and knowledge of the war in Afghanistan was due to the amount and quality of news coverage: as Shpiro writes, “modern wars are fought on the screen as well as on the battlefield.”[5]War reporting has thus played a significant, though subjective, role in the perception not only of the war, but also the ultimate final withdrawal therefrom, of Western involvement abroad in general, and of the overall state and relevance of transatlantic relations. Besides the more-or-less non-fictional news coverage of the conflict, works of fiction – in the form of books, series, or film, for example – have impacted the way in which wars, especially recent and ongoing conflicts, are imagined and perceived by those not directly involved. Literature, including film, is always related to politics and society in that they not only shape but are shaped by each other, as writers and directors have their personalities and worldviews influences by their social and political environments, and as politics adapts to the contemporary norms and values that are shared and often proliferated through works of literary fiction.[6]

This essay aims to investigate the narrative on war reporting, civilian involvement in conflicts and conflict zones, and narratives on different spheres of representation in post-9/11 fiction media. Centring on Ficcara & Requa’s 2016 film Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,[7]I analyse the portrayal of the West in Afghanistan, as well as of Afghanistan in the West through the lens of war reporting, and the significance and consequences of war reporting in the film. On a more meta-level, given that the film is based on a book based on the author Kim Barker’s true experience as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan, and its execution of ‘reporting on war reporting,’ I examine the work for its connections to traditional or written post-9/11 literature. The essay begins with a theoretical framework exploring the concept and practice of war reporting and ‘the West.’ A methodology section follows, providing a background of post-9/11 literature in transatlantic society and on this essay’s selected case study, explaining the lens through which it is analysed, and establishing the markers of the analysis. The subsequent chapter contains the analysis and discussion of the themes and markers of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and the final section concludes this essay by placing the work in context and discussing further research.

Theoretical Framework: War Reporting & the West

Different forms of war reporting have been the basis for informing publics ‘back home’ about the happenings of war and conflict abroad for much of history, whether through conqueror-commissioned victory tapestries in the 11^th century or publishers appointing local correspondents to write from the front lines in the 18^th and 19^thcenturies,[8] or to the more contemporary norm of news corporations and networks sending out their own journalists to report from war and conflict zones. As Martinez et. al. neatly summarizes, existing academic literature covers many caveats of the study of war reporting on current conflicts: how coverage is conducted, what impact media messaging can have on viewers and readers at home, and the role of news media in ‘hate-sowing’ or the rise of ‘peace journalism.’[9] Other scholars go deeper in the topic, however. Greg McLaughlin, an author and Media Research scholar, writes in his book The War Correspondent that journalism can be seen as ‘a first draft of history’ that aims to make sense of reality in an objective way – a challenge in many senses, but particularly challenging when it comes to (Western journalists) reporting on war (for Western audiences).[10]For the purpose of this essay, the contested and contestable concept of ‘the West’ and ‘Western’ refers to a “spatial concept with cultural meanings.”[11] The West is not necessarily a geographical area, but in the words of Bunde et. al., is a synecdochic term for “community of mostly North American and European liberal democracies” which could be extended to include former colonial states such as Australia and New Zealand; “a normative project… [with] a commitment to liberal democracy and human rights, to a market-based economy, and to international cooperation in international institutions” [12]such as the North Atlantic Trade Organisation. In The War Correspondent, McLaughlin explains that there has been a problematic, ever-evolving relationship between journalists and the military for many years and many wars: in high-profile cases from Vietnam to Afghanistan, the military has learnt lessons about keeping the press in a specific, predetermined role; in what McLaughlin calls “[fine-tuned] systems of control, censorship and propaganda… [designed] to sell war to domestic publics.”[13]On the other hand, lessons learnt by war reporters tend to be confined to the memoirs they write upon their return, in which they ‘express regret’ for conforming to the system and their military-determined role for promoting war.[14]

This notion of war reporting as a medium for promoting war is one heavily discussed by Bette Dam, a Dutch journalist that worked in Afghanistan for many years, both from within the army bases where Western journalists are stationed and outside the wire. War reporter turned author and university lecturer, Bette Dam writes that while there is much reason to be critical of regarding the US’s execution of the War on Terror, the role of the media in proliferating troubledness in warzones is often overlooked or ignored: war reporters, she argues, “often are biased in their reporting, and simply gave up cross-checking statements that come from Western government or from the websites of terror groups.”[15]Dam’s second book and various articles chronicle, in part, her scepticism of Western intelligence and sources in Afghanistan, as she stepped out of the Western bubble there to do independent research on one of the Taliban’s most famous – and the US’s most wanted, after Osama bin Laden – leaders, founder Mullah Omar. After the 2001 attacks, Omar was wanted for harbouring bin Laden but disappeared after the fall of the Taliban government. The US’s CIA lost track of him, and said that Omar had fled to and was hiding, essentially untouchable, in Pakistan. Five years of Dam’s life and work went into proving this narrative false: she left the Western military bubble, travelled around Afghanistan interviewing not only relatives and friends of Mullah Omar, but also Taliban members – and found the man who had been Omar’s bodyguard for twelve years. Dam found that the ‘official’ narrative had been entirely wrong, that Omar had never left Afghanistan, that he had retracted his involvement in the actions and running of the Taliban, and that he had lived the last eight years of his life no more than a few kilometres from an American base in Zabul.[16]The process and ultimate revelation brought Dam to the conclusion that “for the United States, the idea that Mullah Omar actively led his troops while cooperating with al-Qaeda served to bolster its own claim that its war in Afghanistan is still directly related to its initial reasons for invasion,”[17]and that indeed, the credibility of Western intelligence in many more matters should be – and should have been – much more closely scrutinized by those who had publicised it: war reporters.

This lack of objectivity, a challenge noted by McLaughlin as well, becomes war promotion when only one side – typically the Western side – of the story is told. In a lecture about the shortcomings of war reporting,[18]Bette Dam explains that when she landed in Afghanistan to be ‘embedded’ in the conflict zone, she arrived with other Western journalists in a military base with high walls and thousands of Western soldiers, both US and allied. And while it is acknowledged that there is critical war reporting on the military about cases like civilian casualties and secret prisons, there was little critical reflection on why the war was happening and that’s why Dam decided to set out into the country independently. She found that the content and tone of the reports coming out of the country by foreign correspondents to the US and to Europe, even outside the walls of the military camps, was “[to serve] the editors on the other side, in the West; they were not serving the public.” [19] By dressing in helmets and combat vests, detailing the latest attacks and dropping buzzwords, and neglecting the truth about the complex yet calm daily situation, the war was instead amplified and sensationalised rather than justly represented to the public back at home. The key point of Dam’s talk was the realisation that this kind of West-serving war reporting was not isolated to Afghanistan but was a pattern in the (mainstream) media. Not only does the military try to cast reporters as ‘public war sellers,’ reporters would place this kind of role on themselves by focusing on Western sources and the kind of content most likely to rate well with their bosses and their audiences. The media culture of war reporting in particularly but not exclusively Afghanistan, was not in communication with sources or resources in the community and this has hindered the creation of an objective ‘first draft of history’ that makes sense of reality.

Finally, both Dam and McLaughlin acknowledge the capitalist problem of what the former calls “fast food” journalism and the latter analyses as “instant-fix news.”[20]The idea that audiences – and by extension editors, news networks and advertisers, in the US and the EU – want the largest quantity of news, the newest news, the biggest, most explosive news, means that in most cases and especially in conflict zones, the quality and the balance of the journalism is compromised. McLaughlin explains that this trend grew in step with technological advancement and as journalists and their information became accessible 24/7, the time it took to do traditional ‘slow news’ and investigation instead became invested in maintaining (satellite) connection and indeed being available to broadcast. For Dam, ‘fast food’ news means reliance on and bias towards one-sided (Western) sources where language obstacles and access to information – such as through the military – are not a problem and don’t cost ‘valuable time.’ In these ways, subjective and irresponsible war reporting becomes war promotion. Indeed, the themes and challenges presented regarding war reporting in academia as well as in expert’s materials are not confined to their spheres: they are visible in politics and society, and as can be seen in the case study for this essay, in literature and film as well.

Methodology: Post-9/11 Literature & Why W.T.F.

Post-9/11 literature is not a keenly studied topic in the US or in the EU but has garnered the devotion of a few key scholars in the field of literary and cultural analysis. In particular, and as the theoretical basis for the methodology of this study, Susana Araújo and her work on transatlantic 9/11 fictions explore the importance of negotiating the truth behind the story and what impacts fiction can have on reality: the social processing of trauma, the acceptance or rejection of external influences, or the public imagination of a story printed or on screen versus in the paper. While the first thought of ‘literature’ tends to be written pieces, film and visual media are included as literary works for their ability and practice of carrying culturally significant meaning: films can be analysed for their symbols and messages just as any book could. Films are wildly popular forms of cultural entertainment, and the rise of streaming platforms and collaborative online upload sites means that video content is more widely available than ever before. Box-office takings were previously very much the measure of success for new releases, but contemporary success is now also measured in the number of views or streams a particular film may have. Essentially, films have always been and continue, perhaps even in a growing degree, to be locales for entertainment, information, and familiarisation with subjects for a wide range of audiences. In a similar way to journalism and war reporting, where authors of varying backgrounds and intentions aim to explain events and explore narratives (though sometimes problematically), so film directors and producers work to tell a specific story from a certain perspective.

Susana Araújo notes early in her book Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror: Images of Insecurity, Narratives of Captivity that she deals with novels, but her analysis and method can easily be transposed for application to audio-visual fiction. The literature in question need not be fiction specifically regarding the time or events of the terrorist attacks; having been created during the War on Terror means that fictions in this category may directly or indirectly provide commentary on events as well as the aftermath of 9/11.[21] Sections of Araújo’s framework for the analysis of 9/11 and War on Terror fictions included in this essay’s case study involve examining the relationship presented in the text between security and terror and captivity. While these may seem most logically connected in the sense of security as the answer to terror and captivity, Araújo explains that “paradoxically but significantly, much terror can often be created, generated, and promoted in the name of security practices and theories, themselves,” with “paradoxical measures through which the United States and its allies have turned ‘security’ into a source of ‘captivity.’”[22]The notion that security, or rather insecurity, and captivity and their connections can be used as a source of justification for military intervention is an interesting part of Araújo’s post-9/11 literature analysis and an perspective that helps to clarify some of the themes in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

As for the case study this essay is centred on, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot was selected as a source for three main reasons: its origin, its subject matter, and its release. The rights to the film were picked up by producers Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels after the release of Kim Barker’s darkly humorous memoir, entitled The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in 2011, which chronicles Barker’s time as a foreign correspondent for American news organisations in the region. The film’s screenplay was written by Robert Carlock who conducted numerous interviews with other war reporter that had experienced similar conditions to Barker, and wrote the film based on the memoir, but with stylistic and narrative changes to make for a more engaging visual experience.[23]Interesting for analysis is that the film is a fictionalised account of a true story, based on the experiences of multiple people, built into a cohesive whole that is able to share a meta-level but plausible narrative on the complexities of war (reporting). Secondly, the film was selected for its subject matter, or content. War reporting is a complex and multifaceted occupation, and as seen in the theoretical framework, entails complex relationships, obstacles, and consequences in and outside the conflict zone. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is one of the few films about the American (and allies) war in Afghanistan that centres on the war reporter, rather than a soldier or military member, and having a female protagonist (Kim Baker, rather than Barker) adds to its uniqueness as a war-based film. Besides this, the film takes place in two spheres of interest to this essay: the conflict zones in various parts of Afghanistan, and at ‘home’ in the US where Kim first gains then fights for her place as foreign correspondent. Finally, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot was selected for its release: while the film is set in the years between 2002 and 2006, it came out reasonably recently in 2016. This is important because the time between the setting and the release, combined with the story’s transformation from memory to memoir to screen, is arguable enough to dispel some of the blinding emotion that is perceivable in some of the post-9/11 literature released very soon after the attacks.[24]Araújo notes that literature published more than five years after 9/11 “benefit[s] from greater critical detachment and more historical perspective… [is] able to understand the wider and long term repercussion of the War on Terror and to reflect on the disproportionate violence… [and] interrogate notions of globalization, democracy, and liberalism in the 21^st century,”[25]all elements that were found important to this essay’s analysis.

Analysis: War Reporting in Post-9/11 Literature

Although the film has numerous relevant, profound, and intriguing scenes, the scope of this essay limits the analysis to three main plot points of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: the sending out and arrival of Kim in Afghanistan, the Women and the Well and Tanya’s big break/Kim in New York. After an intense opening scene in the year 2006 and a marker that reads ‘three years ago,’ the film opens to shot of Kim Baker, the 40-something protagonist played by Tina Fey, sitting at her cubicle at a news network in New York, copywriting an article about sugar for someone else to present on screen. She is invited into a meeting where her boss explains that he’s gathered all the unmarried and childless employees under his management: with ‘Iraq 2.0’ happening, there is a void, and the network has decided to deploy a new foreign correspondent to Afghanistan. Kim departs a few days later, leaving her unfulfilling day job and ‘mildly depressed boyfriend’ behind, as she takes the opportunity to ‘embed’ in a military unit and experience the conflict up close. In an essay of larger scope, there would already be notable content for analysis on the reasons why war reporters would take up a dangerous or risky position, with insight into how the military and its media strategy capitalises on ‘desperations.’ More feasible for analysis is Kim’s basic assumption of Afghanistan and its war as being a temporary escape from her ‘normal:’ we see here the first barefaced display of privilege. Leaving her ‘boring’ life for a few months of whirlwind adrenaline in another country’s nightmare, without previous experience nor an underlying passion or interest in the region, is an insight into Western interventionism and the way the West perceives itself in Afghanistan.

Fey’s character arrives bewildered and unprepared at Kabul airport, with cultural inexperience in the form of uncovered hair, and childish naivety in the form unsecured cash that promptly blows away in the wind. She is saved by Nic, her hired security, and taken care of by Fahim. Fahim is Kim’s Afghan ‘fixer:’ he acts as her guide, translator, and contact connection for the travel, interviews and ‘scoops’ she’ll come across in her time in Afghanistan. Kim relies on Fahim more than she’s willing to admit early on, and in her reckless inexperience endangers him socially and physically several times throughout the film. Fahim’s role in Whiskey Tango Foxtrotis as a juxtaposition to Kim and the other Westerners she lives with in Kabul: while she acclimatises and recovers from hangovers, he organises her schedule and solves (or sometimes prevents) her problems. As a well-educated man, a former medical doctor who speaks English, Fahim is the only character in the early scenes of the film to have a clear and vested interest in the success of Afghanistan, to the point where he will work alongside the invading military to bring stability to his country. His seriousness and steadfastness are contrasted starkly with the nonchalance of Kim in particular, but of the others in the Western ‘Kabubble’ too.

About forty minutes into the nearly two-hour film, Kim Baker has made significant progress in her growth and understanding of the conflict, culture, and complexity in Afghanistan, as well as her in role and agency as a war reporter. Due to this progress and her official breakup with the boyfriend she left behind, Kim’s stay in Afghanistan is extended and she goes on a second ‘embed’ outing to a conservative town she’s visited with the military unit before. Her relationship with the military is informal but rigid: as long as she adheres to the rules and stays out of their way, there’s no problem. She previously earned the unit General’s respect by not sheltering in the armoured vehicle when a firefight broke out, instead opting to grab her camera and shadow an armed and engaged marine as he entered the fight – a move for which she was rewarded by her bosses and praised for by her colleagues, despite it being one of the moves that endangered Fahim’s life. During this second embed visit, the marines notice that the well they had built and rebuilt several times in the village centre had been destroyed with explosives again. Both the townsmen and the military presume the Taliban is responsible. Meanwhile, Kim is separated from the group and is called around the corner by an Afghan woman in a full coverage burqa. Kim follows the woman into a room where several more Afghan women are waiting, and to Kim’s shock they all lift their veils off-camera. Some time passes and Kim rushes back to the convoy, requesting to speak to the General: the women have been blowing up the well with old Soviet landmines. The General responds that they built that well specifically for the women, so they don’t have to walk to the river, to which Kim explains that the women want to walk; their communal walk to the river each day is their only opportunity to be social, talk and just ‘hang out’ together, but that the men mustn’t know about their actions for fear of retribution. The General applauds Kim, announces to the townsmen that the well won’t be repaired any longer, and Kim writes an incredibly well-received feminism piece for her news desk.

There are three significances to this scene and its lead-up: the relationship between the war reporter and the military, the military and the locals, and the locals and the war reporter. Kim and the General have a relationship of respect, but the strict codes of conduct and expectation that are described by McLaughlin and Dam are also present in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. In their first meeting, the General explains the list of rules Kim must abide by to remain on embed, and later when she is interviewing the young men on the base, their answers are sometimes scripted and purposefully vague. Only one marine answers ‘off-script,’ explaining that he thinks after Iraq, Afghanistan has become the Forgotten War (Coughlin, to Kim and camera: “Capital F, capital W”) and that he doesn’t load bullets in his gun on patrol anymore because he’s only there to help in community projects. Soon after the interview is aired, Coughlin is removed from this base unit and placed on patrol, where he’s caught in an explosion and loses both his legs. This part of the film demonstrates, albeit indirectly and extreme, the consequences of stepping out of line, as military or as reporter: Coughlin sure shouldn’t have said that, and Baker definitely shouldn’t have aired it. Unapproved media that deviates from the (usually implicit) agreed narrative is punished by the military, because it doesn’t serve the selling of the war to the public. Indeed, this is an example of security breeding captivity and control, as those in the most secure position, with weapons and walls, are confined by those who make the rules.

Secondly, the village scene is demonstrative of wider West-Afghan relations, in which the military comes in with presumably benevolent intentions but with little to no communication, ‘helps’ with something only for it to cause more harm than good. It demonstrates a lack of broader cultural understanding, and nods towards feminist theory as well: the military had built the well ‘for women,’ apparently without having asked them – or without having been able to ask. The town in the scene is religiously conservative, with the women dressing in burqas despite it not being legally mandated at that time, which indicates they are not permitted to interact with men outside of their marriage or family, nor are these men permitted to speak to the women. The men of the town must’ve wanted the well, given that the women hid their will for its destruction. Since in the film there no women in the military unit – until Kim came along – there was no other way in this unconventional setting for the Western military to interact with half the population of this town and perhaps many more across the country. Finally, the interaction between Kim and the locals is a taste of what McLaughlin discussed in ‘escaping the system’ of military dictation of war reports or using media purely for its own gain, and what Dam refers to as going out independently to experience and truly report the war. Instead of promoting war, the case of the Women and the Well was a moment that Kim wrote based on an Afghan source, rather than the same Western ones. The audience does not know what Kim wrote in her piece, but given its positive reception perhaps that it was a balanced piece can be inferred, one which did not portray the Afghan men or women involved negatively – backwards, oppressed, oppressive – to the piece’s audience in the West, but rather misunderstood and miscommunicated with.

The third and final plot point for analysis is an intense scene just over halfway through the film, in which Tanya, one of the very few other women war reporters in Kabul, her camera crew and her fixer, Jaweed, head into the desert to meet with one of Jaweed’s contacts in the Tribals. Tanya had pressured him over a few months to set up the rendezvous; the route is dangerous, and the meeting is risky, but Tanya has been waiting for this kind of break – interviewing Tribals contacts is a high-profile occurrence. Kim, on the other hand, had gone months without being on-air and was losing motivation and steam. Tanya’s scene of the crew waiting in a sandy Land Rover is interjected by shots of drone controllers monitoring the site of the meeting. Finally, the counterparts arrive, but as Jaweed walks towards their car to greet his contacts, he is grabbed and threatened as the group starts firing at the Land Rover where Tanya and the rest are sitting. Almost immediately, a drone strike hits the car, killing the group, including Jaweed, and injuring the others.

The scene cuts to Kim and fellow foreign correspondent Iain hearing about the event and rushing to the military hospital to check on Tanya: she is lying in bed with bandages on her face and a broken arm, sobs that Jaweed is dead, that her security lost an eye, but cannot contain her smile or eagerness to inform them that her camera crew had been filming the whole time. She almost beams when explaining that she’s going live with the footage of the explosion when the medics let her go, and the scene cuts to the television broadcast of Tanya covered in cuts and bruises, explaining to her audience that they can see the Hellfire missile just as it’s about to strike. Some time later, Kim flies back to New York for a meeting with her new boss to find out why she’s not getting any airtime or new resources, why she can’t connect when she has news despite them wanting news from her constantly and consistently, and is told that as much as they love the troops, people simply don’t want to see the war on television anymore. Unless, boss Geri continues, the story is exciting and sensational – like the work Tanya has been doing, and did Kim not know that Tanya was taking over the Afghanistan coverage position? Kim immediately runs into Tanya at the New York office and is shocked to find out that Tanya used the coverage of the explosion that killed Jaweed to secure her contract; to Kim, that meant Jaweed had paid his life to get Tanya a promotion, while Tanya insists that Kim would’ve done the same thing. This may be true, given Kim’s interaction with Coughlin all those years ago. Their years-long friendship ends that day in New York.

It is not difficult to connect this final scene to the theory of Greg McLaughlin and the lived experiences of Bette Dam. McLaughlin writes that war reporters tend only to regret their selfish or systemically harmful actions between the covers of a memoir, and the film presents Tanya’s case as exactly the sort that would be apologised for in hindsight. Dam denounces the behaviour seen here by Tanya but in other ways in other scenes by Kim too, as war reporting not in service of the locals or of the public, but in service of the West, in service of the military media strategy, in service of the editors, corporations and advertisers, and in service to the self. This is when, through lack of objectivity and irresponsible journalism, war reporting becomes the promotion of war in the West.

Conclusion: A healthy media diet?

Films like Whiskey Tango Foxtrot operate to visualise, familiarise, and make accessible through entertainment, the more complex sides of conflict and war in the 21^st century. The themes addressed in this essay included the current state and mid-War on Terror states of transatlantic relations: ‘the West’ maintains its strong conceptual and symbolic bonds, but is perhaps strongest when working against a common enemy rather than just towards a common goal. The theme of war reporting was discussed as having been a feature of the news landscape for centuries, but as the world progresses and changes, so does the form of war reporting and foreign correspondence. What broadcast television did to the papers and online instant streaming did to the broadcast, is what social media and ‘citizen journalism’ is doing to the contemporarily standard forms of war reporting. While scholars like McLaughlin and Dam make the convoluted and complicated easier to understand, there is further benefit in applying the research and methodologies of academics like Araújo to well-crafted and thorough literary works such as Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. There is plenty of opportunity to further this research on war reporting, post-9/11 literature and transatlantic relations: other films such as Michod’s War Machine[26]could be analysed for its contribution, and books – both fiction and non-fiction – on Afghanistan or other ongoing conflict zones, have a place in war reporting analysis. It would be fantastic to dive into more examples of successful war reporting in the transatlantic context in the future: where the service was to the locals, to the public, and the results were tangible and positive. Perhaps this is still to come, but it is useful in any case to have the skills to recognise “fast food” journalism and the pitfalls of “instant-fix” news.

Official feedback: It really is a very good and very insightful paper. You have worked with good resources to build the background of your research and conducted a very thorough and convincing analysis of the movie, applying the background to it. Very well done!

I evaluated the paper with 1,0 and will enter the grade on FlexNow accordingly.

This is the largest piece of content I created during my semester at Georg-August Universitët Göttingen, and, in being honest, the only truly academic (in the usual sense) output from my time there. Of course, Globalised Democracies was also written that semester but in the general context of the study whereas A,TF&FC was the conclusion of a seminar revolving around transatlantic relations. The other outputs were reflections and reports and the results of the Project Management course - not really the content I'm looking to share here - so I'm happy to be able to show this work too instead of relegating it to the submission portal void of a whole 'nother univerity!

The semester itself was tough - I travelled a lot and did not really make my space in Göttingen, so this paper too was researched and written in trains and on couches. It took me a while to come up with the topic; at first I was inclined to keep it political or policy-grounded, but the whole time during the course couldn't keep this film out of my head. It's not that everything I knew about Afghanistan came from the movie, but more so that it was the most recent visual representation I'd seen of the place besides the horrific images after the US withdrawal in 2021. During the last class of the semester, a few weeks before the final deadline, our teacher shared casually he was suprised to not see any 'cultural analysis' papers from our group and this struck me, as usually indeed what I write is cultural analysis and for some reason I wasn't letting myself do that for his class... so I spoken to him after and said I'd be changing my paper topic to something closer to what I enjoy writing! I had the case in mind pretty clearly, though seeing Bette Dam's TedX Talk on war reporting gave me the angle I wanted to take in the analysis. The theoretical framework of post 9-11 literature was useful (though honestly felt very shaky at the time - now still??) and I was very happy with the product when I submitted it.

However, of course, it became a last-minute affair and an all-night sprint to finish. She says she won't do it again and then she does.... I can say though that I was busy with it for a good amount of time, with the final form already in shape a week before the due date. This helped a lot with estimating how long this or that would take, though I was still a few hours behind when it came to the end. So be it! Little steps make big changes, right...