Free News From the Red Desert by Kevin Patterson

anything about café culture. But the boy has no choice about being here, would prefer to be at a madrassa someplace, and ought to be, inshallah. I would die to protect him, but I don’t know how to protect him from this torment. If ever the prostitute lifted her eyes from little Mohammed, she would see me and know she is seen. But she never does.

CHAPTER FIVE
    G eneral Thomas Lattice sat in his office within the Special Forces compound, a hundred yards from the Green Beans café, and sipped from his cup of hot water. He had left his door wide open. It was after midnight, and apart from the duty officer and NCO, who were being conspicuously attentive to the security of the compound, it was generally quiet. He could hear locks being checked. One of the sentries coughed, once.
    He was reading summaries of the media coverage of the war over the last month. Both he and General Jeremy Jackson, commander of the whole Afghan operation, had been posted here from Iraq four months ago—and not because things were going well. Still, one of them seemed to be doing just fine in the court of public opinion no matter the facts on the ground. Lattice had been briefed by his staff about how skilfully General Jackson was managing his media profile. Every mention of him included his Princeton PhD and his ability to run a mile in less than seven minutes. Lattice’s response to this was disdain. The two had once been friends. Lattice had been Jackson’s best man when he married, the summer they graduated from West Point. But even when they were friends, Lattice had understood how interested Jackson was ineveryone’s opinion of him. He had silently predicted that such a weakness would limit his Jackson’s career success. But he had been wrong. Jackson’s attention to how he was seen—image management, it was called now—also included a finely attuned sense of whether he was seen as too concerned with his image. An essential component of field craft is how to observe without being observed.
    Lattice’s aide had made the point: Jackson was a celebrity. And that status accorded him certain capabilities here and in the future. The same aide had prepared a summary of the reporters Lattice himself needed to cultivate if he wanted to have similar influence. Deirdre O’Malley’s coverage of the war had historically been very useful: 88 percent of it positive or message enhancing. (The aide actually hadn’t needed to point O’Malley’s effectiveness out to him; he’d read her profile of Jackson in
Time
early on in the Iraq war, and understood the role it had played in making his old friend a star, not only in the media but at the Pentagon.) But lately her stories were slightly muted. The success of the surge in Iraq had not been duplicated here, Lattice thought, and she was responding to that. Then there was the matter of how she was seen to cover Jackson long-term. She could not have sustained the admiration she’d revealed in the profile and retained credibility with her editors. Still, 88 percent.
    Stewart Robinson was about to visit the base. Robinson had fashioned himself a public intellectual—an unusual step for someone so junior and from the intelligence community. Not that Lattice knew anything explicit about Robinson’s covert roles. But he could smell spook. Anyway, in Robinson’s op-eds and lectures he supported the war or furthered the message 64 percent of the time, but was judged to have a higher impact than O’Malley because of the walk that had made him a celebrity and because he had been publicly critical of the military in several instances. “The Fox News guys don’t change anyone’s minds, sir,” the aide had said. “People who could go either way listen to other people who could go either way. We need him on our side.”
    Then the aide added: “Jackson’s lustre is bound to fade here. You’ll want to position yourself for that.” Lattice looked hard at that youngman with his master’s in communications.