The Pew Research Center's weekly polling on the public's interest in news stories showed such a low level of interest that the overseas conflicts didn't make the organization's list of the year's top 15 stories.
Nor did the Afghan war come up often when The Associated Press conducted its annual poll of editors and news directors in the United States. The only overseas stories voted to be the year's top news stories involved Libya and Syria.
Yahoo's list of the top news stories of the year also omitted the war, and so did a separate list of the top international news stories. Those lists were created by analyzing millions of searches by Yahoo users.
The absence of words like "Afghanistan" from year-end lists reflects both the national news media's scant coverage of the war and the public's disengagement with it.
"We are in a period where the American public is intensely focused on domestic economic concerns," said Michael Dimock, the associate director for research at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. "On top of this, the public is having a hard time staying focused on foreign engagements that have been ongoing for over a decade."
Comment: Or to put it another way, "The government and the media have done a hell of a job distracting an easily distractable populace from a war that is illegal and killing innocent civilians almost daily. Unless an American died yesterday, the public doesn't bother to care about such things."
The exceptions to what he called this "war fatigue" are mass killings of Americans in the war zone, "which continue to draw public focus for short periods of time," he said.
Comment: But if any mass killings are anyone other than Americans, we pretty much figure "kill 'em all, let God sort them out", or to put it another way, "that's collateral damage." Only when the precious Americans die is it worth paying any attention to.
No such occurrence registered on the radar this year. Thus, Pew found that spikes in public interest were higher around events like the Summer Olympics and President Obama's embrace of gay marriage than around anything to do with the war. There were no significant spikes in interest around the secret American campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
About 68,000 American troops remain in Afghanistan now that the troop surge ordered by the Obama administration in 2010 has ended. Combat troops are scheduled to leave the country by the end of 2014. For the time being the American presence is covered by a small band of reporters, predominantly in the country's capital, Kabul.
Erin Burnett of CNN was one of the few American television anchors to take her nightly show to Afghanistan in 2012. She anchored from Kabul on Dec. 13 and told viewers that "America's longest war is still not won." Her reporting was cut short; the next day, the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., pre-empted all other programming on CNN.
The Associated Press poll of editors had already taken place; it was redone a few days later, and the massacre was ranked the top story of the year.
I had to repost this story. The link is also here.
Afghanistan: worst place for children to be born and raised
Not only do children die, they can also be recruited and used to fight in armed forces and groups
By David Swanson & David Swanson
Lisa Davis
Afghanistan has been engaged with more than 30 years of war with thousands of civilians killed or injured since 2001.
It is under these conditions that children are at extreme risk of violence, abuse, exploitation and neglect.
The children of Afghanistan are growing up in one of the least developed countries in the world. Six percent of babies die at birth and 25 percent before their 5th birthday. Conflict and political violence force millions of children and their families to flee their homes and as a result displaced families spend years in situations of uncertainty and insecurity.
Girls face multiple gender discrimination from the earliest stages of their life and throughout childhood. 70 percent of school-age girls do not attend school. Ninety-four percent of births are not registered.
A child's basic right to life and development is seriously compromised for the children growing up amid the conflict in Afghanistan.
Hundreds of children continue to die as a result of attacks and air strikes by insurgent groups, international military and armed forces and the Afghan National Army (ANA). During 2009, the UN confirmed that a total of 346 children were killed, of which 131 were killed as a result of air strikes and 22 in night raid operations by International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Afghanistan National Security Forces (ANSF).
Not only do children die, they can also be recruited and used to fight in armed forces and groups.
Children, especially boys, continue to be sexual abused by armed forces and the Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict notes that little has been done to prevent and punish sexual violence.
Around 1.6 million children are left orphaned in Afghanistan mainly due to conflict, depriving these children of family life. The destroyed education infrastructure needs to be rebuilt, and, in the face of growing armed attacks to schools, demand for education needs to be bolstered.
A quarter of the world's refugees have come from Afghanistan during this or the preceding wars. Children's rights are compromised primarily by the psychological consequences of the war and violence and their health and nutritional status is a major cause of concern. Hunger, sickness, and deprivation are aggravated, as well as fundamentally caused by, the violence of the war. We need to recognise the children's rights violations in Afghanistan. We need to break the silence and recognise the injustice.
The violations of children's rights documented in this report will shock and outrage most people throughout the world. There are a lot of categories of abuse and a lot of statistics here, but the story they tell is a simple one.
David Swanson
Afghan children are suffering terribly. Afghan children are not a side issue, not collateral damage. The majority of the people in Afghanistan are children. After the first decade of the US-NATO occupation, Afghanistan has become the very worst place on earth to give birth to or raise a child.
Hunger, sickness, and deprivation are aggravated, as well as fundamentally caused by, the violence of the war. A quarter of the world's refugees have come from Afghanistan during this or the preceding wars. Refugee children and the children of refugees have been deprived of a home. But those back home tend to be worse off.
In too many cases, they are deprived of the right to life and development by death rained down from above or kicking in doors at night. In willful or accidental ignorance of the information reported here, commentators justify this war as being fought in the name of human rights by discussing only the sorts of rights that are a top concern to people who are not being bombed or shot or struggling to find food.
Ignorance is a key issue raised by this report. Not only do too many Afghan children lack education, but we lack any knowledge of too many Afghan children.
Ninety-four percent of births are not registered. Twenty-five percent of children born die before their fifth birthday.
There is not a tree-falling-in-the-woods-unheard philosophical enigma here. These children really do exist. They just don't enjoy it very much, and it doesn't last very long.
On August 6, 2011, numerous US media outlets reported "the deadliest day of the war" because 38 soldiers, including 30 U.S. troops, had been killed when their helicopter was shot down.
Bt compare that with the day of May 4, 2009, discussed in this report, on which 140 people, including 93 children, were killed in U.S. airstrikes. We are denying to each other through silence and misdirection every day that the children of Afghanistan exist. But their deaths are rising.
Their access to hospitals is diminishing. And we believe we are continuing to occupy their country, launch drone strikes, perform night raids, and disappear prisoners for their own good.
What if we're wrong? What if the world outside our little cocoon, the world that recognizes the rights of children, condemns our behavior? What if the option of ceasing to occupy Afghanistan only seems unavailable because, like Afghanistan's children, we refuse to look at it?
Read more: [Link]