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In a recent piece for _TheArticle, _I asked : why does our TV news fail to ask so many obvious questions? Why do they never look at the bigger picture? Their coverage of Afghanistan, for

example, fails to make connections with other Muslim countries which also treat women and gays appallingly, which also expel Jews in huge numbers and which are also going through a civil war

between secular and religious, urban and rural, liberals and extremists. Part of the problem is that TV reporters and editors prefer images of suffering, preferably women and children,

ideally in hospital wards. Secondly, they are parochial in their world-view. They may be reporting on terrible suffering thousands of miles away, but when it comes to finding someone to

blame, they prefer British and American politicians, bumbling Biden and Raab on holiday. Thirdly, there is the rolodex problem. The reason we keep seeing the same twenty or thirty faces

talking about Afghanistan on our TV screens is that there is a consensus among programme editors about who are reliable and authoritative commentators: a handful of international

journalists, politicians, and in the case of Afghanistan, British military veterans, including a few Conservative MPs who served in Afghanistan and/or Iraq and the mothers of British

veterans who lost their lives.  Who doesn’t make the cut? Who doesn’t count as a reliable commentator? First, people from Afghanistan’s neighbours, Iran and Pakistan. Second, and perhaps

most surprising, academics and intellectuals, especially historians, economists and people who have taught international relations for years. The BBC, ITN and Sky News all agree on a number

of things. One is that Lyse Doucet, John Simpson, Jeremy Bowen or Mark Stone at Sky News know more about what is happening in Afghanistan than some professor at Harvard, SOAS or the LSE and

are also better communicators.  This is nonsense. Partly because Lyse Doucet _ et al _ leave out hugely important parts of the story. But also because, in twenty years producing programmes

with leading intellectuals and academics, I have always found them to be articulate, passionate and unfailingly focused on the key issues, which often turn out to be exactly the issues that

reporters miss out. An obvious recent example has been the Covid crisis. Journalists and reporters have been exposed over the past 18 months for their failure to offer a proper analysis of

key issues about epidemiology, the causes of the pandemic and which countries have been worst hit during the pandemic. Think of the woeful daily press conferences, at which most of the

journalists were just not on top of a very complex subject. Contrary to the conventional wisdom within TV news departments, scientists have been superb at explaining very difficult medical

and other scientific issues to a lay audience.  We have had exactly the same problem with what has been missing from the hours and hours of TV coverage of Afghanistan. This was brought home

to me by an online article by Adam Tooze, a Professor of History at Columbia University and Director of the European Institute. In 2019, the journal _Foreign Policy _named him one of the top

Global Thinkers of the decade. Tooze has an extraordinary range of interests: from the book that made his name, _The Wages of Destruction_ (2006), a superb book on the Nazi economy, a

brilliant recent essay on Vasily Grossman_ _and now a fascinating account of the crisis in Afghanistan. His next book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy , will be out in a week’s

time. Tooze’s essay on Afghanistan’s “looming triple crisis” is about some of the key issues which you never see on the TV news. He distinguishes between three separate but interrelated

crises: 1) “The political crisis of Taliban conquest and seizure of power”; 2) “the looming humanitarian crisis. This results from Afghanistan’s chronic poverty compounded by war and

environmental shocks. According to the World Food Program, half of Afghanistan’s population is in need of assistance. Millions of children are malnourished. The harvest in 2021 has been

devastated by drought.” 3) “Afghanistan’s macroeconomic situation”. By this he means, “The bit of Afghan society that was not dependent on basic agriculture or immediately reliant on foreign

aid — let us call it ‘urban Afghanistan’ for short –lives in an economy that is fuelled by foreign payments. That funding is now abruptly halted and is being made into a diplomatic weapon.

The idea seems to be to release it only on condition of ‘good behaviour’ by the Taliban. The consequences for urban Afghanistan will be dire.” According to Tooze, “roughly ten million people

live in Afghanistan’s cities”. That population is largely dependent on $7 billion in funding that could well be cut off in the coming months to punish the Taliban. This will not just affect

the Taliban. It will cause “a dramatic economic collapse that will bring life as Afghans have known it in recent years to a halt. What economists call a ‘sudden stop’ can befall any economy

heavily dependent on external funding to support a large trade deficit… A sudden stop can be extremely painful and destabilising. It is the simplest way to think about the economic crisis

that felled the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s.” Already, “the banks have been closed for more than a week. Western Union has closed its offices, shutting off flows of remittances that

normally account for 4 per cent of Afghan GDP. The US authorities halted the last shipment of cash dollars to Afghanistan ten days ago… The Afghani banking system will likely be subject to

panic attacks.” Food prices are rocketing in Afghanistan. Truck transport, needed to move food around the country, depends on imported petroleum, which has to be paid for. Famine will

follow. At this point, but only at this point, the BBC will send in Lyse Doucet and Sky will send in Mark Stone and we will see images of starving children. What we won ’ t see is footage of

politicians and international bankers agreeing on the sanctions which will cause the price of petrol and food to rocket and the banking system in Afghanistan to collapse in order to punish

the Taliban. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever,

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