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JOURNALISM & THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN: AN INTERVIEW WITH JAKE TAPPER Conducted by Marina Villeneuve, World Outlook Staff Jake Tapper ’91 is a journalist, anchoring The Lead with Jake Tapper and serving as Chief Washington Correspondent for CNN. Since graduating from Dartmouth with a HisWRU\ PDMRU PRGLÀHG E\ YLVXDO VWXGLHV KH KDV ZRUNHG ZLWK $%& 1HZV DQG LQWHUYLHZHG President Obama, among others. He is a three-time recipient of the Merriman Smith Memorial Award for broadcast journalism. He has published books on the 2000 presidential election and Jesse Ventura. His most recent work considers the war in Afghanistan. World Outlook sat down with Jake Tapper to discuss his recent work, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (published November 2012), implications of drone warfare, and the spirit of journalism.
What was your goal in writing about Combat Outpost Keating in your book? The goal was, from the very beginning, a personal one: to learn about the meaning of counterinsurgency beyond an intellectual and academic perspective. I didn’t really know who these men and women were, what motivated them, why they were in the army, why they had been sent to different parts of the country, and I said: I’ll go out to get this story. I’ve been covering the war on Afghanistan but it wasn’t until my son was born that the desire to really understand on a much more comprehensive basis took hold of me. My son was born on October 2nd, 2009 and on October 3rd, Combat Outpost Keating was attacked and overrun by the Taliban. I was in the hospital, holding my son, listening to this broadcast about just over 50 U.S. troops facing up to 400 Taliban. The enemy all had the upper ground because Combat Outpost Keating had been built in a valley, at the bottom of three steep mountains. There was just something poignant about the moment where I was holding my son, my newborn baby boy, and hearing about eight other sons taken from this earth and I needed to know more. I needed to know more about who these men were, and what it was like for the troops there to face such overwhelming odds and such an incredible attack, and also there was the lingering mystery of why anyone would put an outpost LQ WKLV YHU\ YXOQHUDEOH SODFH 6R LQLWLDOO\ WKH GHVLUH ZDV IRU PH WR ÀQG RXW WKH DQVZHUV to those questions. And it later became a desire to understand the war in greater and larger terms: in terms of what our troops are doing, who they are. Ultimately, when the book came out, it was the desire to share the stories and make sure that other Americans understood this war on a more personal level – because I had been so disconnected with it, I suspected a lot of other Americans had been as well. Was there anything you learned as you were writing your book that you wish you could have included but you weren’t able to? You know, it’s a tough question because the book is already fairly long, so it’s tough to argue that it should be longer. But there were stories that I had to cut for space reasons that made me sad for the individuals or the soldiers or the families; they were not going to be mentioned although their stories were just as important. It