Michael Yon

Dan Rice and Guy Filippelli

American commanders are preparing for a major offensive in Afghanistan to attack one of the most formidable enemies we face in country: corruption.    Despite sincere efforts to promote governance and accountability initiatives, Afghanistan has slipped from 112th to158th place on Transparency International’s global corruption index.   One reason the international community has been unable to effectively tackle corruption in Afghanistan is that our own reconstruction efforts perpetuate the problem. As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently acknowledged, “Corruption, frankly… is not all an Afghan problem.”   Money appropriated to secure and stabilize the country is too easily siphoned and redirected as it changes hands, inevitably making its way to local powerbrokers, insurgent networks, and offshore bank accounts, rather than the individuals who need it most. One solution to this problem lies in the palm of our hands: the mighty cell phone.

12 July 2010
Chiang Mai, Thailand

During the Thailand fighting in May, the rain of media mixed with the dust of politics, creating mud that left honest people feeling bogged down.  People desiring clarity slogged knee deep, then waist deep, and it kept coming.

My reports avoided politics largely because I do not understand Thai politics.  There can be value in this, just as a Korean, for instance, can come to the United States and observe from a “here and now” perspective and, quite possibly—if he sticks to what he sees and not what people tell him to see—render a more accurate observation from a riot.  The “mouths of babes” are not restricted to children.

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Michael Yon
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Published: 07 July 2010
Chiang Mai, Thailand

During the Bangkok fighting in May, radio interviewers back America kept asking about the overuse of force by the Thai Army.  I answered that’s not happening, and there seem to be hundreds of journalists crawling over the streets, and I see them with cameras on tripods on balconies (like mine was) or peering through windows.  How could the Thai government hide a herd of elephants in front of all those cameras?

Published: 05 July 2010
Chiang Mai, Thailand

This journalist was all over the place.  She stood out from the crowd for obvious reasons.  One evening, as the sun was setting, she was walking down a mostly desolate street not far from Dusit Thani hotel, and she was alone with that little camera.  Soldiers were here and there, and I thought, “That’s a brave woman.” She walked by and I never said hello.  On another day, she walked by and I was talking with some journalist whose name I never got, and said that if she took off that helmet and body armor you might think she is just another pretty face, but she’s not just another pretty face, is she?  The journalist said that he had once seen her at another time, and she was curled up on the ground, sleeping by a trash can, and he said she is a brave one indeed.

Published in The US Report at theusreport.com
Published on June 24, 2010
by Kay B. Day

Michael Yon has been invited to embed again by both Great Britain and the US.Michael Yon isn’t a correspondent who sparks a neutral reaction in the reader. You either love him or you don’t. There’s not much of an in-between.

In April Yon’s embed in Afghanistan ended abruptly. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, was in charge and some of Yon’s fans blamed the general. The official reason given was “overcrowding by journalists.”

In a dispatch announcing the change, Yon wrote, “Haven’t seen a journalist in weeks.”

In the preceding month, Yon had pulled no punches in his dispatches,  criticizing Canadian Brig. Gen. Daniel Ménard who commanded Task Force Kandahar. Yon took some heat for that one too, until the truth came out.

A court martial found Menard guilty of accidentally firing a weapon while preparing to board a military helicopter in Kandahar—the shot allegedly came close to hitting Canada’s chief of defense as well as military vehicles. Then a female Canadian soldier confessed to having an inappropriate relationship with Ménard. The rest is history.

Yon said in an email: “Insofar as Menard, that guy allowed Tarnak River Bridge to be blown up.  Lost Ian Gelig.  Halted many operations for DAYS.  Lied about it.  ND'd with his rifle.  Lied about it.  Affair with enlisted subordinate...  Good grief.”

Published in the Daily Telegraph at telegraph.co.uk
Published on June 24th, 2010
By Toby Harnden

Well, I wouldn’t cross Michael Yon, the intrepid independent war reporter and photographer who has covered the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan with distinction and dogged intensity. For weeks, he was fulimating about two men – Brigadier-General Daniel Menard of the Canadian Army and General Stanley McChrystal.

Then, two things happened. First, Menard was fired. Then, McChrystal was fired.

Published on TheUSReport.com
Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 09:06AM
by Kay B. Day

Rolling Stone’s advance of an article with controversial remarks by Gen. Stanley McChrystal about President Barack Obama’s prosecution of the war will be on the screen for days to come. Apparently the general opened up to a freelancer and held little back when it came to deriding vice-president Joe Biden and ambassador to Afghanistan Karl W. Eikenberry. Eikenberry retired from the US Army as a Lieutenant General.*

But war correspondent Michael Yon had begun to ask questions about the leadership in Afghanistan weeks ago.

The Washington Post said McChrystal “is quoted in an upcoming profile in Rolling Stone magazine as saying that Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, had ‘betrayed’ him by sending a diplomatic cable to Washington last fall dismissing Karzai as ‘not an adequate strategic partner.’ The cable came as McChrystal was recommending that President Obama increase U.S. forces and ties with the Afghan government.”

Long before Rolling Stone published the story, war correspondent Michael Yon had also levied criticism at McChrystal. Yon came under fire from some milbloggers for his dispatches, and at least one military blog came close to character assassination because of what Yon wrote about McChrystal.