On September 6, CBS correspondent Imtiaz Tyab stood in Kabul, next to what used to be the American Embassy, and handed his microphone to Abdul Qahar Balkhi — the Taliban's Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman. Balkhi looked into the camera and said, "Even back then, our position was very clear: That targeting civilians, places and individuals is a condemnable action."
That aired on the week of the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001. On CBS.
The three-part package from Tyab was billed as a look at Afghanistan 25 years after the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans and launched what became the nation's longest war. What it actually delivered was something closer to a Taliban media tour.
The segments featured Balkhi not once but twice. In addition to his remarks about civilians, he was asked about the estimated $7 billion in American military equipment abandoned during the 2021 withdrawal. His response: "That's the assets of the state of Afghanistan, and we are in no business of doing transactions and deals on the assets." CBS aired that without pushback. The Taliban now claims our Humvees and armored vehicles as sovereign property, and the network's follow-up was silence.
Tyab did include one caveat. "Now, to be clear," he said, "the Taliban waged a vicious insurgency during a war that killed more than 2,400 American service members and tens of thousands of innocent Afghans." One sentence. Buried in the middle of a multi-segment package. The kind of line a correspondent drops so the legal department can point to it later.
Meanwhile, the footage told a different story. CBS cameras lingered on the Taliban's Badri 313 battalion — their elite special forces unit — wearing American tactical gear and carrying American weapons. One shot showed a Humvee still bearing a Green Bay Packers sticker from whoever drove it last. That's not journalism. That's a trophy case tour, and CBS held the camera.
What the segments didn't show was equally revealing. No mention of Afghan women and girls stripped of education and basic freedoms since the Taliban's return five years ago. No examination of who was responsible for the withdrawal that left a trillion dollars' worth of war effort in the hands of the people we'd been fighting for 20 years. The Biden administration's role in the August 2021 collapse was a ghost — referenced by no one, blamed by no one, apparently relevant to no one at CBS.
Anchors Jericka Duncan, Vladimir Duthiers, Tony Dokoupil, and Weijia Jiang all introduced or transitioned segments across the three broadcasts. None challenged the framing. None asked why the network's 9/11 anniversary coverage featured more Taliban officials than Gold Star families.
The Taliban got a spokesman on American network television, on the week of 9/11, to publicly deny responsibility for enabling the worst terrorist attack in American history. They got to stand next to $7 billion in stolen American equipment and call it theirs. And CBS handed them the platform, the production value, and the reach.
Twenty-five years, 2,400 American lives, and a trillion dollars. The Taliban's anniversary present was a three-part CBS special where they got to play the reasonable ones.