The problem with war coverage is just this: we are given a simplistic view of a complex situation.

Consider, for example, counterinsurgency. Most people have probably heard the term. They might even have an idea that it’s about “winning the hearts and minds of the people”. If they’ve chosen to actively pursue the subject, they might know about “Shape, Clear, Hold and Build” — but few will reach even this level of knowledge. This is perfectly excusable; not everyone needs to be an expert on tactics or strategy — but those who are writing about Afghanistan, particularly those strongly advocating positions, surely do.

Far too many people, including interested generalists, have no idea exactly what the plan is in Afghanistan. It’s out there, for everyone to read. Blogs such as the Long War Journal ably describe it. The principles of counterinsurgency, applied in Iraq in 2006 and Afghanistan today, have long been in the public domain. David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla is probably in your local library, and his more down-and-dirty summation, Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency, is just an internet search away. Even the US military’s official counterinsurgency manual is on WikiLeaks. Yet many commentators remain startlingly ignorant.

All too frequently, commentary seems to lean on a kind of dinner-party consensus — “everyone knows” we “can’t win in Afghanistan”, whatever happens “the country will still be a brutal, bloody mess”. An accretion of headlines has become a narrative of pseudo-knowledge, which in turn has become received fact — and now, far too often, we are told by people who have never been to Afghanistan, who would never consider going, and who don’t trust anyone who’s been, that the war is a doomed, bloody waste.

Part of the problem is that military expertise is simply not accepted as real expertise. Current and former military personnel are treated as biased and unreliable. Consider Senator Bob Brown’s admission on The 7:30 Report last night to having never sought a Defence briefing on Afghanistan to confirm his strongly held position; similarly, an academic recently told me that Lateline was irresponsible for interviewing David Kilcullen on Afghanistan, because his position makes him biased. To some, the only time soldiers can be telling the truth is when they’re criticising the war or their superiors.

There’s a reason for this — the toxic legacy of the neoconservative adventure in Iraq lays heavily on Afghanistan. We remember how Colin Powell allowed himself to be browbeaten into lying to the UN, and how retired generals were paid by the Pentagon to lie to CNN. Yet a big part of the Iraq equation was the ignorantly supportive position adopted by the media, which should not be corrected with the adoption of an ignorantly critical one. If we’re going to look for real knowledge of an objective reality, surely we should look to those who have studied it and lived it — if a little more sceptically than we might have in 2003.

Waving away all military knowledge as an irrelevancy has real consequences. Consider the kerfuffle Shadow Minister for Defence David Johnston created when he demanded tanks, additional mortars and more air support be deployed to Afghanistan, based on an angry email from a 6 RAR soldier.

Johnston’s ridiculous sallies ignored two important lessons of Afghanistan. The first is that the overwhelming fire support available to the NATO forces should not be used where it would result in civilian casualties, because doing so only fuels insurgency. The second lesson I will quote from David Kilcullen — “Driving around in an armored convoy, day-tripping like a tourist in hell, degrades situational awareness, makes you a target, and is ultimately more dangerous”.

A mainstream media with access to real military expertise would have laughed off Johnston’s demagoguery as contemptuously as Prime Minister Gillard did. Instead it was treated seriously, and real lessons, bought with real lives, were ignored in the media frenzy.

Counterinsurgency doctrine is not revealed wisdom. There are real criticisms to make and concerns to address. For example, its degree of responsibility for the bloody Sunni-on-Shi’a ethnic cleansing in Iraq needs more examination, as do its roots in the ethnic divide-and-conquer strategies of the former colonial powers; the cost-benefit equation of the war should also be considered, although I would argue the human rights case overrides that. But without real, deep knowledge, these questions cannot be addressed. War coverage is worth getting right.

Andrew Riddle is a journalism student at the University of Wollongong, a former soldier in the Australian Regular Army, and is now in the Army Reserve.