The first draft of history: How war reporters get it wrong, and what they can do to get it right

Since 2001, Patrick Cockburn has provided peerless reporting of the wars that have torn apart the Middle East and created the conditions in which Al-Qaeda and Islamic State have grown and flourished. In the first of a series of excerpts from his new book, he combines eyewitness accounts of the battles for Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and beyond with an explanation of what these conflicts have in common – and how they were reported or misreported at the time

A Iraqi Turkmen Shiite fighter, who volunteered to join the government forces, holds a position on August 4, 2014 in Amerli, some 160 kilometres (100 miles) north of Baghdad. IS fighters launched a blistering offensive on June 9 2014 that saw them capture the Iraqi city of Mosul and move into much of Iraq's Sunni heartland Getty

War reporting is easy to do but very difficult to do really well. There is great demand for a reporter’s output during the fighting because it is melodramatic and appeals to readers and viewers. This is what I used to label in my own mind as “twixt shot and shell” reporting, and there is nothing wrong with it.

The first newspapers were published during the Dutch Wars with Spain, the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War at the beginning of the 17th century. People rightly want to know the latest news about momentous and interesting events such as wars, natural calamities and crime. But single-minded preoccupation with combat may be deceptive, because such exciting events are not necessarily typical; neither do they always tell one who is winning or losing the war.

I covered the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and the beginning of 2002, which was largely reported as a military victory by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, supported by US air strikes. Television viewers would have seen impressive pictures of exploding bombs and lines of dejected prisoners. But I followed the Taliban from Kabul to Kandahar and their villages outside the city and saw their forces retreating and breaking up without really being defeated. There was little serious fighting, but a lot of giving up and going home by Taliban fighters who had been told to do so by their commanders and who knew that they were bound to lose the war anyway.