Compare: 19 Dead (Afghanistan) vs 21 Dead (Mexico)

Big hat tip to Hugh Hewitt for this!!

Wednesday, February 11, 2009
19 Dead v. 21 Dead
Posted by: Hugh Hewitt

An attack by Taliban rebels in Kabul leaves 19 dead, and is featured prominently by the New York Times. The "attacks in the capital underlined the severity of the challenge facing American policy-makers." No doubt about that. This sort of large scale assault conveys that the attacking force can menace the society for a long time to come.There was another attack reported in the Times yesterday. The episode got a paragraph, even though it left 21 dead, and occurred 80 miles from El Paso, in Mexico.

From the paragraph:
Soldiers in the state of Chihuahua chased and killed 14 armed men who had kidnapped nine people and killed six of them on Tuesday. One soldier was killed by the kidnappers, believed to be drug traffickers, bringing the death toll to 21. The gunmen took the hostages from the ranching town of Villa Ahumada and drove them to an isolated farm where six were killed, said Enrique Torres, a spokesman for the federal government’s antidrug operation in the state. A military convoy caught up with the kidnappers about 80 miles south of El Paso, killed seven of them and freed the remaining three hostages. Soldiers then pursued the other seven gunmen through heavy snow and killed them in a shootout.

Four other people were killed in Juarez as well, bringing the death toll near that part of the border to 25, according to the El Paso Times.

Frank Dowse of the the Agemus Group, an international security consulting firm based in San Diego, has been writing at American Sentry blog about Mexico's hidden civil war, but most of MSM isn't paying much attention to the rising instability on our doorstep.