Just across the valley, lights flickered from a few homes nestled in the terraced farmlands of Yaka China, a notorious village in the Korengal River valley in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunar... It was a known safe haven for insurgents. American troops have tended to avoid the place since a nasty fight a year or so earlier. And as Halloween approached, the soldiers I was with, under the command of 26-year-old Capt. Dan Kearney, were predicting their own Yaka China doom.

So begins a fantastic piece by Elizabeth Rubin in this weekend's New York Times Magazine. On her latest of many trips into Afghanistan, Rubin is embedded with an infantry company in Afghanistan's notorious Korengal valley struggling to make headway against entrenched tribal structures and religious dogma. By her own admission, Rubin came to research why the US was "killing so many civilians in air strikes." She comes up with some interesting observations on that topic, but more importantly, she gives a grunts'-eye view of why counterinsurgency warfare is so difficult, and how it challenges some of the traditional mores and values of the Army.

And yet, most readers of the published version of the Times will probably never read it. And that's a shame, and one that could have been easily avoided by a simple choice of cover design.

By way of background - I found out about the piece in my typical way, by seeing a link to it on a blog (in this case, my friend and colleague Phil Carter's Intel Dump.) I clicked through, and was immediately mesmerized by the power of the writing, the relatively neutral tone of the piece, and the powerful pictures that accompany it. The first photo that accompanies the headline is particularly telling - it shows the battalion staff, including the battalion commander, all watching a TV monitor as Battle Company struggles against unforgiving terrain and an amorphous enemy. The picture perfectly captures how the small-unit nature of COIN clashes against the hierarchy of conventional warfare. I went to bed on Saturday night figuring that I would make sure to pull my copy of the piece out of the next day's paper and save it.

So imagine my surprise when, this morning, I was confronted by a lurid cover that splashed an otherwise terrific cover picture of CPT Kearney and his men in action with out-of-context quotes from the piece like:

"I feel like Dr. Phil with guns."

"I ended up killing that woman and that kid."

"I've got too many geeking out, wanting to go off the deep end."

"We're all to the point of 'Lord of the Flies'."

And the crowning indignity? The listed title on the cover is "Captain Kearney's Quagmire" - a line that is not only not the title of Rubin's piece, but isn't even found anywhere in the piece. Interestingly enough, the online version of the cover omits the quotes, but keeps the listed title - an odd compromise, to say the least.

The net effect of this will be quite simple - if they see it in the printed version, those who could benefit the most from reading the piece will likely dismiss it as a reconfirmation of their own biases. Anti-war zealots who see only death and destruction in the wake of US troops will see the cover, nod their heads knowingly, and move on. Right-wing MSM haters who see a liberal conspiracy in every Times headline will fulminate over the character assassination of another good soldier and turn up the talk radio a little louder. In the end, a great piece of journalism is likely to fall on deaf ears, all because someone wanted an eye-catching cover design.

It didn't have to be this way. The picture is powerful enough to stand by itself, and coupled with the actual title of the piece ("Battle Company is Out There"), it would have drawn in the curious from all sides of the spectrum. The Times owed Rubin's piece a better cover, and it owes its readers an explanation of why they took the path of sensationalism in telling this unit's story.

Less would have been more.