Jonathan Landay was part of one of the greatest “if only” newspaper stories of the last 10 years — as in “if only more people had read it.”

You might have seen Landay in a PBS program about the reporting that was done and not done during the run-up to the war in Iraq. The program revealed one of the true failures of American journalism — the failure to question and challenge the Bush administration’s claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as justification for going to war. Landay and colleagues at Knight-Ridder were among the rare and heroic exceptions. They did not go along. They did the work, drew on an incredible network of sources and showed that the argument for going to war was full of holes.

The stories ran in Knight-Ridder newspapers. They didn’t go much further. They didn’t penetrate the power corridors where the large national dailies and the networks got on board with the president. The war began more than 6½ years ago. Landay went in early. He got to northern Iraq on his own, then waited for the war to start, then covered it.

He’s one of those reporters. Two months ago, he filed the kind of story we have seen too little of. He was with Marines in Afghanistan and walked with them into an ambush:

“The first shot cracked out at 5:30 a.m., apparently just as four Marines and the Afghan unit to which they were attached reached the outskirts of the village. It quickly swelled into a furious storm of gunfire that we realized had been prepared for our arrival.”

Four Marines were killed in the ambush. Landay told of incredible bravery in the firefight. He told, too, of how air and artillery support weren’t there when they were vitally needed.

He was in a place he knows better than most. It is a place he thinks too many people are talking about with little or nothing to go on. It is very difficult to make an informed decision about Afghanistan, he said, because we aren’t being told what we need to know.

Landay will talk about Afghanistan Saturday night when he appears at the Old State House in Bristol. He’s got credentials.

“I consider myself an expert,” he said during a phone interview last week. “I lived there. I speak the language, though I’ve gotten a little rusty.”

He is now senior national security correspondent in the Washington bureau of McClatchy, the company that acquired Knight-Ridder in 2006.

In 1985, he was based in India with United Press International when that venerable wire service still existed. He spent four years covering the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

He has spent years in the area, watching conflicts spill over borders. It is the subtle connections — how conflict on one side of a border affects countries on the other — that are seldom discussed. We cannot think about Afghanistan without thinking about India and Pakistan.

Landay will not say whether he thinks the United States should send more troops into Afghanistan. But he said people need to know a lot more than they do now.

“The administration and the military are not presenting Americans with an honest appraisal of the stakes,” he said. “They need to start speaking the truth.”

Landay’s appearance in Bristol is sponsored by East Bay Citizens For Peace and is open to the public. He will speak at 8 o’clock. There will be plenty of time for questions.

bkerr@projo.com