AFGHANISTAN JOURNAL
A Run with the Pack
What our fast-moving press passes by
Kabul, four in the morning. An earthquake jolts the house. Pulling on some clothes, I dash outside. My housemate, an NPR correspondent, is already in the courtyard, asking guards where the quake might be. If the destruction is great enough, he wants to see it. By dawn, we know: the epicenter is in Nahrin, a district capital some 100 miles to the north. The town has reportedly been leveled, with thousands of casualties. The road to Nahrin, as in so much of Afghanistan, is deeply rutted, and getting there requires going through the Salang Tunnel — or, as journalists like to call it, the Fucking Salang Tunnel. Built by Soviet engineers in the 1960s, the nearly two-mile-long passage cuts through the rugged Hindu Kush, connecting Kabul with cities to the north. Unfortunately, the tunnel is narrow, and accidents often block it for hours. Even if it is clear, the trip to Nahrin can take the better part of a day. My NPR colleague is nonetheless determined to go. Dropping everything else, he rustles up a sleeping bag, a case of bottled water, and a spare car battery to power his laptop.
Later that morning at the offices of the United Nations Mission, I find the dapper spokesman, Manoel de Almeida e Silva, besieged by journalists clamoring for a seat on one of the helicopters flying to the disaster site. In the end, most have to drive. In the afternoon, I run into one of the few who stayed behind, a correspondent from USA Today. She had begged her editor to let her go but had been refused. “That’s why we subscribe to the AP,” he had told her. When I asked why she had been so eager to go, she says, “Oh, plenty of dead bodies.”
I must say, I agreed with her editor. This was late March, when a new Afghanistan was taking shape. With so much going on in Kabul — the Karzai government’s push to establish its authority, the international community’s efforts to galvanize the economy, the United States’s on-again, off-again commitment to nation-building — why not leave the quake to the wires?
I had come to Afghanistan for two-and-a-half weeks to write a political analysis for The Nation. Yes, I was a parachutist. It was a particularly tough place to be one — the strange languages, the forbidding terrain, the impenetrable culture, the lack of phones, the early curfew, landmines, bland food, no bars, and the women draped like furniture in storage. Most of all, there was the sense that so much of what happened in Afghanistan occurred beneath the surface, and that getting at it required large reserves of time, dedication, and resourcefulness.
The correspondents based in Kabul seemed to have all three. They were learning Dari, going on military patrol, sipping tea with warlords. They all had Thurayas, the latest in satellite phones, and were constantly on the line to New York or Paris. Pulitzer Prize winners abounded. Attending a press conference at the presidential palace one afternoon, I ran into John Burns, the New York Times correspondent. A burly man with an impressive head of graying curls who was toting a copy of The God That Failed, Burns has been covering Afghanistan off and on since 1989. As we waited for the conference to begin, he gestured toward a room in an adjoining wing of the palace and said that was where Najibullah (Afghanistan’s president from 1987 to 1992) had shown him the spot where former President Daoud Khan had been murdered. How could I compete with that?
Yet being a parachutist had its advantages. I faced no deadlines. I had no editors to confer with. And, as one of the few free-lancers in Afghanistan by that time, I felt like an outsider among my peers. This allowed me to see the country — and the press corps — with a newcomer’s eyes. And I came away feeling that my colleagues had succumbed to several unfortunate syndromes, which together caused them to miss what is perhaps the most important political story in post-Taliban Afghanistan.
First, there’s the breaking-news syndrome. In covering Afghanistan, Western news organizations seem excessively wed to traditional-style news — explosions, skirmishes, assassination plots, natural disasters. The press migration to Nahrin was one example. Another was the roundup in early April of hundreds of Afghans for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government. When the editors of The Washington Post learned that The New York Times planned to run a story about the arrests on its front page, it called one of its correspondents in Kabul at midnight and got her to write a quick version so the paper would not be scooped. Couldn’t the Post’s readers have waited a day for a fuller account?
The breaking-news syndrome works in reverse, I found, when news breaks elsewhere. While I was in Kabul, the Passover bombing occurred in Israel, and the subsequent flare-up of violence in the Middle East caused editors back home to lose all interest in Afghanistan. The only stories reporters in Afghanistan could then get into the paper were soft features. The correspondent for USA Today spent days gathering material about how Kabul doesn’t work. A reporter for U.S. News & World Report went to Bamiyan province — site of the Taliban’s destruction of the two Buddhas — to investigate rumors that a third was buried in the sand. Not exactly the best use of journalistic resources.
These experiences, in turn, point to a second shortcoming in the press’s approach to Afghanistan — its pack mentality. The “hacks” in Kabul, as they call themselves, tend to hang out with one another, eat together, party together. Most nights, they would gather at someone’s house, ice up some Heinekens or Stolichnaya procured on the black market, put on some CDs, light up cigarettes, and trade stories. Many of these parties were organized by Marla, a bubbly, blond-haired woman who had come to Kabul for Global Exchange, the antiglobalization group based in San Francisco. Marla’s mission was to organize Afghans who had lost family members to the U.S. bombing. She was hoping both to document the number of victims and to get survivors to demand compensation from the United States.
I never did figure out if Marla’s hostessing was specifically designed to snare the media’s attention, but stories about civilian casualties began appearing regularly. And, on one level, they were welcome. Last fall, while the air campaign was taking place, many U.S. news organizations had studiously avoided the subject. The difficulty of reaching the bomb sites was one factor, but even more important, I think, were the inhibiting effects of the war’s popularity and of Donald Rumsfeld’s intimidating performances at press conferences. Now the press was finally getting around to investigating the matter.
Well-researched accounts, though, put the civilian death toll at about 1,000. While all such deaths are regrettable, that number seems low when measured against the positive effects of the bombing — the overthrow of the Taliban, the smashing of al Qaeda, the restoration of basic freedoms to the Afghan people. In fact, Marla told me that many of the families she had contacted were so pleased with the results of the bombing that they were reluctant to come forward to demand compensation. This reality, however, made its way into very few of the stories that appeared in the U.S. press. The coverage of the issue swung from complete silence to lockstep condemnation — a demonstration of how synchronized the reporting out of Kabul tends to be.
A final weakness of the press corps in Kabul is its taste for adventure. At first glance, this might sound odd. Reporting from Afghanistan requires abundant curiosity, spunk, and nerve. But excessive thrill-seeking can lead to questionable news judgment. Thus, journalists’ interest in covering the earthquake in Nahrin seemed directly proportional to the difficulty of reaching the site. Those who made the trip wielded it like a badge of honor.
Interviewing warlords provided another such badge. Since the fall of the Taliban, journalists had rushed to report on the country’s powerful regional commanders — Gul Agha in Kandahar, Ismail Khan in Herat, Rashid Dostum in Mazar-i-Sharif, Bacha Khan in Gardez. With their exotic dress, fierce bodyguards, and rifles at the ready, stories about these men “write themselves,” as one correspondent put it. And they are without doubt worth writing. As long as these commanders maintain their autonomy, the government in Kabul will have trouble imposing its authority.
While in Kabul, in fact, I felt the pressure to interview a warlord. I found one in Logar province, about an hour and a half south of Kabul. When I arrived, Fazellulah Mjadedi was holding court in the squat, white building that served as his headquarters. He fit all the specs: he was built like a bear, had a thick beard, and was surrounded by men toting Kalashnikovs. But he turned out to be a fairly decent man. In fact, he was a medical doctor. I came away feeling disappointed.
In the end, though, I would stumble upon the man who is Afghanistan’s most important warlord, Mohammed Fahim. I would find him in the most unexpected of places: as defense minister in Kabul. And, to my amazement, few others seemed interested in him.
I first heard about Fahim before I left New York, in conversations with such experts on Afghanistan as Barnett Rubin at New York University and Peter Bouckaert and John Sifton at Human Rights Watch. From them, I learned of the Panjshiris, a small but politically prominent subgroup of Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley, about three hours north of Kabul. The valley had been home to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the famed Northern Alliance commander. After Massoud was assassinated in an attack last September 9, his place as leader was divided up among several of his lieutenants. And after the fall of the Taliban, these men took control of three of the government’s most important ministries: defense, Fahim; interior, Yunus Qanooni; and foreign affairs, Abdullah.
In Afghanistan, I began asking about them. One important source of information was my fixers. These local translators, the unsung reportorial heroes of Afghanistan, arrange interviews, suggest sources, relay news from the street, and get you into places you aren’t meant to go. During my stay, I had two such fixers. Both were brilliant analysts of the Afghan scene. When I mentioned the Panjshiris, they explained how they were the real power inside the government, and how many of the country’s majority Pashtuns deeply resented them.
From my interviews, I gradually began to learn more. A senior Afghan officer at a U.S. relief agency talked in hushed tones about his fear of the warlords in the government, as he described the Panjshiris. They were building a power base for themselves, one that made it dangerous for people like himself to speak out, so he asked that I not quote him. Later, when I raised the subject of the Panjshiris with a member of the loya jirga commission, which was preparing for the national assembly that would pick a transitional government in June, the man suddenly lowered his voice. Glancing furtively at a group of visiting elders, he confided his worries about the Panjshiris’ power grab.
Of the three top Panjshiris, people kept singling out Mohammed Fahim. Abdullah and Qanooni were described as educated and urbane; Fahim was said to be crude and grasping. As the defense minister, he controlled the country’s armed forces — made up, for the most part, of the remnants of the Northern Alliance army. Most of its soldiers were Tajiks and loyal to Fahim rather than to chairman Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun. In one telling anecdote, I learned that whenever John McColl, the British general who headed the international peacekeeping force, came to see him, Fahim made him wait an hour or more to show who was boss. All in all, Fahim seemed by far the most powerful man in the country.
My time in Afghanistan was coming to an end, but I still had many questions about him. What, for instance, had been his role from 1992 to 1996, when Massoud’s army — one of several occupying Kabul — had engaged in indiscriminate attacks that helped level much of the city? What were relations like between him and Karzai? Would the new Afghan army being trained under his direction simply enhance his power? And what was the nature of his contacts with the United States, now that the war was all but over? As a strong rival to Karzai, he was clearly an obstacle to U.S. efforts to build a stable government.
After my return to the U.S., I scoured the press for answers. I found none. When the loya jirga took place in mid-June, most papers treated it as a great triumph for Afghan democracy. For a more nuanced account, I had to go to the New York Times op-ed page. There, two delegates to the loya jirga, Omar Zakhilwal and Adeena Niazi, told how the hopes of the assembly for a truly representative government had been dashed. “We delegates were denied anything more than a symbolic role in the selection process,” they wrote. “A small group of Northern Alliance chieftains led by the Panjshiris decided everything behind closed doors and then dispatched Mr. Karzai to give us the bad news.”
An even fuller report appeared on the Internet. It was written by Ahmed Rashid, the author of Taliban, and distributed by EurasiaNet, an online news service about Central Asia sponsored by the Open Society Institute. In it, Rashid described how at the loya jirga a groundswell of support had developed for Zahir Shah, the former king, but U.S. diplomats in Kabul had intervened to block it. According to Rashid, the United States preferred to continue supporting the Panjshiris because of their help in pursuing the remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda. (An abbreviated version of this piece appeared in The Wall Street Journal, for which Rashid sometimes writes.)
It was not until July 24 that the silence about Mohammed Fahim was really broken. On that day, The Washington Post ran a front-page story by Susan Glasser on the rivalry that was flaring between Karzai and Fahim, concentrated on the latter’s control of the country’s secret service. Still intact from the days of the Soviet occupation, that service had 30,000 employees and departments “run by ethnic Tajiks from the Northern Alliance who answer only to Fahim.” It continued to use KGB-style methods to spy on and intimidate the local population. “To the ethnic Pashtun president and his supporters,” Glasser noted, “the unchecked power of the Tajik-run secret service is a key obstacle to Afghan democracy that lies closer to home than either regional warlords who refuse to disarm their men or lurking remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda.” Two weeks later, the Post, in a piece by Glasser and Pamela Constable, described how the power struggle between Karzai and Fahim had recently intensified, raising “the alarming prospect of a return to the kind of violent political feuding that destroyed the country in the early 1990s.”
It was not the type of story one wants to leave to the AP.
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