Adventures in Correspondentland

Nick Bryant was born in Bristol, England, and works in Australia for the BBC as one of its most trusted and senior foreign correspondents. He is a regular contributor to several Australian magazines and newspapers, including
The Australian
,
The Spectator
,
The Monthly
and
The Australian Literary Review
. Nick studied history at Cambridge and has a doctorate in American politics from Oxford. He lives in Sydney with his wife and son.

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Imprint Page

Dedication

Introduction Hotel Kabul

Chapter 1 Two Bad Saturdays and a Very Good Friday

Chapter 2 Dear Bill

Chapter 3 W

Chapter 4 9/11

Chapter 5 Happy Meals at Guantanamo

Chapter 6 Afghanistan: America's Forgotten War

Chapter 7 Pakistan: The Land of the Double Game

Chapter 8 India Shining

Chapter 9 Battlefields in Paradise

Chapter 10 Year of Disasters

Chapter 11 The Search for an Indian Bride

Chapter 12 Lie Back and Think of Australia

Chapter 13 Rolling History

Postscript

Acknowledgements

Picture Section

The laundry list at the Kabul Intercontinental spoke of the sudden changes that had overtaken my life: shirts, $1; trousers, $3; commando suits, $15. In the lobby down below, chipboard hoardings covered a row of shattered windows, destroyed the week before when Taliban insurgents launched a rocket attack that showered glass on new arrivals checking in at reception and knocked diners in the restaurant off their chairs. Prostrate at my feet was our translator, a Kandahari man with rotting teeth, two wives, extravagantly applied black eyeliner and a vaguely flirtatious stare, who was kneeling towards Mecca in readiness for sundown prayers. Just over the way was a huge white marquee, a gift from Germany, where it had previously been used to host Rhineland beer festivals. Now, two years on from the attacks of 9/11, it played host to tribal leaders, returned refugees and even women's rights activists who had gathered for a
loya jirga
, a grand council, convened to pave the way for elections now that the Taliban had fled the capital. Outside the window, howling manically, was a pack of feral dogs tearing apart a defenceless goat, which was usefully metaphoric for the power struggles about to be unleashed next door.

Cast in the role of founding fathers was a disreputable
collection of unreformed warlords, who arrived at the opening ceremony of the
loya jirga
in brand-new SUVs, with smoke-glassed windows and Kalashnikov-toting bodyguards at front and rear. Slaloming through the thigh-high concrete blast walls past policemen wearing heavy, Stalin-style overcoats and soldiers sitting atop rusting Soviet-era tanks, the length of their motorcades was a measure of their power.

Following in their wake came a mud-splattered white minibus carrying a children's choir dressed in traditional costumes representing every ethnic tribe. Picked as much for their cuteness as for their musicianship, these infants had spent weeks rehearsing a special Afghan peace song. Presumably, the American and United Nations image-makers who had choreographed this pageant intended the cameras to focus on these beatific youngsters. Alas, when the choir drew up to the convention site, the children had to sprint from their minibus to the safety of the marquee with the scrambling urgency of pupils escaping a Columbine-style shooting, such was the fear that Taliban snipers could take potshots from the mountains high above. Since the grammar of television news demands that reports begin with an exclamation mark, the pictures were irresistible and ideal for an opening montage of shots.

Kabul felt different. Momentous. Thrilling. After spending much of the previous five years perched inside a backless tent on a rooftop high above the White House, providing a galloping commentary on the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, I had made it back to that kingdom of the journalistic mind that perhaps we should call ‘Correspondentland'. That place of boundless adventure, breathless reportage and ill-fitting flak jackets, of khaki waistcoats with a ridiculous surfeit of pockets, often exaggerated tales of derring-do and occasional moments of
extreme personal recklessness, which we preferred to call bravery.

In Washington, my colleagues in the West Wing press pack were a clean-cut bunch with near-perfect teeth, hurricane-proof hair and the kind of smiles that did not quite say ‘Have a nice day' but were buoyant nonetheless. In Kabul, the conflict-frazzled journalists looked like extras from the set of an Indiana Jones remake after months of on-location filming. That simple difference in clothing spoke of the frontier I had crossed: I had gone from being a suits correspondent to rejoining the fraternity of boots.

Travelling the world with the White House press corps, we used to grumble that the seats in business class on the press charter did not fully recline, or that the souvenir stands outside our hotel filing centres had only a narrow range of carved African tribal decorations (Abuja), babushka dolls (Moscow) or Imodium (Delhi). Here at Hotel Kabul, however, the phrase ‘occupational hazards' truly meant just that, from the plug-less heaters in our ice-cold rooms, which could only be activated by jamming two frayed wires into a live power socket, to the outdoor pool, which was shamrock green. As for the chipboard hoardings in the foyer, they were a complete conversational taboo. Even to mention them was a sign that you did not belong, and no one would admit to that.

At a time when Iraq was in virtual lockdown, with many international journalists wary of leaving their bureaux or hotels out of fear of being kidnapped and then beheaded, Afghanistan was not only a must-see destination on the post-9/11 beat but also a can-see destination. For foreign correspondents, it had long been viewed as a kind of adult theme park, divided, Disney-like, into a hotchpotch of different realms. There was Warlordland: the personal fiefdoms of vying chieftains – hard men with heavily armed private armies, homicidal tendencies and ludicrously gauche
mansions with pink stucco facades funded from the proceeds of black-tar heroin. Warlordland, as often as not, occupied the same turf as Opiumland, the vast swathes of countryside planted with poppy flowers that continued to be the source of ninety per cent of the world's heroin. Even now, two years after the liberation of Kabul, it was possible to speak of a Talibanland: the pockets of obdurate resistance in the south and east of the country, where black-turban-clad Talibs imposed their murderous reading of sharia law.

More familiar to a recent transplant from Washington was a kind of Main Street, USA, located at Bagram Air Base, a sprawling military complex 40 minutes from Kabul. In observance of the rule that wherever American soldiers tread fast food must quickly follow, there was a Burger King, Pizza Hut, Popeyes Chicken and a number of Seattle-style coffee bars – food and drink intended as much for its comfort as its speed. Just about the only thing that was not super-sized about the American presence was its fighting contingent, for the simple reason that so many soldiers had been diverted to Iraq.

Though the men and women who remained behind sported T-shirts decorated with the slogan ‘Get Osama for Mama' – gone now was the Cold War chic of ‘Kill a Commie for Mommy' – it was proving infuriatingly difficult to establish the precise whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. He was thought to be somewhere over the Pakistan border in lawless Waziristan, hunkered down in some cave or secret compound, but the search for Saddam Hussein's latest bolt-hole, along with those elusive weapons of mass destruction, had now taken precedence.

Like all good theme parks, this new Afghanistan was based to a large extent on pretence and unreality, and, as was often the
way in the post-9/11 world, few things were quite as they seemed. Consider the road from Kabul to Kandahar. Long stretches had been recently covered with asphalt in what was now being touted as a monument to post-war reconstruction. Yet when a section of the highway was opened on the eve of the
loya jirga
, VIPs had to be helicoptered to the site of the ceremony because it was too hazardous to drive. The Taliban regularly killed and kidnapped the construction workers who had built it, and now threatened to turn their guns on the visiting dignitaries. That day, the country's interim leader, Hamid Karzai, who arrived wearing his trademark Karakul hat made from the downy fur of lamb foetuses, performed the ribbon-cutting duties. Yet Karzai only rarely ventured beyond the city limits of the capital, and thus the de facto president of Afghanistan was commonly known as ‘the Mayor of Kabul' – a lesser title that tidily captured his powerlessness.

Likewise, the
loya jirga
was presented as a cradle of democracy, even though the presence of so many warlords, and their involvement in the national government, implied that any form of parliamentary government would be dead at birth. With these militia commanders sitting threateningly at the front of the stage, like an identity parade of suspected war criminals, free speech and debate was impaired severely, if not virtually impossible. When a brave young female delegate, an émigré recently returned from the United States, rose to her feet to harangue the warlords for their barbarous ways, she had to be closeted away for weeks at a United Nations compound, Kabul's impromptu version of the witness-protection program. After that, there were not many dissenting voices, since so few people could muster the courage to speak out. Rendered mute, their reticence offered the most eloquent statement on the true state of post-war Afghanistan.

Unspeaking or not, the Afghans themselves were notoriously hard to read. In a country where the life expectancy was then just 42, most of the men looked prematurely old, sometimes by as much as a decade or even more. The ravages of 30 years of almost continual state of war had not so much been written on their faces as carved with a blunt chisel. Some of the most macho militiamen were unabashed paedophiles, who routinely buggered the beardless young dancing boys who dressed in women's clothes with bells strapped to their feet in a custom known as
bacha bazi
.

Still more impenetrable were the country's mothers and daughters. Even in Kabul, a large proportion of them continued to don pale-blue burqas, despite the abolition of the Taliban decrees that threatened public stonings if they appeared outside without them. But how many women continued to wear these sun-bleached gowns out of choice, in observance of their faith, and how many wore them out of compulsion, in fear of their husbands and imams? Only a small number would speak, making it almost impossible to tell. And we urgently needed their testimony to get a handle on Realityland.

Unable to assemble a collage made up of individual stories, we tended to peddle grand narratives instead, with all the exaggerations and simplifications that went with them. At the very moment that nuance and complexity were demanded of reporters covering the post-9/11 world, all too often we succumbed to the Bush administration's insistence on clarity and certainty. Good versus evil; for us or against us; New Europe as opposed to Old Europe; democracy against totalitarianism; modernity against nihilism; and all the Manichean variations. We also adopted its nomenclature. What truly should have been called ‘the Bush administration's war on terror' came to be known, more simply
and lazily, as ‘the war on terror', as if it had our endorsement. It was only much later that we added the qualifier.

Nowhere was this sense of alignment stronger than in Washington. When first I started reporting from the American capital, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, I quickly got used to the sight of members of the White House press corps rising to their feet even when the president came into their presence. Soiled blue dress or not, he was, after all, their head of state. In the aftermath of 9/11, however, too many reporters dropped to bended knee. Polished enamel flag-pins started appearing on the suit lapels just as quickly as scepticism started disappearing from their copy.

Few were as brazen as Geraldo Rivera of Fox News, who bought a pistol and vowed to gun down Osama bin Laden, but by the same token few wanted to be labelled as unpatriotic. On overseas trips with the president, one of the chief wire reporters, whose copy commonly set the tone of the overall coverage, took to wearing an NYPD baseball cap to display his fealty. It did not mean necessarily that he agreed with the Bush administration, but it hinted at a ‘Don't fuck with America' bunker mentality that the White House tended to take on the road. It was a climate in which half-truths and half-baked theories, especially about the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, were often accepted unquestioningly as gospel. Why, faulty intelligence even made regular appearances on the front page of
The New York Times
, that one-time haven of reportorial infallibility, which gave it the stamp of truth.

Even before 9/11, George W. Bush had mastered the art of flattering the White House press corps – a technique that, paradoxically, centred on their belittlement. Favoured reporters
were given playful nicknames, which some interpreted as an attempt to create the sophomoric bonhomie and occasional cruelty of a college frat-house, but which felt more like a final club at Harvard because of its exclusive membership. The tallest reporter in the press pool was christened ‘Super-stretch', while the next in Bush's vertiginous ranking system became known as ‘Stretch' and then ‘Little Stretch'. The reporter for the wire service The Associated Press was known always as ‘the AP person', while a partially blind reporter who then worked for the
Los Angeles Times
was called ‘Shades'.

A nickname not only conferred insider status, and admitted selected reporters into a kind of West Wing brotherhood, but also changed the character of presidential press conferences and the more regular question-and-answer sessions in the Oval Office. Ideally, they should have been combative, like a martial art where the skirmish was bookended with protocols of respect. But the genius of Bush's bantering style was that it disarmed so many of his potential critics.

During the period of ultra-patriotism that followed the attacks, when home-grown journalists could perhaps be forgiven for their lapses, the foreign press should have filled the void. But most of us had ended up in America precisely because we loved America, so we, too, often equated scepticism with disloyalty. In the months and years after the attacks of 9/11, we should have been solely dedicated to the quest for understanding, but frequently we were sidetracked, along with our American colleagues, by a desire for revenge. We, too, had been caught in the clutch of circumstance, and it made some of us temporarily lose our grip.

Perhaps my reassignment to South Asia, where it was easier to take a more dispassionate look at the Bush administration's war
on terrorism, was an attempt to balance the ledger. Perhaps I was living out a personal variant of what the then secretary of state Colin Powell described as the Pottery Barn rule, his unheeded warning to President Bush on the eve of the Iraq war: you break it, you buy it. Perhaps I was simply more interested in America's original post-9/11 mission, the hunt for Osama bin Laden.