As the Western experiment in Afghanistan is being packed up for shipment home, the diplomatic, aid and military folk should ask the journalists and the Afghans what's going on outside the bubble; they might just learn a thing or two about Afghanistan.
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In Kabul last week, an American friend working there as a freelance journalist told me he’d dreamed the night before that his arms had been blown off. John Wendle said he’d woken up in a terrified sweat and turned on his bedside light. If I can turn the light on, he told himself, I’ve still got my arms.
In early December, he had been at Kabul’s Abu Fazal Shia shrine when a suicide bomber killed more than 50 people. A lot of friends were there, including AFP’s photographer Massoud Hossaini.
Massoud’s picture of a girl wearing a bright green dress and headscarf for the Shia Ashura ran on front pages worldwide.
It captures the moment that broke John’s sleep – the teenager is mid-scream, her clothes splashed with blood, hands splayed, face contorted with shock, terror, disbelief.
At her feet are bodies of men, women and children, many of them her relatives. There’s a bloodied baby sprawled across the back of his mother’s neck; she is face down, dead. Another girl, wearing black and on her knees, is crying. Blood runs down her cheek.
The picture is so graphic one can almost hear the screams. Massoud still hears the screams. One of his hands was injured; he’s not sure what lodged in it, but at first thought it might have been a bit of bone from one of the dead. Or even the bomber.
When I was AFP’s bureau chief in Kabul, Massoud and our other photographer, Shah Marai, used to wipe the blood and flesh and bone off their shoes when they came back from covering bomb attacks.
Massoud says he’s having nightmares and suddenly bursts into tears. He had to stop doing follow-ups, he said, like going to hospitals to photograph survivors.
John has seen a counselor; she told him he is doing ok. “I know I am. But I worry it’s going to happen again. And more people will die,” he said.
There will be more attacks in Kabul and more people will die, needlessly, pointlessly. The Taleban have long been inside the wire and there’s a belief they’ll make their presence felt ahead of any peace talks.
I've just spent a few months as media adviser to the EU’s Kabul delegation, and the experience has shaken my confidence in the durability of the international project in Afghanistan.
Many young and capable Afghans do have faith in a peaceful, prosperous, secure and free future, and they're prepared to work hard for it. Many others are scrambling to get themselves, their families and their money out before 2014, when foreign combat troops will withdraw.
And for the foreigners? “It’s a fight without a fucking point,” as one friend, an NGO official, put it to me soon after I returned in October.
A TV reporter told me his fin de siecle moment came at a ball in Kabul when a senior military officer was so drunk she could only stay upright by holding onto the back of his dinner jacket. “That’s when I thought: ‘We’ve lost this’,” he said.
For me it was last week, when I heard tales from a party at a UN compound in Kabul where at least two Western ambassadors were said to have stripped to leap into the pool.
The pretence of victory in Afghanistan is dropping as fast as a vodka-fuelled diplomat's boxer shorts and now the imperative is to say that at least we, the West, didn't lose. Just as it ever was, the losers will be the Afghans.
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Anecdotes about abrasive news editors, obnoxious reporters and the veracity of stories from the field are the stuff of Fleet Street legend, and journalists have long laughed behind their hands about made-up quotes, even made-up stories. While this is not confined to the British media, the papers here are well known for their colourful personalities and practices.
When multinational companies pull their advertising, the laughing quickly stops.
While it seemed confined to celebrities and politicians, this scandal provoked little more than tuts and eyerolls among a public that generally knows not to believe everything they read in the papers. But following news that the voicemail of murdered schoolgirl Millie Dowler was hacked, days after she disappeared and while her family and the police were still searching for her, the public mood has turned to one of revulsion.
It does seem beyond comprehension that those responsible did not know that listening to and deleting voicemails was morally, let alone legally, wrong. It is unbelievable that those running the News of the World at the time did not know what was going on as stories were published referring to the content of hacked voicemail messages.
Each hour seems to bring more news of how little integrity the newspaper had when it came to staying ahead of the savage British press pack. With implications that bereaved relatives of Afghanistan and Iraq war dead were also hacked, this episode moves into the realm of the profoundly sick.
A man whose son was killed in the terrorist attacks in London on July 7, 2005 told the BBC that police involved in the phone hacking investigations had “found a file” that contained personal information, including an unlisted phone number.
After the attacks, Graham Foukes said he and other families “were in a very dark place, and we were using the phone frantically trying to get information, talking to families and friends, and talking very intimately about very personal issues. The thought that these guys may have been listening to that is horrendous.”
Mr Foukes said he would like to meet Rupert Murdoch, head of News International which owns the News of the World, “face to face, and have an in-depth discussion with him about responsibility and the power that he has, and how it should be used appropriately”.
Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, said she knew nothing of the phone hacking despite then being editor of the paper. She did, however, tell a parliamentary committee in 2003 that the paper paid police for information -- which has been illegal in Britain for around a century.
Mrs Brooks artfully quoted former US President Harry Trueman that “the buck stops here” during her editorship while running a campaign to change the law on pedophiles. As calls grow louder for her to go, it remains to be seen just where the buck stops for Mr Murdoch.
From a country without music or movies, Afghanistan is now jam-packed with radio, television, newspapers, magazines, film, music and theatre. Much comes and goes, and a consolidating shake-out has yet to level the playing field.
For media entrepreneurs like Sardar Ahmad Khan, Afghanistan is a land of opportunity. It's tough, competitive, full of challenges and inevitable disappointments, but energy and creativity can still find traction.
Sardar, a confidently suave father of three with frighteningly idiomatic English learnt from US soldiers while he was covering US-led operations for AFP at Bagram airbase in the early years after the 2001 invasion, saw his opportunity as foreign journalists streamed in behind the retreating Taliban.
"Like it or not, it was clear that the era of media freedom had come to Afghanistan,"; he says.
"I knew the Afghanistan story would remain in the Western headlines for quite a while and this gave me the idea to do something to be a part of this fascinating industry.
"I tried a couple of other ideas - a weekly news magazine or a monthly fashion magazine, but both failed to find a market.
So the idea of creating a media facilitating company came to mind, to provide services to the hundreds of Western journalists who were based in the country or visiting from time to time.
"Traveling outside Kabul as a journalist myself, I always relied on local assistance for a good story, so I knew that without a good local helping hand, be it a fixer or contacts or even a good driver, you can't get a good story. That’s where the idea came from.
"Then I had to pick a name: catchy, of course, but also immediately conveying what I was offering. I came up with Pressistan - press In English, and istan, the Dari word for land or country. And I attached ‘Kabul’ to give it an Afghan identity. And so, three years ago, Kabul Pressistan came to life."
Since then, Sardar - who holds down two jobs, as correspondent for AFP and managing director of Kabul Pressistan - has taken his inspiration from others who have built successful media companies, foremost among them Saad Mohseni, the man behind Tolo TV, the country’s most popular, and innovative, channel.
Kabul Pressistan has grown from a simple fixing/translation service into a comprehensive "one-stop shop" as Sardar likes to call it, offering a wide range of media services, including video, photo and text reporting, stringing, facilitating, monitoring, and training."It's been quick to make use of social media, with 3,400 friends on Facebook and a growing following on Twitter.
A recently launched SMS service has found a ready market for its breaking news and security alerts among the media, diplomatic and aid communities in Kabul and beyond.
Clients have included Western ambassadors, NGOs, and US and NATO military personnel, as well as journalists who have left glowing testimonials on the website - kabulpressistan.com.
Harper's writer Matthieu Aikins called the company "the Cadillac of Kabul-based fixers" while Singapore freelance photographer Simon Lim said simply: "Kabul Pressistan is a godsend."
Media freedom is yet to be institutionalised in Afghanistan, so censorship can be arbitrary - nervous military police, for instance, pointing their weapons at journalists covering suicide attacks.
Media is one of the few things that has thrived in post-Taliban Afghanistan but still we have a rocky journey ahead to claim we have a competent free media in this country,” Sardar says.
One of the biggest challenges is the lack of expertise and competent journalists and media manpower. We have lots of television stations, for example, but we don't have good journalists and experts to run them; we have hundreds of radio stations but we don't have people to produce content for them."
While others see a bleak future for the country and even imminent civil war as warlords and the Taliban compete to fill the vacuum that will be left by exiting foreign troops, Sardar strikes an optimistic note: "I'm working towards that time when all my dreams will have come true and all my plans comes to fruition - a couple of TV channels, a serious weekly news magazine like Newsweek, a network of radio stations and a huge production house."
Laughing at his own ambition, he adds: "I think we will definitely see the day Afghanistan has a truly free media and the manpower that it needs. The future is, without a doubt, bright."
]]>The acclaimed book chronicles the work of the Frontline news agency, founded by journalists Rory Peck, Peter Jouvenal, Vaughan Smith and Nicholas Della Casa.
First published in 2005, the latest edition features a foreword from BBC world affairs editor John Simpson, who writes that the book is “the history of a moment in television news, which was brief enough, yet so bright it will stay in the minds of everyone who experienced it, like staring into a torch-beam on a dark night.”
Frontline Television’s reporters were motivated to document the true horrors of war and courageously went where other news organisations feared to tread. Risking everything to show the truth, they travelled the world’s most dangerous places in a quest to live life to the full, a quest some paid for with their lives. (Two of FTV’s founders, Peck and Della Casa, are now dead: killed in action.)
Between them, this colourful collection of adventurers and ex-army officers captured some of the key images at the end of the Cold War, and the fractured, fissile world which emerged.
The way they lived and died was an anachronism; they were eccentrics who might have been happier fighting wars in the British Empire a century before. Instead, they brought back pictures from the worst war zones the late twentieth century had to offer. And it suited them.
For the men of Frontline, how things were done was as important as what was done. All four of the founders, and those they recruited, shared the same panache, wit, and disdain for authority, planning the next trip to the Hindu Kush in the bar of the Ritz.
Their story reads like a latter-day Rudyard Kipling adventure. But while their lives may have been lived as if they were still playing the Great Game, they also cared passionately about their work and the truth it conveyed.
Part Bang Bang Club, part Flashman, Frontline is the gripping story of lives lived to the full in some of the worst places on earth.
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Praise for Frontline:
“Loyn does a terrific job. His methodical, journalistic approach is perfect for grounding out a yarn that nobody would dare make up” Time Out – Book of the Week
“A gripping story, splashed with devil-may-care colour and scarcely credible tales of derring-do” The Guardian
“Girls, booze, physical hardship and flying bullets ... Loyn keeps his narrative rattling along nicely” Daily Mail
“Barnstorming non-fiction. Every page is full of the kind of chutzpah, grit and valour that makes your own nine-to-five seem gut-wrenchingly futile.” Arena
“Hugely entertaining ... the nearest thing to a Victorian adventure romp of empire against a background of fine marijuana, ‘Hotel California’, and the wheep and chirrup of satellite technology” Literary review
]]>But it is Semipalatinsk that demonstrates the truly destructive potential of nuclear, and its ability to wipe out humanity through the gradual generational degradation of DNA, rendering life as we know it unviable and so, ultimately, extinct.
Semipalatinsk was the site of the Soviet Union’s foray into the future, with the detonation of almost 500 nuclear bombs. As I found when I made the long journey as a correspondent for The Australian a few years ago, it is one of the bleakest places on the planet, on the northern Kazakh steppe near the borders of Siberia and Russia. Since 2007 it has been called Semey.
The Semipalatinsk Test Site, also known as Ground Zero, was secret until the USSR’s collapse in 1991, though of course the Soviets could not hide the fact that they were exploding nuclear bombs. They just kept denying it.
The people of Semipalatinsk were not warned about the 340 underground and 116 atmospheric bombs exploded between 1946 and 1986. They could only wonder why the sky regularly turned red, the roofs of their houses blew off, and massive mushroom clouds hid the sun.??
Nor did they know why their children and their farm animals were being born with two heads, or their legs on backwards, or no legs. Or with their spines exposed. Or with tiny heads. Or with huge heads. Or when their kin became psychotic. Or when their headaches became so unbearable they could only bash their heads against the wall. Or when lesions grew on their bodies and faces, making them look like a casting call for The Elephant Man.?
Old glass cabinets in a university laboratory overlooking a garden strewn with toppled Lenin statues display hundreds of specimen bottles, each containing a pickled foetus - some species indeterminate -- hidden from the Soviet authorities, who made it illegal to preserve deformities such as these.??
The most horrific is a baby boy. He's huge, perhaps 10 pounds, and bonny, the baby any mother would be thrilled to hold. Except for one thing: in the middle of his forehead is just one, huge eye. This is Cyclops.?
Three generations in Semipalatinsk are witness to the true fallout of radioactivity. A lovely woman with bad skin took me to orphanages and hospitals and rehabilitation centres, introducing me to the deformed, to doctors, to women’s groups fighting for help from their government, to scientists trying to patch together what knowledge they could from the documentation that had not been destroyed by the fleeing Soviets.
I said that she seemed lucky to be in good health. She looked at me with incredulity. I have 15 different types of cancer, she said. You can’t see my illness, but that doesn’t mean I am not suffering. No one has escaped.
Japan has had Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Japanese scientists and charities are active in Semipalatinsk. As they struggle with Fukushima, the Japanese are perhaps the only people on earth who truly understand the extent of the horror they are battling.
]]>Conversation among decision makers who gather in London's private dining rooms has turned from Afghanistan to Libya. Over rare beef and fine wine, they voice concern that Western governments have again embarked on a rushed military adventure, in a far away place, on a vague premise, with no clearly defined goal, and no apparent exit point. What is the end game, ask some of the most influential men and women in the country. Do our leaders know what they are getting us in to? Have they learned nothing?
Afghanistan, it seems, has become the object lesson.
David Miliband, Britain's former foreign secretary, has joined the chorus singing from the hymn sheet of a political solution to the Afghanistan conflict, a new recruit to the latter-day wise who claim, after ten years and two-and-a-half thousand body bags, to recognise a military quagmire when they see one.
Afghanistan is set to become the 'forgotten war', overshadowed in the public and political consciousness by events in the Middle East. Nothing could be worse for the Afghan people, exhausted as they are by war, poverty, corruption, and decades of being fought over by the well-meaning and the venal, each equally difficult to determine from the other.
The road to hell is paved with Afghans’ patience, endurance and hopes for peace, and recent shocking events in Mazar-i-Sharif - where United Nations employees were set upon and murdered by a mob - should be seen as a warning that progress in the margins of a bureaucrat’s ledger is meaningless to a man who cannot go to bed at night secure in the knowledge that his door will not be kicked down, by either side of those fighting for his heart and mind.
US Army Lt General William Caldwell, arguably the most important man in Afghanistan today, recently breezed through London to tell anyone who would listen about his efforts to build Afghanistan’s security forces. Withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan depends on the success of General Caldwell’s mission to build an army that can keep insurgents at bay, and a police force that can fairly enforce laws backed by a credible judicial system.
The mob attack in Mazar, where the police seemed incapable of controlling the situation, showed there is still a long way to go. But General Caldwell does not have the luxury of failure as an option. And London’s chattering classes, who accept the commitment to Afghanistan is a fait accompli, want him to succeed. They just don’t have the stomach for another war with no end.
Picture credit: United States Marine Corps Official Page via a creative commons licence.
]]>There is not much to do in Midan Tahrir for the revolution, now less than ever. This is what most of the Egyptian opposition forces seem to realise in these dramatic days of chaotic protests. The Midan falling back into some kind of surreal ‘normality’ is certainly not the result of the Army’s violent, ruthless comeback, neither of a loss of revolutionary fervour by the forces of the opposition. It is a sign, hopefully of change.
On Thursday morning, soldiers and volunteers in downtown Cairo were planting flowers in the Midan and painting walls and pavements in white and black, as if covering the written signs of a country in uprising would make people forget about how much they have achieved so far.
Last Saturday, two desperate parents wandered crying around Tahrir for hours, showing people a bloodstained piece of carton carrying the dimm el-shaheed, the blood of their martyred son killed in the Midan on Friday, while the Army was reportedly shooting in the air in order to frighten what they still want people to think is only a small group of violent dawdlers. Will I ever forget those crying faces?
Sharif, one of the shebab temporarily opposing protests in Tahrir, says there are three different kinds of people:
There are people who work for the revolution, people who work against the revolution, and people who sit at home, watching television and believing whatever the news says.
One of the Army’s strongest points lies in the power of a dialectic, enforced by media still subjugated by a corrupted political system, aiming to divide those in favour of the revolution, keeping them at home and turning them into sceptical observers from afar. They say the people in Tahrir are baltageya, professional thugs whose job is to throw the country into anarchy and chaos, occasionally selling hashish during breaks.
The baltageya is indeed an actor on stage, but is a double-edged one. Even two inveterate supporters of the baltageya like Hosni Mubarak and former Interior Minister Habib el-Adly committed their last, fatal mistake by ordering the opening of state prisons on 28 January. The sight of “pro-Mubarak” supporters riding camels and storming into the crowd to beat peaceful demonstrators made protesters squeeze up.
Even those who already made up their minds and wanted to allow Mubarak to stay until September elections, suddenly found themselves shouting for his ouster. Almost three months after those events, the baltageya‘s double-edge is still a highly destabilising factor in the country, fully exploited by those reactionary forces willing to thwart the country’s path towards political normalisation.
But this is not enough. As a small number of Army officials joined demonstrators and refused to take off their uniforms last Friday, many protesters smelled a rat. This intrusion disclosed a glaring sign of division within the Army, but at the same time it legitimised the intervention of security forces.
After seeing them shooting in the crowd and clearing out the Midan, many protesters still fool themselves into thinking that the Army is the people’s only guardian, and that those who cleared out Tahrir were mercenaries paid by Mubarak’s personal friend and business Ibrahim Kamel. Even in this case, where was the Army when the people needed protection? Egyptians have to realise that the time - if there was ever one - when the people and the Army were iid wahda (one hand) are now definitely over, and handing over power to a civil presidential council is the only solution for the time being.
Here we come to the point. The recent escalation of violence is a sign that the Army’s divide and rule agenda is being successfully put forward. This urged the opposition to wisely call for a suspension of demonstrations, and for the cancellation of Friday’s milioneya, the march of the million calling for the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) to step down. This does not mean that revolutionary forces are satisfied with the Mubaraks’ or Kamel’s – fake – prosecution. “Our revolution is not against Mubarak,” one of the activists involved in the movement for the ‘Protection of the Revolution’ reminded me. “Our protests aim at a reversal of the 1952 coup d’état and the institution of a civil Presidential council”. Indeed, Field Marshall Mohammed Hussein Tantawi is a military man, like Mohammed Naguib, Gamal Abdel Naser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak before him.
When I asked an Egyptian friend for a definition of the baltageya, he told me “a baltagy is either someone who pushes you to do something you do not want to do or someone who prevents you from doing what you want to do.” Suspending protests this Friday means avoiding that open (and suicidal) confrontation the Army has been looking for since they mingled with those violent enemies of the people’s rightful demands.
The revolution has been played out in many other fields, but Midan Tahrir still remains the battleground for the protesters’ main political demands. Celebrating a new Friday of protests with an empty Midan Tahrir amounts to an important step towards the realisation of the revolutionary agenda, and shows that the revolution is gaining ground on, and understanding of, an increasingly chaotic panorama, remaining loyal at the same time to its peaceful character and refusing to bow heads in front of the SCAF’s cosmetic adjustments.
Davide Morandini is an Italian freelance photojournalist based in Cairo, Egypt. He reports for the Egyptian online newspaper Bikya Masr, and his personal blog is called caironichles.
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