Reporter
You Are There
I spent a month in Peshawar, Pakistan, thousands of miles from my home and family in Austin, covering the war for National Public Radio. Here's what I saw.
AS WE WALKED BRISKLY THROUGH the narrow streets of Peshawar, Pakistan, toward my first "Death to America" rally, my translator, Hasan, called over his shoulder, "Stay close to me. If anyone asks, tell them you're Canadian. And don't worry, the demonstrators are well behaved—most of the time."
It was my third day in the dusty, teeming city that became the best listening post during the first weeks of the war in neighboring Afghanistan. I normally cover Texas and the Southwest, including the Mexican border, as the Austin-based correspondent for National Public Radio. From mid-October to mid-November, NPR had gerrymandered my beat to include the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. "Promise me you'll be safe" was the last thing my wife, Ginny, told me at the Austin airport. But at this moment, I was wading into a sea of bearded faces roaring, "Crush, crush, USA!" like a high school football taunt, while I tried to keep sight of Hasan's bobbing head as he glided through the crowd.
A few weeks earlier, I had been in New York City interviewing rescue workers at Ground Zero who uttered the name Osama bin Laden as though it were a strain of hemorrhagic fever. Here in Peshawar, he was a folk hero. "Osama, the Great Mujahid [holy warrior] of Islam" read a $2 T-shirt for sale on the street.
Hasan and I finally found a spot at the rear of the six thousand chanting protesters. These weekly demonstrations are mostly street theater—they provide an outlet for Muslims to blow off steam. Nonetheless, I kept an appreciative eye on a nearby squad of riot policemen holding bamboo batons. At six foot seven, I've stuck out in crowds all my adult life, but at this moment I could not recall a time when I felt more uncomfortably conspicuous. The sensation was heightened when a flush-faced student hoisted a homemade sign directly over my head that read "Americans Are Uncivilized Beasts and Shameless Hellions."
"Hasan, tell this man to take his sign down," I said.
"Just ignore it," he replied.
"Then tell him I really like his sign and I'd like to have it."
"What?"
"Ask him if he would give me his sign as a gift."
Maybe the student wanted to show me he was neither beast nor hellion like my countrymen, or maybe he thought I needed to meditate further on his damning message at home. Whatever the reason, he rolled up the placard and handed it to me with a smile.
"You are our brother, no problem," he said, extending his hand. "You are our friend, no problem."
So began my introduction to the Pashtuns of western Pakistan, a people whose crustiness is matched only by their generosity of spirit. Think West Texans with Old Testament beards.
THE HUNDREDS OF FOREIGN REPORTERS in Pakistan left two things in short supply: a good fixer, someone who spoke the language and knew the local culture; and a decent hotel room. Luckily I had both.
My fixer was Hasan Khan, a Pashtun journalist who was so blond and blue-eyed that he was often mistaken for one of us. He seemed to know someone everywhere we went, from the plainclothes police lieutenant at the protest rally to the expert sandalmaker on the road to Islamabad. And his gentle, self-deprecating humor was a welcome antidote to the zealotry all around us. "Hasan must go pray now," he said sheepishly one Friday, "or my mother will call me a bad Muslim."
In covering a war, the hacks ideally situate themselves as close to the action as possible but not so close that they can't get cocktails after deadline. In the first five weeks of this war, that place was Peshawar's Pearl Continental Hotel. At any hour of the day, the lobby—which is decorated like a Raj-era Holiday Inn—was full of fixers, hustlers, sullen camera crews, and well-groomed intelligence operatives. While a hellish tape loop of the syrupy sixties instrumental "Love Is Blue" played on the hotel sound system, the spooks slouched in overstuffed couches and eavesdropped on other people's conversations. When their nosiness became too obvious, they'd suddenly discover a fascinating ceiling tile.
One of the main assets of the PC, as the hotel is called, is that it has Peshawar's only open bar—though "open" is subject to interpretation. A sign next to the door reads "Non-Muslims & Foreigners Only." (When I asked the bartender who the clientele was, he said contemptuously, "Christians and Sikhs.") Nightly, the hacks came to this smoke-filled chamber to ruminate over the day's news and drink Pakistan's answer to Pearl Light, a watery beer called Murree's. But no one complained because we knew what it was like on the front. In the Afghan capital of Islamabad, a soulless city populated by bureaucrats and diplomats, the Western networks were paying the Marriott $850 a day to broadcast live shots from the rooftop. On the southern frontier, in the tense border city of Quetta, correspondents were forbidden to leave their hotels without an armed escort.
But nothing compared to Northern Afghanistan. My NPR colleague Annie Garrels said she and other journalists slept on cushions in mud-brick "guest houses," washed in water from an iron barrel, and had their pockets picked by the Northern Alliance at every opportunity. Remember the scenes of bored Alliance fighters firing their assault rifles over the parapets at no one in particular? The "bang-bang" was bought and paid for by TV. Reporters who wanted to cover the northern front paid $600 to go in—they traveled seventeen hours a day for three days in a Russian jeep that crept over the brutal Hindu Kush mountains—and then $1,200 to $2,000 to get out. And the talcumlike dust got into everything, killing recording equipment and turning hair stiff. "I could mold it into some quite fanciful 'dos," Annie said. "We called it Afghan hair spray."
THE ONLY TEXAS JOURNALIST I CONNECTED with in Pakistan was Lee Hancock, of the Dallas Morning News. We met one night at an Italian restaurant in Islamabad that discreetly served bottles of wine to anyone who asked, and we dined with two Delhi-based journalists who were curious about life back in Texas. Lee told them about paranoia in Tyler—that a federal agent she knows in the East Texas city has been getting reports of Pakistanis doing nothing more suspicious than running a convenience store. I told them about compassion in San Antonio—how the Saudi radiologist who came home after thirteen days of interrogation by the FBI was met by an outpouring of friendship and concern from his neighbors.
Lee and I marveled at the circumstances that brought us together. It turned out that she and I had both had premonitions that something big was going to happen last fall. We figured it was time for another Texas kook to erupt, someone like David Koresh or Richard McLaren. Who could have predicted we'd meet eleven time zones from Waco while covering the greatest manhunt in history, a story that would dwarf the Branch Davidian conflagration and the Republic of Texas standoff?
AT TIMES, THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11 and the assignment in Pakistan seemed to be distant and unrelated. The street scene was mind-bending. Pelotons of bicyclists sped past with their shalwar kameezes, pajamalike garments worn by Pakistani men, fluttering behind them. Haulers rode their donkey carts standing like charioteers. Camel caravans plodded along the shoulders. The freight trucks were hand-painted works of rolling folk art that could put Houston's Art Cars to shame. And every other vehicle was a rickety rickshaw taxi that invariably had one of two images painted on its tailgate: a grimacing image of a Pashtun action hero or a pair of seductive eyes, Pakistan's version of the chrome-babe silhouette on truck mud flaps.
"Why the eyes?" I asked Hasan.
"That's all we see of a woman and so that's what attracts us," he said in another of his patient tutorials. "For me, Muslim women create suspense. Western women show everything to a man. There's no suspense."
In parts of Peshawar, you're lucky to see even the eyes. The city is more conservative than most in Pakistan because of its proximity to the ultratraditional Pashtun tribal areas along the border. Here, women don't work outside the home, and it's common for them to don the same head-to-toe burkas that TV viewers recognize in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. One day I sat down with a group of teenage Afghan exiles to find out what it's like living under this sacklike garment. "On hot days we sweat under the burka—it is so hot it takes your breath away," said a fourteen-year-old from Kabul. "Sometimes we trip over it and hurt ourselves. We cannot see our footsteps unless we bend over."
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