On Their Own   

The Pentagon’s secrecy policy has not only severely restricted access to unfiltered information about the war in Afghanistan, it has helped create an especially risky environment for the working press.

It hadn't been a particularly good day. It got off to a bad start when a blustery warlord upset with his press reviews thundered at us that he would do something obscene to all Western journalists and then throw them in prison. It got worse that afternoon when some Taliban sympathizers in another village plotted to take us hostage to win the freedom of their captured commander. It turned horrific when a Canadian colleague of ours soon afterward was seriously injured in a grenade attack apparently perpetrated by the would-be kidnappers. And it seemed to stop, frozen in time, for a few chilling moments later that night when the sky just in front of us lit up with the firecrackers of mortar shelling that sent us diving into ditches.

Fortunately, after all this, we thought we had somewhere to go for help. We were just outside of Gardez in eastern Afghanistan covering the battle of Shahikot. Unable to return to town after our convoy was shelled, we raced immediately to the nearby American military base. That's when we realized in this friend-or-foe land that we had too many of the latter and not enough of the former. The U.S. Special Forces refused to take us in, leaving us to spend the night in our cars outside the base and hope that no enemy fighters would find us in their crosshairs again.

Or for that matter any friendly fighters either. The U.S.-trained and commanded Afghan soldiers guarding the American base ordered us to remain inside the cars through the long, bitterly cold night because otherwise they might mistake us for attackers.

If you get out of the cars, they warned, we'll shoot.

So goes the relationship between the U.S. armed forces and the war correspondents covering the action in Afghanistan. More so than during any major war in American history, journalists here have been left to their own devices, left literally and figuratively to take their chances in freezing cars outside the protection of the U.S. military cocoon. The Pentagon's secrecy policy has not only severely restricted access to unfiltered information about the prosecution of the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda (see "Blacked Out," March), it has helped create an especially risky environment for the working press.

Eight journalists have died by violence since the Afghan war began, more than in any of the U.S. military actions of the 1990s, from the Persian Gulf War to Somalia, from Bosnia to Kosovo. Many more have been wounded, kidnapped, robbed, detained and threatened. Kathleen Kenna, a courageous correspondent from the Toronto Star, had the back of her right thigh and buttock shredded like so much ground beef the day we were threatened in March. "My wife is dying, my wife is dying," her husband, who was traveling with her, called out after she was hit, and he was very nearly right. She remains in bad shape in a Vancouver hospital.

Covering war is inherently dangerous, and there's no way to say for sure whether the correspondents killed in Afghanistan would have lived had the U.S. military been more cooperative with the press. But the lack of an alternative has forced reporters operating in Afghanistan to travel on their own into perilous areas and volatile situations without at least the guidance of, say, the Marine officers who took reporters with them to liberate Kuwait a decade ago.

That was clear when my wife and fellow Washington Post correspondent, Susan B. Glasser, covered the battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan last December. In any past war, she might have accompanied American troops to an area presumably safe enough to take journalists. At Tora Bora, no such invitations were forthcoming from the U.S. military, so she went to the front lines with Afghan commanders. But after 23 years of war, the Afghan concept of safe is a little different than the American, and so three times she and her colleagues found themselves under fire in areas they had been told were secure.

Indeed, relying on the Afghans to define safe is a little warped. During the fighting in Maidan Shahr south of Kabul shortly after the capital fell in November, artillery shells landed uncomfortably close to a group of us who immediately took cover. The Afghan soldiers simply laughed at our skittishness and for the next hour mischievously whistled to mimic incoming rounds just to watch us jump. Virtually every reporter working here has a similar story.

Journalists do what they can to protect themselves. Most research problem areas thoroughly before entering and often seek escorts who know the region. Some wear flak jackets and helmets. A few hire their own gunmen. A CNN team arrived in Gardez with a small army of Afghan fighters led by a former British Special Air Service officer who methodically saw to the group's security.

Most Americans have no idea how isolated correspondents are from the U.S. military. In six months of covering the war, I had never spoken to an American soldier in Afghanistan until that day we were shelled in March. Friends back home were shocked to learn this. "I just assumed 50 percent of your information came from Americans," said one, a reporter who follows the news closely. More like zero percent.

What little interaction there is has often been strained. Belatedly and grudgingly, the U.S. military began allowing reporters to visit its bases in Kandahar and Bagram, though only after the Taliban had fallen, and it finally began taking a few reporters along after most of the action at Shahikot was over. But the hospitality expires easily. Craig Nelson, a special correspondent from Cox News Service, was thrown off the Kandahar base and declared "PNG" (persona non grata) because he reported that Australian special forces troops were there. E.A. Torriero of the Chicago Tribune and a British colleague were forced to lie on the ground spread-eagle by U.S.-allied Australian troops for daring to wander into an area around Gardez where they were not wanted. "It's tough to tell who is the enemy and who is not," one of the soldiers told Torriero.

That's the problem when the U.S. military won't work with reporters covering a war. One of the most outrageous incidents involved a colleague from the Post. Doug Struck, a veteran foreign correspondent, drove to the Khost region in February to check out reports that an unmanned CIA drone had hit three al Qaeda fighters with a missile--one of them described as a possible Osama bin Laden lookalike. Struck was barred from getting closer to the site of the incident by armed U.S. soldiers who, when asked what would happen if he went forward anyway, told him that he would be shot. The Pentagon later disputed his account, not realizing that, unlike Afghan villagers with unknown credibility, Struck is awfully hard to challenge. Hardly a hotdog, Struck has earned a reputation as a reporter of unimpeachable integrity, a real solid citizen who would never exaggerate for effect.

Such policies profoundly influence the information made available to the American public back home. If readers were to rely solely on the version of reality presented at official briefings every day, they might never know about civilian casualties, mistaken raids or military setbacks of any kind.

At Shahikot, Afghan soldiers told reporters that the opening "surprise attack" had been a disaster for the U.S.-led force, that al Qaeda clearly knew they were coming and began pelting them with deadly mortar fire before the American side got off the first shot. The U.S. and Afghan forces retreated and were forced to shift their strategy to bring in more air power. The Pentagon, however, denied for days that it had suffered a defeat.

Likewise, an Afghan source in Gardez told us two days after that initial battle that the first American casualty had died from friendly fire. The Pentagon did not reveal that for weeks afterward, even though Gen. Tommy Franks, the chief commander for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, later said he had suspected from the moment it happened that his own troops had hit the U.S. soldier.

And without reporters examining the battlefield after the fighting at Shahikot was over, there might be no reason to question Pentagon claims of killing 700 or 800 enemy fighters. A daylong tour of Shahikot by journalists after the battle ended found just three corpses; undoubtedly there were plenty more, probably in the caves, but no evidence emerged to suggest carnage on the order described by U.S. military commanders. Their own Afghan allies said the losses inflicted on the enemy were far lower.

Our own day of close calls came in March, two days after U.S. and Afghan soldiers launched Operation Anaconda against presumed al Qaeda and Taliban hideouts in the craggy mountains around Shahikot. Scott Johnson from Newsweek and I had rushed to Gardez, the nearby provincial capital, to find out as much as possible. No Americans there would talk to us. So we headed off to the controversial local warlord, a chest-thumping fellow named Bacha Khan.

Khan is the straight-from-central-casting picture of a warlord, a stout man with a wide face, fierce glower and single eyebrow over both eyes. He is considered ruthless and has been blamed for misleading American troops into bombing a convoy of his adversaries in December by pretending they were al Qaeda fighters.

On this particular morning, he was furious that the Western media (by that, he really meant BBC radio, which is the only media he gets) was quoting the governor of the province instead of him--the same governor installed in power by the government in Kabul to replace Khan. He had worked himself into a full lather about such addle-minded reporters.

"I'll fuck them all!" he screamed about journalists. "I'll put them in prison!"

We hoped he did not mean us, and, fortunately, he let us go after securing a blood oath to instruct our colleagues in the press corps that he was the only real power in the area.

From there, we drove to a town closer to the fighting, a wisp of a village called Zurmat. By this point, we had been joined by Stephen Coates of Agence-France Presse, and together we interviewed a dozen local fighters who insisted there were no al Qaeda terrorists in the mountains around Shahikot.

But there was something disconcerting about these men. They complained that their commander, Naim Farooqi, and a half-dozen of his fighters had been arrested unfairly by American soldiers. Asked for his name, one of the fighters telling us this started to introduce himself as "Mullah" until his friend poked him and told him not to tell us that. As we began to disengage from the armed men, our translator overheard two of them sitting on the wall.

"These [expletives] put our boss in jail and six of our friends," one hissed at the other. "Why shouldn't we keep them as hostages?"

The other liked the idea. "What are you waiting for? Are you waiting for instructions?"

We certainly didn't need any; we decided to leave. We moved quickly to our cars. While we worried that the gunmen would resolve to act on their instinct, my car wouldn't start and it had to be push-started. We raced out of town.

Not much later, though, a car with the two men on the wall caught up with us and approached Johnson, who was waiting for other cars in our convoy to follow. They suggested we go with them to a village where we could cover the battle better. Johnson wisely said no and the gunmen turned around and sped back toward town.

Soon another car containing Western journalists, including Kenna, came under attack. Kenna had not been with us while we were interviewing in Zurmat and did not know about the threat. We were well ahead of her on the road by this point. But suddenly, Star photographer Bernard Weil, sitting in the front left seat, noticed an Afghan man running toward their car, cocking his arm back to throw something. The back of the car exploded, tearing into Kenna, who was sitting in the back seat.

"I've been hit, I've been hit!" she called out.

Coates had paused by the side of the road not far ahead and saw the blast. Realizing Westerners were in trouble, he turned his van around and headed back to see the horror. One of the translators lent his scarf to help bind the wound and slow the bleeding. Then the men helped her to Coates' van and they raced back to Gardez.

Gardez is the kind of town that anywhere else might be considered a primitive throwback to the 14th century. In Afghanistan it's a midsize metropolis, with a bazaar to buy fruit and vegetables, plenty of dirt roads and a cloud of dust that never goes away. The hospital, to say the least, is misnamed. It is a cold, dreary, lifeless shell of a building with no medical equipment to speak of, just a few cots where the unlucky struggle to overcome the myriad ailments that afflict people here. An injury of Kenna's magnitude far overwhelmed its meager capabilities.

Johnson and I rushed to the U.S. base south of Gardez and pleaded for help. A few U.S. Special Forces soldiers led by a man named Mike agreed to assist, despite the fact that they had lost seven of their compatriots in helicopters ambushed earlier that day. There's no doubt in my mind they saved Kenna's life. Her friends and husband had been planning to drive her to Kabul in the dark, probably a three- or four-hour trek through the mountain passes; by that point she was already having trouble breathing. The American soldiers instead put her on an airplane with one of their own surgeons and flew her to Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, where they had the sort of medical facilities needed to stabilize her.

As it turned out, though, that was as far as they were willing to go. The soldiers had told Johnson, Coates, Weil and me to wait outside the base until they returned from the airfield where they evacuated Kenna. Hours passed and we found ourselves caught in the dark after curfew.

The Americans sent a car of their U.S.-trained Afghan soldiers to escort us back into Gardez. We all piled into our vehicles and began driving the couple miles back to town.

Suddenly, a series of lights that looked like the flashes from a Fourth of July sparkler erupted perhaps 100 yards in front of us. Explosions and a smattering of semiautomatic gunfire punctuated the light show. Mortar shells were showering down in front of us. "Go back!" I shouted at my driver. "Go back!"

But it was too late for that. The Afghan guards in the front car threw open their doors and ran for cover. We did the same. Johnson hurtled into a ditch, I found a low wall to crouch behind. In the darkness around us, we had no idea where each other was, much less who the men on the ground next to us were. But the headlights were still beaming out from the cars, offering an easy target for hostile gunners.

"Turn off the lights!" the Afghan soldiers screamed. "Turn off the lights!"

Our drivers, incredibly, complied and ran back to their cars to douse the headlights, despite the obvious danger. After a few minutes, everything calmed down. The shelling ceased, the gunfire stopped. Unsure what else to do, we hopped back in the cars to head back to the U.S. base, headlights still off. Once again, mine had to be push-started.

Within minutes after our return, the Americans had a helicopter up in the air training a spotlight on the area. The Special Forces soldiers were afraid that the base might be under attack. The search revealed nothing, but the soldiers said they could not let us into the base to stay the night. "You've got too many Afghans," one explained, meaning our translators and drivers. So the U.S. soldiers decided to try sending us back into the city again despite the mortar attack, this time dispatching more Afghan fighters to go with us.

"Even if they fire again, don't turn back," an Afghan-American soldier instructed my translator in Dari.

But the Afghan fighters had other ideas. As soon as the American soldiers retreated back into the base, their Afghan trainees began to balk. Going back into the city was too dangerous, they said, no matter what their American commanders had ordered them to do. Finally, they agreed to go if we insisted. "If you're ready to commit suicide," one of them said, "then we're ready to die with you."

Needless to say, we weren't. But the Americans weren't about to let us into the base either, leaving us nowhere to go. Appeals by our home offices in the United States to the Pentagon drew only nonresponsive replies from Victoria Clarke, the chief spokeswoman, who made clear to my editors that American correspondents in Afghanistan were not the military's responsibility.

We hunkered down in our cars, staring out into the pitch-black night, warding off subfreezing temperatures and wondering who might be lurking nearby. None of us slept much, if at all. Only after hours of negotiations did the Pentagon finally agree to let us into the safety of the base as long as we did not write about it – or so one of Johnson's editors was told. By that point, though, it was already dawn. We had survived the night.

Some of the guards approached the cars. We assumed they were there to deliver the message we had heard by telephone, that the Americans were finally ready to let us in. Wrong again.

"Go!" the lead guard ordered. But what about the invitation to go inside? "Just go!" he ordered. "Go!"

And so we did, off on our own, again.