Transcript
Reporting From Afghanistan
November 17, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: I’m Bob Garfield. Violence and chaos. Missiles and landmines and trucks full of Taliban, in advance or in retreat it’s hard to tell. The war week in Afghanistan has led to extraordinary developments and, for the journalists trying to cover it, extraordinary challenges. Some reporters, including three killed last week by Taliban fire traveled in the company of Northern Alliance troops. Others have set out on their own. Among them the Los Angeles Times' Paul Watson, reporting veteran of 14 conflicts. He's been on the move with a photographer and an Afghan translator, commuting daily to the front lines. He speaks to us now via satellite phone from Kabul. Paul, welcome to On the Media!
PAUL WATSON: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:Now I understand that the combatants are busy fighting a war, but how are they regarding you? How - are they treating you specially? Are they cultivating you I guess is what I want to know.
PAUL WATSON: Well the, the-- the strange part about this is the Northern Alliance fighters, when you get out toward the front, especially when you go to areas that journalists haven't reached before, are just kind of glad to have the interest. They're happy that somebody cares about their front line. When you get higher up the ranks, you're back into a more traditional bureaucratic stonewalling, manipulative military machine.
BOB GARFIELD:Early in the war you did a piece where you described Northern Alliance troops performing military exercises and mock assaults that basically were staged for media consumption and after the foreign press turned off the cameras, the soldiers just sat around chatting and looking bored. How often have you found yourself the target of you know, a spin machine?
PAUL WATSON: Not as often as you would if you were hanging around a Western army to be frank. There's certainly some of it here, but, but it's quite easy to get to the real thing here. It, it, it's more difficult to get past the cultural divide. You know no matter how much time you spend with somebody here you are a non-Muslim foreigner who doesn't speak the language.
BOB GARFIELD:About two weeks ago you reported the presence of four Western men in Afghan head scarves and [LAUGHS] U.S. sportswear videotaping one of these staged Northern Alliance military maneuvers. When you asked them who they were, they refused to speak to you and they sped off in their van, and your story described the situation and other sightings of these men in some substantial detail which generated some vociferous letters to the L.A. Times. One reader wrote: Paul Watson has given our enemy enough information to make these men targets, and another one said: Get a clue. We're at war. Do you think you compromised some sort of military or intelligence operation?
PAUL WATSON: I have no idea whether I compromised it or I didn't, but I will take the writer's point. The United States is at war, and that demands the highest level of professional behavior on the part of intelligence services and the military. When I saw those people, I can tell you my first assumption was they can't possibly be carrying out intelligence because they're doing it in an amateur fashion. If I as a reporter without the slightest amount of effort can spot them, then an Afghan would do it before me, I can assure you of that. They stuck out like a sore thumb. And my purpose in writing that story was to tell people that if you want to win this thing, you have to pay attention and demand that your politicians and your military commanders and your civilian intelligence forces do it the right way.
BOB GARFIELD:This is a week when three foreign journalists were killed, not far from where you're reporting now. Would your mother prefer that you had gone into dentistry?
PAUL WATSON: [LAUGHS] I think, I think she gave up a long time ago. Look, I photographed in Somalia when that mission went wrong. The picture of the American airman being dragged by an angry Somali mob -- you know I, I got a lot more heat from people in, in the United States including people in military - probably foremost among them - because of that photograph, because people thought that somehow I had intended to denigrate a fallen American soldier and, worse, to undermine the mission there. Ever since that incident I, I, I've been determined to try to be in the place where it counts, because there's really no other purpose for doing what it is that I do here except to tell people the hard reality of it. A lot of these conflicts now have simply become entertainment. It's people standing on roofs, talking into cameras about things that are exploding. The, the, that's not the essence of a conflict. The essence of, of a conflict to me that people really need to know about is what are the consequences going to be? Is Afghanistan still going to be a cesspool of drugs and conflict and terrorism or is it going to be cleaned up? If people had asked that question ten years ago and had pain attention all the way along the line to the war that was going on here, I, I hate to say this, but the World Trade Center Towers would still be standing.
BOB GARFIELD: All right! Paul Watson, thank you very much!
PAUL WATSON: Thank you for having me.
BOB GARFIELD:Paul Watson is the South Asia bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times headquartered in New Delhi, India but speaking to us by satellite phone from Kabul, Afghanistan.