Notes from a new war zone

>> A Montreal journalist left for Asia on October 5. His first report, exclusive to the Mirror, looks at a shaky Pakistan from the ground up

by KEN HECHTMAN

ISLAMABAD--Oct. 9 It's 12 noon and I'm walking down Embassy Road, making my way from Step Two to Step Three of the The Visa Extension Dance. All foreign correspondents arrive here with at best a week to go on a 10-day visa and have to apply for a 30-day extension before they can start working. This is a three- to four-day process that requires getting a recommendation in one office, an approval in a second, a voucher in a third, paying for it in a fourth and stamping the passport in a fifth, with each office located between two and 10 miles from the last.

Doing this much walking around gives a pretty good feel for how the tension has ratcheted up between the day before the bombing and the day after. Two days ago there were half-squad bivouacs every couple of blocks in the residential neighbourhoods. Today the soldiers are dug in behind sandbags and pickup trucks with mounted machine guns patrol the streets. Something odd strikes me about the guns--they have no gunshields. They're not designed to be used against anybody who can shoot back. This is crowd control, Third-World-style.

Mind you, we're doing pretty well in Islamabad. In Peshawar, the cops are using tear gas to clear the streets. In Quetta, the buckle on the Koran Belt, the army is doing the same with artillery. Everyone whose skin is lighter than a brown paper bag is being escorted to the airport by armed guards. Then again, good times in this city still mean that any private home where a westerner would even consider spending the night has an armed guard outside 24-7.

I'm taking this particular route so I can drop off yet another visa application, this one at the Afghan (Taliban) embassy. The Talibs have been putting on the stone-faced, gruff-voiced routine, folding their arms and generally intimidating the hell out of the Western journalists. In the consular section, a gravel-covered courtyard shaded by a corrugated tin roof, a tall, skinny kid in a black turban brusquely handed me a form and grunted, "You fill out form, come back two weeks."

Two weeks? This guy is either kidding me or else he doesn't watch CNN.

I remind him, "A lot can happen in two weeks. Your foreign office might be in a tent in the mountains by then." All six Talibs in the yard laughed out loud, the ice was broken and the stone-face masks came off.

After that we got to talking about where I wanted to go in Afghanistan, what I wanted to write about and why none of them were allowed to say anything to journalists. I also found Dindar, who was the embassy computer tech and webmaster of www.afghan-ie.com. (Don't bother looking for it. Mullah Omar ordered it offline on Sept. 11 for reasons best known to himself.)

Dindar wasn't allowed to tell me anything about the Jihad Lands (the two-dozen hotspots, from Algeria to the Philippines, where Al Qaeda has provided weapons, training and leadership for Muslims under attack) volunteers--the main story I'm working on here--but when I told him my real job was database programming and invoked the International and Cross-Cultural Brotherhood of Computer Geeks, he introduced me to a Kashmiri journalist with contacts in the Kashmiri Mujahideen.

Public relations for fanatics

As I was leaving, they announced a press conference on the lawn later that afternoon, so I decided to hang around. The journalists call these events "Taliban Garden Parties" and in this day of spin-doctors and managed news it's almost refreshing to see the least media-savvy government on the planet in action.

As they do with any other undertaking, they begin in the name of Allah the compassionate, the merciful. The ambassador reads a wooden prepared statement, translated into English with far too much vocabulary and far too little grammar. No protestation of their innocence is ever too strained; no condemnation of American evil too forceful. Afterwards, the press asks rhetorical questions and the ambassador gives non-sequitur answers until someone succeeds in annoying him, at which point the conference is concluded.

Highlights:

"We condemn also the terrorist acts of Britain and note that Britain has attacked us without success twice before." (Three times, 1841, 1878 and 1919, actually, but who's counting.)

"These baseless accusations are a pretext by the U.S., who covets our natural resources." (Which resources would those be, the sheep or the rocks?)

Brian Hurst, former personal assistant to John and Yoko, offered to give peace a chance by going to Kabul and sitting on a target to discourage American bombing. Ambassador Zayeef declined the offer, cracking a joke that at this point neither side was likely to care about one more innocent bystander. (Well, it was funny when he said it; I guess you had to be there.)

"The only casualties [in Kabul Oct. 9] were four workers of the UN Demining Program who were engaged in removing the landmines placed in the previous invasion of Afghanistan."

That last one actually checks out. Luke Powell of the UN Demining Program explained that the UN compound was bombed because it had an old satellite dish in the back yard. "The thing hadn't worked in 12 years--we were using it as a planter for crawling vines. I told the Americans about it a year ago but they didn't listen. They never do. They prefer to believe their eyes in the sky than listen to the people on the ground."

Russian hardware and riots

ISLAMABAD--Oct. 11 I saw an Afghan street peddler with some binoculars on his table and remembered I was going to buy a pair back in Montreal but never did. Just to bust the guy's balls, I ask if he has a set of Soviet-issue Spetznasz night vision binoculars. Goddamned if he didn't open a footlocker under his table and pull out a pair. They're cast in tool-steel, they weigh a ton and probably eat a battery a day, but they're the real thing. I'm sorry now I didn't ask for a rocket launcher.

When I explain why I want the glasses, he says, "Okay, that's why you got that journalist's beard," referring to my two-week growth. These guys don't miss a thing.

He also explained why the Sunday Express's Yvonne Ridley and the French journalist got caught within five minutes of hitting the street in Kabul in their disguises. Apparently, the eyehole of a burqa limits your peripheral vision. If you grew up wearing one, you're used to it. If not, you're constantly looking from side to side and a six-year-old kid can spot you in a crowd.

Munir, who left Kabul 20 years ago, hopes that he can go home after this war but he's not closing his army surplus stand just yet. "Used to sell all Russian equipment, now come from Germany, everybody have. Maybe next year I sell American equipment."

The dinnertable gossip here says that half the district governors in the Koran Belt (the northern halves of Baluchistan and North-West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan) have banned religious demonstrations, while the other half are either leading them or keeping very, very quiet. And nobody knows WTF is going on in Quetta. The airport is closed. The train station burned to the ground. As of yesterday, the buses were running but apparently white journalists don't take buses.

DIY warfare and crowd control

I also heard that the gunsmiths of Darra Adam Khel, a town 25 miles south of Peshawar, have figured out how to duplicate the Stinger missile launcher. They can't do the warheads yet, the electronics are too complicated, but the launchers were always the bottleneck. Back in the 1980s the CIA figured they could limit the spread of the things by handing out a lot of missiles but only a few launchers. In the '90s, they bought back most of the launchers, but every village kept a few missiles buried under the poppy field--just in case.



A lot of buzz is coming out of the Tribal Areas in Baluchistan, especially Orakzai Agency. The 18 Orakzai tribes have agreed to a cease-fire in all inter-tribal feuds for the duration, something they never bothered to do while fighting the Russians or the British. They say the first contingent of 1,000 volunteers marched into Afghanistan today with homemade rocket launchers on their shoulders and young children tagging along behind. "This will be a good education for the next generation," said one Orakzai fighter to Network News International. "They were in danger of growing up soft."



Signs of increased tension in Islamabad: most mornings, I take a shortcut through Shakar Parrian Park to get downtown. As I passed the army camp a mile back in the woods from my hotel, I saw soldiers heading out in hastily converted unarmoured personnel carriers. They've ripped the canvas off a deuce-and-a-half truck, lashed a machine-gun to the rollbar with clothesline and braced it with a rolled-up bath towel. The police and soldiers holding the downtown intersections are wearing flak vests today. They didn't have those before and it's over 100 degrees in the sun--nobody's wearing body armour just because it looks butch.



Overheard from a CNN cameraman: "So the CNN cameraman says, 'How come a CNN producer can get into heaven and I can't?' and St. Peter says, 'That's God. He only thinks he's a CNN producer!'"