Opinion
Georgie Anne Geyer
FOREIGN JOURNALISTS FACE A DANGEROUS NEW WORLD
Fri Oct 30, 6:50 PM ET
WASHINGTON -- This fall, David Rohde, a young and intrepid journalist covering Afghanistan for The New York Times, told the dramatic story of his seven months in captivity with one of the most extreme Taliban militias -- from his capture in Afghanistan to months in miserable, gun-filled rooms in the Pakistani tribal areas.
If you really want to know what is going on in both of those countries, which dominate American attention today, you'll want to read more from this young journalist who looks more like a Midwestern graduate student than a foreign correspondent. You'll also find out how and why "political kidnapping" (my phrase) has become a favorite weapon of the violent outcasts of the world.
One of the first revelations in Rohde's writing comes when, after being kidnapped under the ruse of interviewing a Taliban leader in November 2008, he realizes, from street signs and traffic patterns, that he is being taken away from Afghanistan into North Waziristan. It is then that he comes to a dramatic realization: The Taliban state that had existed in Afghanistan until it was "destroyed" by the American invasion in 2001, still exists; it had only moved "a few miles eastward," into Waziristan.
Tellingly, the Pakistani soldiers and militias who were supposed to impose law and order there had instead agreed to ceasefire terms with radical Islamists that only more dramatically protected the Taliban. When a Pakistani military convoy passed, civilian drivers had to bring everyone out of their cars for cursory inspection, but Taliban drivers only had to get out themselves, thus allowing them to hide both foreign fighters and kidnap victims while the Pakistani troops turned a blind eye. Even the experienced David Rohde was aghast at this deception.
"The trip confirmed suspicions I had harbored for years as a reporter," Rohde wrote at one point. "The Haqqanis (the radical Islamist group that ruled this part of Pakistan) oversaw a sprawling Taliban mini-state in the tribal areas with the de facto acquiescence of the Pakistani military. The Haqqanis were so confident of their control of the area that they took me ... on a three-hour drive in broad daylight to shoot a scene for a video outdoors."
Yet when Rohde and his Afghan translator Tahir were able miraculously to escape last June by throwing a rope over the walls of the house while their captors were sleeping, and then walk, terrified, to the nearby Pakistani military base incongruously situated right in the middle of Taliban-run territory, it was some moderate Pakistani soldiers who got them out.
Thus we see a dramatic personal example of the contradictions that are at the heart of the American effort in that region and illustrate the degree to which our involvement in there seesaws between mortal danger and almost comical absurdity.
There are those of us who remember what it used to be like to be a correspondent, even in these insanely dangerous situations.
When I first went overseas in the 1960s, for instance, we correspondents were always doing stories similar David Rohde's that were also fraught with danger. I lived for a week in the mountains of Guatemala with Marxist guerrillas in 1966, was held by Palestinians as an "Israeli spy" in 1973, and was held by one faction or another (I never knew) of the "revolutionary" Angolans who suspected I had information, gleaned inside Angola, about a Soviet or Cuban coup in 1976.
I got out of the Angolan "problem" using some of the same tactics David Rohde did. I told my Angolan tormentors that I didn't get any information in Angola but that I had been "brainwashed by the state department" before leaving Washington and had been instructed exactly what to write. This pleased them immensely. It also taught me that you always feed your enemy's predilections.
By far the most famous and instructive story of the present times -- and the story that illustrates most horrendously the changes in the world for journalists and others -- is that of Daniel Pearl, the excellent writer for The Wall Street Journal who was captured by a group similar to the Haqqanis in the hellhole Pakistani seaside port of Karachi, and eventually brutally murdered by them.
In my days, one could often laugh afterward; today, there is no laughing. In my days, most militaries, and even most guerrilla groups, recognized journalists under the Geneva Accords as "non-combatants"; today, journalists are the new targets. Nobody is safe, not U.N. workers, or Red Cross nurses, or certainly foreign correspondents.
Many correspondents, like The New York Times' excellent Kabul bureau chief Carlotta Gall, simply do not try to interview the Taliban. One can understand why, but then, of course, we are left with less information on them.
Today's political kidnappings -- there are so many one cannot keep tally, and many of them are never announced -- are a function of the failed states, of the chaos engulfing so much of the world with radical Islam and other fanatic ideologies, and of the failure of developed countries to devise and agree upon adequate international police and military responses.
Meanwhile, we true non-combatants have become little more than the radicals' devices to show their power when they cannot reach our soldiers. Me? I guess I'm glad that this isn't my turn.
(Georgie Anne Geyer this fall received the Daniel Pearl Award from the Chicago Journalists Association for best exemplifying his spirit, courage and high journalism standards.)
