Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  Afterwards, however, we discovered that the sniper had checked into the very same motel. His car, a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice with a boot adapted into a makeshift sniper’s perch, was parked outside. As stakeholders in this story, we were all relieved and delighted when John Allen Muhammad and his 17-year-old accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, were arrested.

  As we learnt more of their biographies, the circumstantial evidence suggested that Muhammad had launched a one-man jihad. A member of the Nation of Islam, who had changed his name to Muhammad a month after 9/11, he had purchased his blue Chevrolet on the first anniversary of the attacks and openly expressed admiration for Osama bin Laden. Prosecutors, however, preferred the theory that he had intended eventually to murder his wife, and that the killings were designed to make her death look random.

  A week after his arrest, The New York Times carried a riveting piece about the interrogation of Muhammad, which suggested that he was about to explain ‘the roots of his anger’. But just as he was about to reveal all, the Feds came barging into the interview room on the orders of the Justice Department and the White House, thus halting him in his tracks. Alas, the story was complete fiction. Another Jayson Blair special.

  Beyond the Beltway, the most fun that I had in those final months came covering the New York blackout, which became both a testament to how firmly bin Laden had imprinted himself on the American mind and how quickly New Yorkers wanted to erase him from their thoughts. The lights went out as we were filming in the chamber of the United Nations Security Council and coincided with the precise moment that my cameraman, Chuck, bent down to plug his Klieg lights into a power socket behind the famous horseshoe conference table.

  Initially, we thought we were about to be the cause of some diplomatic incident, but a UN security guard wandered into the darkness to announce that the lights in the entire building were out. In the super-slow-motion way that these events tend to unfold, we all looked down at our mobile phones and saw that they had no service. Our immediate, unspoken reaction was ‘here we go again’. Then the Manhattan human telegraph cranked into action, and we realised that the lights were out all over New York. The fear everywhere was of another 9/11, that al-Qaeda was in the process of launching another attack on America’s eastern seaboard.

  What followed, however, was a carnival. As soon as word spread that the blackout was the result of nothing more sinister than a decrepit, third-world power grid, New Yorkers reverted to type. In merry defiance of the city’s bylaws, they held impromptu drinking parties on the sidewalks. With all the lights out, and the roads jammed with rush-hour traffic, many New Yorkers anointed themselves as traffic cops and leapt into the streets to help relieve the gridlock. In a city with an eye for the theatrical, the more exuberant the volunteer the more quickly they moved the traffic. Close to Central Park, Chuck and I ran into a balding Italian-American who was orchestrating the cars and trucks with the operatic exuberance of a conductor reaching the finale of Turandot at the Met.

  ‘You look like you’ve done this before,’ I ventured.

  ‘Well, I play a cop on TV,’ he shot back, as, with a snap of his wrist, he unleashed his white flag into the air. I should have recognised him. It was Matt Servitto, or, as he was better known, Special Agent Dwight Harris from The Sopranos.

  As I prepared to leave Washington, and to swap suits for boots in South Asia, I filed my wistful ‘how America has been transformed’ farewell despatches and pretty much followed the well-trod analytical path that the country had been overtaken in an instant by massive and irreversible change. Reshaped and distorted forever, from the erosion of civil liberties to the delays and irritations at airports, from the pervasive sense of gloom that America’s best days were yesterdays to the fear that hope would never fully reassert itself, the country seemed mired in a sloth of anxiety and negativity.

  While all that was true, I should have reflected more on the extent to which the country remained unaltered, how little it had changed. For a long time, one of the central tenets of new normalcy theory was that Washington and New York would come under intermittent, possibly even regular, attack. So, too, cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago. They would be targeted with an ever more sophisticated menu of terrorist weaponry and suffer even greater loss of life. The detonation of a dirty bomb, packed with radioactive material, was seemingly impending. However, for all the warnings about a home-grown terror threat and the potential disloyalty of young male American Muslims, there has been no American jihad. If anything, the US has actually come to be seen as a model of assimilation, which Britain and other countries have sought to copy.

  Americans have been asked to put up with mildly annoying workaday inconveniences, but no great sacrifices have been demanded of them. Even though the country simultaneously fought two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, placing huge manpower demands on the US military, there was never any serious debate about conscription. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’ was an idea from the Cold War that was not refurbished for the Bush administration’s war on terror. Instead, its domestic agenda was marked by giveaways, in the form of huge tax cuts and prescription drugs for the elderly. Materially, Americans pretty much went on as before. Indeed, they were encouraged to do so: to shop, to dine out, to take to the skies again. In other words, to keep the economy from stalling.

  After 9/11, it would have seemed ridiculous, fantastical even, to suggest that historians and my successors in Washington would one day debate whether the collapse of a bank, Lehman Brothers, on 15 September 2008, had more impact on the American way of life than the destruction of the World Trade Center. Nonetheless, the question of whether the sub-prime-mortgage crisis represented a more serious risk than al-Qaeda to everyday Americans, and more of an impediment to their dreams, is far from settled.

  The reason, of course, is simple: much more so than the global war on terror, the global financial crisis affected Americans’ purchasing power – the bottom line. All this is not to minimise the effect of 9/11, nor to deny that the changes afterwards were profound. However, 9/11 was not nearly as transformative as we forewarned at the time. Quick though we were to plumb the darker recesses of our imaginations, and to talk in apocalyptic terms, the new normalcy is nowhere near as bad as we predicted.

  Everyone has a ‘New York returns to normal’ story. Mine had actually come in the run-up to Christmas in 2001, when I got off the train from Washington and started walking to my nearby hotel. It was the thick of rush hour. Commuters were shoulder-barging through the sidewalks on their way to Penn Station, and at the kerbside a trumpeter stood with an open instrument case at his feet, blasting out a few raspy melodies. Struggling to both hold a tune and make a dime, he was absolutely useless. Unable to put up with his busking any longer, a female passer-by, with a voice as penetrative as his bugle, stormed up, stood directly in front of him and launched into a baseball-style face-to-face tirade. ‘Just shut the fuck up!’ she blasted. ‘JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!’ That, I suspect, came as music to most New Yorkers’ ears. I know it did to mine.

  With her mournful green eyes and bewitching stare, Kamila had the kind of ravaged beauty common in Afghan children, and a face that could easily have been staring out from the cover of National Geographic. Wearing a crimson dress embroidered with shimmering green thread, she had spent the afternoon chasing a herd of goats high in the mountains near to the border with Waziristan, but she had made the mistake of darting from the pathway in an area littered with anti-personnel landmines, the deadly detritus of 20 years of almost continual war.

  Her right foot landed on a mine with sufficient force to detonate its hidden explosive charge. Shrapnel ripped upwards, tearing off part of her foot, maiming rather than killing instantly – which was precisely what its designers had intended. Kamila was now losing so much blood at such a rapid pace that she was struggling to cling to life.

  When first we encountered her, she was cradled in the arms of a beefy US Special Forces
soldier with a scraggy black beard, wraparound shades and weaponry strapped to his torso and legs, who carried her as if she were his own daughter. Just a short while earlier, he had rescued her from the mountains and tried to staunch the flow of blood. Among the US military’s most highly trained warriors, he was stationed in the forbidding border region as part of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Here, though, he relied on one of his more elemental skills: basic battlefield first aid to try to save a young girl’s life.

  Now, he gently loaded her into the belly of a Black Hawk medivac helicopter, one of the army’s ambulances of the skies. In a region where the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda was at its fiercest, Kamila’s brother worked as a translator for the Americans and had managed to summon help quickly. Yet even though the Black Hawk had taken only 20 minutes to arrive, the medics crouching over her disfigured body feared they had not reached her in time. Already, she had lost a third of her blood, and the bandages wrapped around her mutilated foot were almost completely saturated. Kamila was so listless that medics struggled to detect a pulse. With an oxygen mask covering much of her small face, her eyes blinked slowly as she drifted in and out of consciousness.

  On arrival at an American forward operating base to the north, she was borne by stretcher from the helicopter and rushed into a field hospital, where the Stars and Stripes was draped over the operating table. Kamila was sedated, pumped with more oxygen and given an urgent blood transfusion. A US military doctor examined her mangled foot and made an immediate diagnosis. ‘Just prep from above the knee,’ he said matter-of-factly, knowing that her foot and lower leg could not be saved. She was given anaesthetic, and the medical team prepared for an amputation. With Kamila now fast asleep, the doctor took out an electric saw, pressed its jagged stainless-steel blade against her bloody flesh and began cutting at the skin. The noise was indescribable, and when later we sent over our television report to London the editors found it so disturbing that they asked us to reduce the volume by more than two-thirds. Even then, it was excruciating.

  When she came round after the operation, the medics told Kamila that she would have to confront life without her right foot. Fighting back tears, she replied that she was an orphan who had no friends and that her only fun in life came from chasing mountain goats. Thought to be just eight years old – she wasn’t sure of her birthday – at least she was still alive. Had Kamila been taken to the nearest hospital, on the Pakistan side of the border, the journey through the mountain passes would have taken more than eight hours. Without doubt, she would have died en route.

  Over decades of conflict, landmines killed or injured 70,000 Afghans, and around 30 per cent of the victims were children. Red-painted stones, barbed-wire fences and hazard signs marked with the skull and crossbones served as warnings, but each month some 60 people continued to be killed or maimed by landmines or unexploded ordnance. For the next 12 hours or so – the time it would take until another Afghan was maimed or killed – Kamila was the latest.

  Two days later, Kamila’s doctors carried out a second amputation, this time folding over the remaining muscle in the hope of forming a ‘nice stump’, as the surgeon described it, which would accept a prosthesis. In six months’ time, he reckoned, she might be able to get an artificial leg – a lengthy process of fittings, consultations and rehabilitation, which, alarmingly, one in eight Afghan families have experienced.

  The final time we saw Kamila was at a dilapidated hospital in Khost, the regional capital, where she was lying on a filthy bed in a dank, windowless room, wearing a bright-orange dress patterned with pink and white flowers. Towering over her was a barrel-chested Afghan doctor with a booming voice and a thick black beard. ‘Do you feel any pain in your legs?’ he bellowed.

  ‘No,’ came her fragile reply.

  ‘Your leg is injured but you will be able to walk soon,’ he said blithely. ‘Then you can go to school and look forward to the future.’

  Kamila looked mystified. Then she tried to sleep.

  Floor by floor, the Kabul Intercontinental was being renovated, and although the swimming pool was still a turgid green peasouper, most of the heaters now came with three-pinned plugs and the room interiors had the kind of bland furnishings you would expect to find in a Travelodge on the outskirts of Luton – a dubious sign of progress. More persuasive as a selling point was the simple fact that the hotel had not come under fire from the Taliban for the past 18 months.

  If anything, the omelette chef at breakfast, an elderly man with a claret tunic and inscrutable smile, posed a more serious threat to the well-being of guests. Perhaps unfairly, I blamed him for the most violent bout of food poisoning I had ever suffered, one that caused me almost to vomit mid-question during an interview with a Tajik warlord, and which to this day continues to trouble my lower intestine. Whenever I see an omelette chef, I do the Continental.

  Whereas the Intercontinental remained the residence of choice for visiting correspondents, other establishments had opened their doors to guests. Foremost among them was Afghan Garden One, which was billed as Kabul’s first boutique hotel. It had velvet cushions, soft, peachy lighting, four-poster beds in the rooms, and bathrooms decorated in blue mosaic glass tiles trucked in from Herat, which would not have seemed out of place in an interior-design store in Fulham but looked absurdly incongruous in situ. Whatever, this ethnic chic had appeal for the more bohemian reporters who considered themselves a cut above the khaki multi-pocket-jacket brigade.

  In the race to become Kabul’s first boutique establishment, Afghan Garden One had just managed to edge out a rival guest house set up by an Afghan-American from Las Vegas. Denied first-boutique status, it marketed itself instead as the only hotel in Kabul with a pool in the shape of a Martini glass. Occasionally, we stayed at the BBC house that could also boast a swimming pool in the back garden, though it was shaped like a kidney and nobody could recall when they had last seen it filled with water. Among its many home comforts was a cook who prepared kafta (meatballs), badenjah (eggplant) and braised lamb shanks, but whose crowd-pleasing signature dish combined fried slenderly cut potatoes, tandoor-baked Afghan bread and dripping butter: the Kabul chip butty.

  Even if the opening of the first branch of Afghan Fried Chicken suggested otherwise, the food all over the capital was vastly improved. There was a decent Thai restaurant, Lai Thai, which had been opened by a Bangkok-born woman who specialised in post-conflict eateries in hotspots such as Kosovo, Cambodia, East Timor and Rwanda. Preferring to operate in cities where there was little in the way of competition – her only venture in a peaceable country, Australia, ended in failure – she was already eyeing up Baghdad.

  A French restaurant, Le Bistro, was another welcome addition, which served hearty food, a decent bottle of red and even staged the occasional art exhibition in its walled garden. Still, the night that my coq au vin arrived accompanied by a rock hurled over the wall from the adjoining street was the last time I dined there. Thinking that the next time it could just as easily be a grenade or home-made bomb, we decided to eat elsewhere.

  For late-night drinks, Kabul could also boast a Manhattan-style cocktail bar and an Irish pub, but we steered clear of both. Not only were they a prime target for the Taliban but also they attracted American mercenaries from the US-based security firm DynCorp International, who were not renowned for their conviviality.

  Once wrecked by fighting, now concrete blast walls, coils of razor wire, gun emplacements and stained sandbags around every major building disfigured the Afghan capital. Visits to the presidential palace, the Arg, for press conferences or interviews with Hamid Karzai would take hours, if only to negotiate the multiple tiers of security that lay between its outermost entrance and his office overlooking the central courtyard. Here, it was impossible to avoid the boneheads from DynCorp, who were trained to treat each visitor like a potential killer and made sure everyone felt like one. After being frisked, barked at and frogmarched, like fresh recruits at boot camp, even the most mild-manner
ed reporter could end up with the most murderous of intentions. Journalists were often so hostile towards Karzai, I came to think, because DynCorp had been so hostile towards them. The security consultants turned them into character assassins.

  Almost everywhere in Kabul, the mood was darkening. Chicken Street, the once trendy stopping-off point on the hippy trail from Europe to India, had fallen into disrepute. Other than off-duty soldiers, its shops were largely empty of customers, though they were stocked still with antique muskets, knives with ivory handles, onyx chessboards, lapis-lazuli bracelets and magnificent Afghan coats, which made perfect sleeping bags. Soviet-era kitsch, such as Red Army medals, discarded bullet casings and winter ushankas, now vied for shelf space with 9/11-era kitsch. A favourite among US servicemen were Afghan rugs embroidered with the slogan ‘George W. Bush Operation Enduring Freedom’.

  The bookshop on Chicken Street now stocked cheap rip-offs of books on Afghanistan that had become instant global bestsellers: Åsne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul; Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner; Yasmina Khadra’s The Swallows of Kabul. Much of the foreign-correspondent corps found them hard to read with complete satisfaction. This was partly out of intense professional jealousy that the authors had enjoyed such literary and commercial success, but also because their own adventures occasionally threw up real-life stories that were just as extraordinary.

  In hunting down these stories, I worked alongside the BBC’s finest. Nik, my Australian cameraman, who grew up on a sheep farm near Albany, had not only worked in virtually all of the world’s trouble spots – Bosnia, Sierra Leone, the first Gulf War, Kosovo – but also done so with marvellous distinction. Six foot six inches tall, he was something of a human tripod, and he could pull off shots that were beyond most cameramen, both physically and creatively. Starting from ground level and extending to his maximum height, Nik made it look like we had hired a cherry-picker. Not only was he the most technically gifted cameraman with whom I worked but he was also the best read. For my money, the BBC had no finer news cameraman, which arguably made him the best in the world. Certainly in South Asia, his work was the gold standard.