Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  Karzai was in irrepressible form and spoke passionately about the possibility of ending decades of war. ‘Brothers and sisters, I ask you to vote for me freely, with no pressure,’ he declared. ‘We want a proud Afghanistan, a stable Afghanistan, a peaceful Afghanistan.’ Then, bravely, he thrust himself into the front row of the crowd, like an ageing rock star diving into a mosh pit.

  Emboldened by the experience, he even felt confident enough to admonish his guards when they manhandled an elderly tribesman who clawed at his clothing. ‘Don’t push him! Don’t push him!’ shouted Karzai, for once dishing out orders to his grim-faced protectors. ‘This is democracy. This is emotion!’ The unscripted drama of the moment provided terrific pictures, which were far superior to what Karzai’s media-handlers had laid on. At the climax of the rally, he released a flock of snow-white peace doves into the bracing morning air, but as the cameras followed the birds skywards they captured the American helicopter gunships circling high above. Despite that small snag, the event was deemed a stunning success, if for no other reason than Karzai had escaped without being assassinated.

  Already postponed twice because of concerns over security, the official launch of the 2004 presidential campaign had come a few months earlier. In a Soviet-era auditorium in the centre of Kabul, election officials held a raffle-like draw to decide the order on the ballot papers in which the names of the 18 presidential candidates should appear.

  Among the candidates plucked from the rolling tombola was a poet, an amateur boxer, a Sufi intellectual, an avowed monarchist who wanted the country to once more become a kingdom, a paediatrician physician and a female doctor, Dr Massouda Jalal, who was the sole woman in the race. Aside from Karzai, the most familiar name in the drum belonged to General Dostum, who was among at least five candidates considered to be a warlord because they controlled their own private armies.

  Nobody was in any doubt, however, as to who would win the upcoming election. Karzai, or ‘Uncle Sam’s Choice’, as he was often known, was such the clear front-runner that it risked discrediting a process designed by the Americans and the United Nations to legitimise his rule. ‘Karzai is an American appointee,’ shouted a heckler from the stalls of the auditorium that afternoon. ‘He will be elected with American money.’

  Days later, Karzai did little to dispel this widespread impression when he appeared alongside Donald Rumsfeld at an open-air press conference in the dappled late-afternoon sun of the Arg. Throughout, he looked and sounded very much the junior partner. Fielding questions, he claimed to be untroubled by a new report from the United Nations that showed that nine million people had registered to vote in a country where only 9.5 million were eligible to do so. Given that less than half of the country’s women had registered, this meant that significantly more men were now entitled to vote than there were men.

  A number of factors explained this incongruity. Some of them were sinister, such as the acquisition of multiple cards by warlords determined to rig the entire ballot. Others were quite charming and brought home the newness of democracy. Each voting card came with a laminated photograph – a prized possession in a country where cameras had up until recently been banned and where the Taliban used to carry out public hangings of television sets and stereo systems. It meant that thousands of voters returned to register several times, keen to maximise their own campaign photo opportunity.

  When called upon to ask my question, I wanted to tackle Karzai on these multiple registrations but also to challenge Rumsfeld on a recent statement in which he had likened the level of violence in Afghanistan to crime levels in Berlin. ‘Some six hundred people have been killed since your last visit,’ I said, as the defence secretary fixed me with his squinty stare. Then I swivelled to face Karzai. ‘There is clear evidence, President Karzai, of multiple registrations – people registering over and over again out of coercion from the warlords. Given the volatile security situation, given the unchecked power of the warlords, how can these elections be free and fair in any way?’

  After a long pause, Rumsfeld replied, and his first words came as a surprise: ‘You’re right.’ Still, he did not regret drawing parallels with Berlin. ‘In important countries, violence occurs,’ he said, in a line that echoed his famed ‘stuff happens’ comment after the fall of Baghdad. ‘It occurs in European countries. It appears in western-hemisphere countries and it is occurring in this part of the world.’ Normally so unflappable in front of reporters, the defence secretary looked and sounded ruffled, and it produced a definite charge in the air.

  Then Karzai weighed in. ‘With regard to multiple registration of voters, we don’t really know if a thousand people or two thousand people or three thousand people or a hundred thousand people have two registration cards. And, as a matter of fact, it doesn’t bother me.’ Then, with exuberant incoherence, he added, ‘If Afghans have two registration cards because they like to vote twice, well, welcome!’ As Karzai careered off message, Rumsfeld started to fidget visibly behind his lectern, like a puppeteer who has lost control of his marionette.

  At this point, I jumped in with the obvious follow-up. ‘But you are describing a farce not an election,’ I suggested.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Karzai. ‘We are just beginning an exercise. People are enthusiastic. They want to have cards. They have taken cards. Maybe some have taken one or two cards. We don’t know. It’s speculation. I have not seen anybody that has taken two cards or three cards.’

  Anticipating this problem, election officials had put safeguards in place. As in India, voters’ fingernails would be etched with a thin mark of indelible ink. Yet Karzai overlooked this salient detail. It was only later in the press conference, when an aide whispered in his ear, that Karzai finally remembered the indelible ink. By now, however, the damage had been done, and he just wanted to get the hell out of there. ‘We’re looking forward to the elections,’ he said with another flourish. ‘We are not worried. Have a good heart, and let’s go to the elections.’

  At the risk of immodesty, the headlines that day came from my exchange with Karzai and his garbled logic. So, as the press conference came to an end, and Rumsfeld could be seen gently berating him as they walked back towards the presidential palace, I felt a small pang of professional pride. Even a few fellow correspondents – a notoriously ungenerous bunch in evaluating the work of rivals – were complimentary. London also seemed delighted when, late that night, we filed a report for the ten o’clock news that carried an abbreviated version of the exchange with Rumsfeld. It also ended with the question of whether Afghanistan was seeing a rush to democracy propelled by the Bush administration’s need to score a foreign-policy success ahead of the US presidential election in November, especially when so much miserable news was coming out of Iraq. All seemed well with the world when finally we turned in, with the praise of London ringing still in our ears.

  Regrettably, our delight was short-lived. At the following morning’s editorial meeting in London, which serves both as a look-ahead and a post-mortem on the previous day’s coverage, the view was that I had come across as a bit of a smart-arse and skirted too close to editorialising on the question of whether Afghanistan was ready for democracy.

  On the first complaint, I accepted guilt. In a medium that rewards understatement, a note of hubris had crept into my report. As for making judgements about the Bush administration’s Afghan-freedom project, I considered myself harshly done by. Rather than deliver a blanket condemnation, I had merely posed the question that was on everyone’s lips.

  Over the next few days, admonishing calls came in over the satellite phone from London. My card was well and truly marked. Seriously out of favour for the first time in my career, it was not even certain whether I would get the chance to cover the forthcoming elections. As it was, I did return to Kabul for polling day but was given a fairly peripheral role and kept well away from the premier television bulletins – the BBC’s cruellest put-down.

  When election day arrived, it came with a spectacle
both stirring and cinematic. From early morning, women lined up patiently outside polling stations to vote, some with the pride of suffragettes. Most were wearing burqas but many had put on their finest clothes and spent time doing their hair and make-up. With female turnout high, there was the strong suspicion that many would have been instructed how to cast their ballots by their husbands, who in turn would have received instructions from imams, tribal chiefs or local militia leaders. For many Afghan women, however, the act of voting was also an act of liberation, and watching them lift their blue veils so they could identify themselves to voting officials was breathtaking.

  The men lined up in a separate queue, clasping blankets tight around them and gripping their laminated voting cards. In many parts of the country, the voters had to brave unseasonably chill winds; in others, dust storms. But everywhere, millions of Afghans stood up to threats from the Taliban.

  As voting got underway, I was at a school near Kabul Airport, whose crumbling, mud-brick walls were pockmarked with bullet-holes. Polling booths fashioned out of cardboard were laid out in two classrooms, the war-wrecked state of which offered the most powerful reminder of what precisely was at stake. Some parents brought their infant children along to witness the birth of democracy. Then they cast their vote on long ballot papers that listed the candidates and included a small passport-style photograph of each one, along with their adopted symbols. Karzai had chosen the scales of justice and told voters in the final days of campaigning that they should look out for his Karakul, his trademark sheepskin hat. Since only a third of Afghan men could read, and just eight per cent of women, the process was designed to be as simple as possible.

  Beforehand, the Taliban had threatened to wreak mayhem across the country, but as yet there were few reports of violence on anywhere near the scale previously feared. Instead, the first indication that anything was awry came when a young woman, who had ventured out without her burqa, approached us in a state of teary agitation, thrusting a finger towards our camera.

  Moments earlier, voter officials had marked her nail with indelible ink to prevent her from voting twice. Now, all that was visible was the faintest of blotches. A few seconds later, it had all but disappeared. Sensing immediately the potential for fraud, she was distraught. Other voters merely thought it hilarious that they could rub the ink from their fingernails so effortlessly. What we needed to establish, and fast, was whether this polling station had simply been given a duff batch of ink or this was a nationwide problem that could result in thousands of Afghans voting twice or even more times.

  To find out, we turned to our local Kabul producer, Bilal, a gem of a young man and a quite brilliant news-gatherer, who was sitting outside our satellite truck and served as a one-man search engine, a human Google. For months in advance of the election, he had travelled all over Afghanistan hooking up with our network of stringers, or local reporters, and now, working two mobile phones at once, he rang around to find out if there were similar problems elsewhere.

  Within minutes, we had the answer: everywhere, the supposedly indelible ink had dangerously delible properties. Now, there was no safeguard left against multiple voting and mass fraud. As the ink disappeared, so, too, did confidence in the process, and rival news organisations, which could not boast a Bilal, started picking up on the same irregularities. One after the other, candidates shunned the election. By lunchtime, their boycott was all but complete. Only Karzai and two others continued to argue that the election could be free and fair.

  A campaign without a trail. An election without much electioneering. A vote that by lunchtime had been boycotted by 15 of the 18 presidential candidates. For all its historic trappings and unforgettable imagery, the poll still left unanswered the central question asked of the country at that first loya jirga: was Afghan democracy a contradiction in terms?

  Cutting the first television report on this now disputed election posed all sorts of editorial dilemmas, and the pressure of deadlines meant there was little time to resolve them. Clearly, we wanted to reflect the history of the moment – a chronically overused word in the news business but one that automatically attached itself to this election. The queues, the obvious enthusiasm, the deep hankering of average Afghans for a non-violent future. We also wanted to chronicle another undoubted success: the failure of the Taliban to cause much fatal disruption.

  For balance, we needed to put the boycott in context. After all, all but one of the candidates who had withdrawn were complete no-hopers. But the problems with the ink had clearly compromised the process, even if there was not much evidence, as yet, that people had cast more than one ballot.

  Something else we had to weigh was the possibility that the spat over the disappearing ink had diverted attention from more serious electoral abuses, such as the widespread intimidation of voters, which, in hindsight, was arguably the most glaring weakness of our report. What we essentially had to decide was to what extent the technical failings of the election had eclipsed its spirit and historical import.

  Personally, this was especially tricky, because if I went with the line that the election had been compromised hopelessly it might have looked like score-settling from the summer. Given that the whole exchange with Karzai at that open-air press conference had centred on the safeguards against multiple voting, Schadenfreude was an obvious temptation, though to indulge it now would have suggested an unhealthy fixation.

  Honestly, I thought we produced a fair-minded report, balancing the history and the hitches, which ran on BBC World News in Afghanistan for most of the day. Hamid Karzai most certainly did not. That evening, as chaos continued to engulf the election and he faced the usual accusations about being America’s stooge, he opened his press conference with an attack on our coverage. With uncharacteristic scorn – Karzai is usually the most good-humoured of men – he argued that our reports had been unnecessarily sensationalist and had attached far too much importance to the disappearing ink. Here, I run the risk of inserting ourselves into the story – that common pitfall of correspondent memoirs. However, all we had done that day was to report on the nationwide scale of the problem, which our far-flung stringer network made us uniquely well placed to do.

  Indelible ink or not, Karzai was quickly declared the winner, with 55.4 per cent of the vote, which meant the election did not have to go to a second round. The United Nations validated his victory, and the whole sorry mess was blamed on the company in India that had supplied the ink. (Pakistani diplomats, of course, suspected skulduggery from Delhi.) The whole flap was explained away as the inevitable birth pangs of democracy.

  Instead, the UN, which had organised the entire poll, asked the media to reflect on the lines of burqa-clad women outside the polling stations and the fact that the Taliban had failed to seriously disrupt the election. Fourteen people were killed that day – a much smaller number than had been feared. US commanders went even further, claiming that the presidential election had brought about ‘the psychological defeat’ of the Taliban – a statement that sounded optimistic at the time, and even more so with each passing fighting season.

  The problem for America and its allies was that the insurgents spoke of Afghanistan not as a cradle of democracy but as a graveyard of empires – a cliché in the hands of journalists but an article of faith in the minds of the Taliban. Its fighters believed that endless conflict was Allah’s way of testing them and that, whether it took decades or centuries, they would ultimately achieve a God-given victory – hence the old adage ‘the West have the watches but the Afghans have the time’. Looking back on the first presidential election, whether Afghanistan was ready or not for democracy was never really the most pertinent question. Then and now, it was whether America and its allies could ever conquer the Taliban.

  As for that other bothersome question, where was Osama bin Laden, surely the answer lay over the border in neighbouring Pakistan.

  Pakistan was probably the most impenetrable country I had ever covered. This was largely because of th
e difficulty in divining the true motivations of its key players, whether they be politicians, army chiefs, diplomats, spooks or even cricketers.

  Sometimes, I felt that the people of Pakistan were in on some giant secret, like conjurers inducted into the magic circle, which they had successfully concealed from the rest of the world. Then I would speak to some of the country’s most well-sourced journalists and erudite intellectuals, who often struggled to make sense of their own country. What made Pakistan even harder to comprehend, especially after 9/11, was the enormous discrepancy between what the West thought should be its most urgent national priority – which is to say the hunt for Osama bin Laden, along with the defenestration of al-Qaeda and the Taliban – and its own national obsession, which was the historic rivalry with India.

  It was important to understand that Pakistan had been founded on a grievance and a grudge: that as the Union Flag came down on the British Raj, the last reigning maharaja of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir – who had initially favoured independence – decided eventually to side with India instead of with Pakistan. The Kashmir Valley was overwhelmingly Muslim, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, had supposedly described it as the jugular vein of his newly created country. So a question became lodged firmly in the national psyche, where it festered for decades: how could the nation prosper when such a vital artery was under the sword of its great rival? With the ‘k’ in Pakistan standing for Kashmir, the letter served as a portmanteau reminder of the country’s continuing humiliation.