Adventures in Correspondentland (25 page)

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 the 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.

For any new arrival hoping to map Pakistan's DNA, as good a starting point as any was to make the drive across the plains of Punjab from Lahore to Wagah – the only official border crossing with India. The trick was to arrive just before dusk to witness Wagah's great sunset ceremonial, the Beating the Retreat.

For 30 minutes each evening, soldiers from India's Border Security Force and Pakistan Rangers would high-kick, stamp, speed-march and flash downward thumbs at each other in perfect and well-rehearsed synchronicity. Picked for their towering height, limb flexibility, extravagant facial hair and ability to carry off fan-shaped headdresses that gave them the appearance of strutting peacocks, they engaged in a burst of military machismo that rivalled the All Blacks' haka in terms of its controlled fury and dignified rage.

What made it even more entertaining was that it had shades of Baz Luhrmann's
Strictly Ballroom
, Basil Fawlty's acrobatic goose-steps and the sort of harrumphing, head-turning high-camp that one might expect to see in a West End bedroom farce – normally at the point where the wife returns home to find her husband in bed with the Swedish au pair.

The soundtrack came from two note-splitting buglers and the pantomime cheers of Pakistanis and Indians packed into
bleachers on either side of the border. The ceremony would end with a brief exchange of handshakes, the slamming of gates and the lowering of flags. Honours were intended to be even. Yet, having watched the ceremony from both sides of the border, my guess was that it meant more for Pakistan than for its bigger, richer and more internationally lauded neighbour. Though it still considered Pakistan a major irritant and intermittent threat, India was starting to view China as its main twenty-first-century rival. Fifty years after partition, and three wars later, Pakistan still had an India fixation.

This helped to explain why Pakistan was the principal sponsor of the Taliban when it rose to power in Afghanistan in September 1996 – providing food, fuel, financing, munitions and military assistance from its Frontier Corps. In South Asia's modern-day Great Game, an Islamabad-friendly regime in Kabul was not only an essential bulwark against Delhi but it also meant that Pakistan could amass its forces on the border with India rather than worry about Afghanistan. Only three countries granted diplomatic recognition to the Taliban government in Kabul: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and, of course, Pakistan.

The India fixation explained why forceful action was not taken against militant Islam by dismantling Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous), its home-grown jihadists, or al-Qaeda, whose leaders had taken up residence in Waziristan, parts of the North-West Frontier Province and many of the major cities, such as Karachi. Viewed as useful proxies, these militant groups carried out attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir and major Indian cities, such as Delhi and Bombay, which had a destabilising effect on Pakistan's arch rival. This not only meant that the jihadists often avoided censure but also that they came to enjoy the active
backing of high-ranking generals in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's shadowy intelligence service, as well as senior figures in the army.

Operationally, the ISI was thought to be divided now into two sections: one that offered assistance to the Bush administration in its search for high-value al-Qaeda targets and one that maintained its patron–client relationship with the Taliban and other militant groups. Towards jihadists, the ISI was believed to have adopted an à la carte approach: assisting some while attempting to thwart others, even though ISI spies had been beheaded in the tribal areas and scores of its officials had been killed in suicide attacks.

Pakistan was playing a double game, which also explained why the military continued to divert US funds earmarked for the war on terror – we are talking here of a gargantuan sum of money, now in excess of $20 billion – to finance its arms build-up against India. This, even after the Pakistani Taliban tried to take control of the Swat Valley, close to Islamabad, and al-Qaeda mounted attacks within the capital virtually at will. Militant Islam now posed an existential threat to the state – the talk was of the Talibanisation of Pakistan – but the army and ISI continued to sponsor jihadists.

Trying to fully comprehend Islamabad's double game was difficult enough, but making half-decent television out of it was immeasurably harder. Finding a diplomat or a former Pakistani spook to repeat on camera what they would tell you off the record was next to impossible. As for getting pictorial evidence of the ISI's complicity with jihadists, it was not as if they offered embeds. On issuing journalist visas, the Pakistan authorities also placed quite heavy restrictions on where we were allowed to travel, limiting us for a long while to the major cities. Suffice to say, the areas of
our primary interest, such as the North-West Frontier Province, where the militants were most active, were out of bounds and guarded with military checkpoints. Alas, this was a story best told in heavily classified intelligence cables rather than in the form of broadcast journalism, because so few people would speak honestly on the record.

Often, I would come away from Pakistan – a country I looked upon with great affection – thinking I was probably too naive to cover it properly. Journalistically speaking, it was a place that favoured the deeply cynical – wizened old hacks who never believed a word that anyone told them, on or off the record. Being something of a conspiracy theorist was also useful – a spy novelist even – because of all the secret plots that were actually playing out. It was more a case, however, of being a conspiracy reporter: of working clandestine contacts, over and over, to chronicle what was happening in the shadows, where the fantastical so often doubled as fact.

From 2003 onwards, the country's deteriorating security situation came to be reflected in our choice of accommodation. On trips to Islamabad, we traditionally stayed at the Marriott, the long-time haunt of visiting correspondents, where waiters served wine in teapots to break the Islamic prohibition on booze and where beers ordered through room service arrived with forms for guests to sign admitting to a medical dependence on alcohol – a signature that many a correspondent could deliver with an entirely clean conscience. By 2004, we had started staying in small guest houses, which were less of a target. The allure of a middling pinot noir served in bone china or a locally brewed Murree lager – which was something of a crime against beer – was no longer worth the risk.

In October that year, I happened to be staying at a nearby guest house when the Marriott was bombed for the first time, destroying much of the lobby and restaurant area on the ground floor, where 11 members of staff from the US embassy were dining. Downplaying the incident, Pakistan's inaptly named information minister told us that the explosion was caused by an electrical short circuit. But the official explanation was risible given that the foyer was strewn with wrecked furniture and broken glass, and that seven people had been injured, including an American diplomat. Here, the phrase ‘it looks like a bomb has hit it' was a statement of the blindingly obvious. Still, the information minister refused to recognise the evidence right before his eyes. In common with so many officials in Pakistan, he was in a state of public denial about the dangers posed by jihadists. Sure enough, an investigation quickly found that the explosion had been the work of a bomber, who had tried to smuggle a laptop packed with explosives in through the front door.

That attack on the Marriott came just days before the 2004 American presidential election between George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, and I had flown to Islamabad just in case the Bush administration pulled off a genuine October surprise by announcing the capture of Osama bin Laden. With the election deadline looming, everyone knew that the CIA and US military had redoubled their efforts to capture the al-Qaeda leader, although there was nothing to suggest that the trail was anything other than wintry.

Not for the first time, however, it was bin Laden who pulled off the coup, by getting his couriers to smuggle an 18-minute tape to the offices of the Arabic news network Al Jazeera in Islamabad – yet another indication that he was hiding out within the borders
of Pakistan rather than Afghanistan.

Dressed in a snow-white turban and a golden robe, looking noticeably older and greyer than in his previous appearances, he presented himself as the untitled leader of the Islamic caliphate he so desperately wanted to restore. There was even the quasi-presidential flourish of being seated behind a desk with his script laid out before him, as if he were mimicking an Oval Office address. Even more so than in his usual recorded messages, he heaped scorn on its present occupant and admitted responsibility for the attacks of 9/11 – the first time he had done so publicly. ‘It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the country would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone,' he scoffed, in what sounded very much like a riff from Michael Moore's
Fahrenheit 9/11
, ‘because he thought listening to a child discussing her goats was more important.'

Rather than hurting George W. Bush, however, bin Laden was giving him an election-winning boost, which CIA analysts believed was precisely his intention. John Kerry – for all his weaknesses as a candidate and for all Karl Rove's attempts to portray him as a closet Frenchman – had gone into the final weekend of campaigning ahead of the president in a number of polls. But to attack George W. Bush now that the tape had been broadcast gave the appearance almost of siding with bin Laden or of being unpatriotic. Indeed, the Massachusetts senator, who had once lambasted Bush for not doing more to bring the al-Qaeda leader to justice, had decided months before to drop references in his speeches to how bin Laden remained at large. Internal polling showed it was badly hurting him with voters.

The proof of this came when Bush received an Osama bounce on that final weekend, which meant that going into the last two days
of campaigning the wind was behind his back. In another photo-finish election, Bush won with 50.7 per cent of the vote compared with Kerry's 48.3 per cent. It remains one of the great political paradoxes of the post-9/11 years that George W. Bush's failure to capture his number-one enemy actually helped him win re-election.

More obliquely, what bin Laden was also delivering in that tape was a crushing indictment of the Bush administration's war on terror. Al-Qaeda clearly believed that the invasion of Iraq, and the scandals coming out of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, had invigorated the global jihad. Its leader, who seemingly relished his eye-to-eye struggle with George W., was essentially saying that he viewed America's commander-in-chief as al-Qaeda's leading recruiting sergeant.

Long before 9/11, and soon after the end of my traineeship with the BBC, Pakistan had provided an early rite of passage for a wannabe foreign correspondent: my first election abroad. It was February 1997, and a few months earlier the president had dismissed the government of Benazir Bhutto on charges of corruption and misrule. Not only were Cabinet ministers alleged to be looting billions from the national exchequer, but also the prime minister herself was accused of leading a cover-up into the death of her elder brother and dynastic rival, Murtaza, whom the Karachi police had mowed down a few months earlier. These allegations seemed jaw-dropping for a fledging reporter just in from London, but they were fairly run of the mill for a Pakistani press corps that had witnessed almost every kind of scandal.