Part One
Christmastime in Islamabad

Headline News*[1]

         *     I lost a full day hop scotching time zones during the ride over here, but
                     the rumors never stopped ...

            *      America On High Alert:

“President Bush put America on high alert Monday for possible terrorist attacks during the holiday season after US intelligence officials reported ‘an increase in frequency of  credible threats.’”

            *      Relentless Air Strikes Pummel Kandahar Defenders

            *     Camp Rhino Established in Afghan Desert South of Kandahar

            *     ‘American Taliban’ Captured in Afghanistan

            *  Karzai Leads 4000 Anti-Taliban Tribal Forces on Kandahar From
                    North

            *     B-52s Over Tora Bora Flatten Villages;

                     Scores of Civilians Reported Dead;

                     Pentagon Calls Reports: ‘Suspect’

            *     American Special Forces Reported to be Near Tora Bora Mountain
                    Terror Base.

 *     Pakistan Says Madrasas (religious schools) To Be Brought into
                    Mainstream

 

 

 

~

December 4, 2001

 

Islamabad and Rawalpindi on the edge of Kashmir:

The Only White Guy in Town

 

 

                  I arrived late last night on Pakistan International Airways flight 718 from New York City just before midnight Islamabad time. The miserable 25-hour commute from Hell’s Kitchen via the crowded E-train, the painfully slow traffic-clogged JFK airport bus ride from Manhattan, and the long cramped flight on a full 747 through Manchester, England was only made tolerable by the extra leg room of an emergency exit row seat and about five or six hours of honest sleep.

            To get to Europe from midtown Manhattan in the old days I’d just catch the E-train to the World Trade Center and then transfer to another express subway there which would quickly and conveniently drop me off at a JFK Airport shuttle transfer bus just off the airport grounds. But now the World Trade Center is a smoldering ruin, the underground train stop there is crushed to the rails and buried in the debris of thousands of lives and under the weight of our collective grief. So on Sunday instead of that old time convenience I was accustomed to, I was forced instead to endure the awful traffic-creeping overland Port Authority airport bus.

            As usual I found the jet’s audio headset un-listenable and I used that as an excuse to skip watching the several lame in-flight movies and the multiple episodes of the Simpsons that were shown by the crew. Which curiously enough had all the Pakistanis, Afghanis, and Arabs aboard giggling madly for a couple of thousand air miles ...

            As it turned out, I was the only Euro-American (white guy) on the flight, at the airport in Islamabad , or at the Islamabad Holiday Inn. As I walked toward the exit after clearing immigration and customs at the Islamabad airport, I had to make my way through a wall of about 350 Pakistanis, Afghans, and Arabs waiting for loved ones at the end of a 50-yard-long arrival bay tunnel leading from arrival gates to the terminal. As I approached the throng alone (I had only carry-on baggage and had no delay at immigration) I passed through the parting wall of people feeling as acutely American as I’ve ever felt. Their expressions of joy at the anticipation of reunions with family and friends vanished and changed to curiosity about the incoming American shouldering one small bag and carrying three cameras around his neck and a tripod in his hand. After a few moments of quiet pondering, many in the mob began chattering wildly as 700 eyes followed me across the airport concourse all the way to the Holiday Inn transport office.

            I didn’t see as much anger or the amount of overt hostility I’d expected in many of the faces in the crowd, and so I decided my late night baptism to southwest central Asia (since I’d lived through it) had been a success. However, I was smacked in the face with the feeling of being out there alone among the turmoil and danger, as much as I anticipated I’d be, and as was inevitable. But I was off to a good start and hoping for the best --- as the world around me went from bad to worse.

            I got settled into my room at the Islamabad Holiday Inn and the CNN Breaking News Box there told me that Beatle George Harrison’s ashes had followed me overseas from America and would soon be floated down the Holy Ganges River in India . In order that his soul would be liberated from the cycle of reunification, one with his maker after all.

            From bad to worse with a nugget of nostalgia, sprinkled into a river downstream from these very wars.

            Here comes the sun.

 

            Or was that just the flash of another bomb?

 

 

 

~

December 5, 2001

Islamabad, Pakistan

Islamabad Holiday Inn
Nothing Phony About This War:

Going From Bad to Worse ...

 

                    A report of “mistaken targeting” took place not far from a place called the Tora Bora cave complex, believed to be the possible hideout of Osama bin Laden. The attack reportedly killed 55 Afghan civilians. Amid the larger consequences of war, anonymous people (were) buried in anonymous graves, most of them children ... [2]

 

There’s nothing phony about this war.

 

 

             That’s what CBS anchorman Dan Rather told me first thing this morning on TV from Afghanistan on the CNN Breaking News Box’s Larry King Live show as I woke up at the Islamabad Holiday Inn.

            Nothing phony indeed.

            And it all just keeps going from bad to worse ...

            Yesterday while I was flying over the Atlantic, across Europe, and through the Middle East to get to southwest central Asia on a torturous 25-hour door-to-door commute from Hell’s Kitchen in New York to the Islamabad Holiday Inn, Israel fired a dozen missiles from American-supplied fighter-jet warplanes and attack helicopters into Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority compound in Ramallah on the West Bank. The fiery scene of the attack up on the TV screen this morning showed Israeli troops destroying Arafat’s residence and a couple of Palestinian transport helicopters. It was the last thing I saw on the news box as I passed out last night at about 3 a.m., and it was the first thing I saw this morning after I woke up.

            Arial Sharon had declared a war on terrorism against Arafat in the name of self-defense, either because of Arafat’s refusal to stop the uncivilized suicide bomb attacks on Israeli civilians or because of his lack of power among his own people to stop the attacks even if he’d wanted to. Three Palestinian extremist suicide attacks over the weekend killed at least 25 innocent civilians and several young suicide bombers were spent like firewood by their extremist elders to bring global attention to Palestine’s need for an autonomous homeland.

            More of the same old power-brokering folly from that same old stone-in-our-global-peace shoe, I’m afraid. The gruesome, bloody, and ages-old un-holy battle for control of Jerusalem.

            A matrix of twisted issues and circumstance that regular Americans are unequipped to properly understand --- much less fairly sympathize with either way.

            From peace talks to suicide bombers.

            From olive branches to laser guided missiles.

            From occupation to intifada.

            From bad to worse.

 

            According to rumors in the news, the Russians (who were driven out of Afghanistan in 1989 by American-supported rebels when they were still called the Soviets) have completed the takeover of their old air force base near Kabul and are about to re-occupy the Russian embassy there, protected by (of all things) American-led coalition forces. The American home security chief Tom Ridge just issued a new unspecified terrorism alert for US and Western targets, the third such unspecified alert since September 11. Warning of an increased threat of another terrible attack on another group of regular civilians somewhere in the civilized world by the uncivilized extremists that be. And Osama bin Laden and his cronies, with $25 million dollar bounties on some of their heads --- dead or alive --- are still out there somewhere.

 

            Afghan eastern Alliance troops, a few American Marines and special force units have reportedly surrounded their enemy (and maybe even bin Laden) just up the road from Islamabad in Afghanistan, on the red line on the 24-hour CNN War Map. And they’re poised to capture the last Taliban strongholds of Kandahar, Khost, Paktia, Nangarhar and Balkh near Mazar-e-Sharif. And perhaps (if things go better than I expect them to go) even poised to make safe the hazardous Grand Trunk Road from Islamabad to Kabul through Peshawar and Jalalabad, enough so that I might safely get everywhere I may want to go while I’m here working the streets of the outskirts of this war.

 

            Coalition F-jets, B-1 bombers, B-52 bombers, Stealth bombers, and AC-130 gun ships guided by satellite, U-2, AWAC, Global Hawk, and Predator drone spotter aircraft are reportedly pounding targets from the air that are being spotted on the ground by US special forces. Dropping waves of gravity ordinance on and firing smart bunker-busting bombs at suspected mountain cave complexes that contain retreating al-Qaida fighters trying to flee to Pakistan. Innocent civilians have also reportedly been killed along with guilty extremists as American Coalition aircraft attacked village buildings near a place called Tora Bora that American generals suspected of housing a terrorist command and control facility.

            Innocent death --- the consequence of any all-out war.

            Whether it’s an understandable war in self-defense, or a despicable war of aggression.

 

            And if the wars on terrorism against civilians raging in the Middle East and in southwest central Asia weren’t enough, the decades-old nuclear cold war at the Line of Control in nearby Kashmir between Pakistan and India (that has already resulted in more than 25,000 deaths, most of them civilians) also just heated back up to another terrible boil. Attacks along that front in recent weeks (only a stone’s throw from Islamabad, which sits on the edge of Kashmir about 30 miles from the disputed Indo-Pakistan Line of Control) have claimed hundreds of additional civilian lives.

            And not far away to the northeast of Kashmir is the gory ongoing separatist conflict in Chechnya, Russia’s own leftover Cold War-related terror war.

 

            From peace talks to suicide bombers.

            From cease-fires to nuclear terror.

            From separatist guerrillas to tribal anarchy

            No --- there’s nothing phony about this or any of the other festering wars in Asia and North Africa, from Chechnya to Kashmir, to the West Bank, to Kenya and Tanzania. Nothing phony about this World War III terror war in Washington DC or in Kansas or in Paris or in Amsterdam or in Islamabad, Pakistan.

            Nothing phony about this war in lower Manhattan where seven martyred World Trade Center buildings are still burning, still in their smoldering heap when I flew out of New York over the weekend like the goddamn end of the world. Where about three or four thousand dead innocents -- regular people from nearly half the countries on Earth and from nearly every denomination of faith -- used to go about business -- used to go about their regular lives.

 

Headline News*[3]

*    Four Rival Afghan Groups Sign Historic Power-sharing Agreement In Bonn to Form a Post-Taliban Interim Government in Afghanistan

*    Battle For Kandahar Lingers On

*    Friendly Fire Kills Three American Green Berets in Battle to Seize Kandahar.

    “The 2000-pound bomb blast also killed five Afghans fighting alongside the Green Berets in a heated gun battle with Taliban forces a few miles north of Kandahar.”

 

     “President Bush said that the troops died in a just cause for American freedom.”

 

     “Also slightly injured in the friendly fire incident was Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun tribal chief who was named today as prime minister of the provisional Afghan government by a coalition of anti-Taliban Afghan tribal leaders in Bonn, Germany.”

*    According to Donald Rumsfeld:

                        “Their are hundreds of al-Qaida defenders at Tora Bora. Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens, and other fanatical dead-enders. And they’re fighting extremely hard because apparently there’s something there worth fighting to the death for ...”

*    Al Qaeda Cave Complex at Pakistan Border Next Battlefield

“The long awaited ground attack on suspected terrorist hideouts in northeastern Afghanistan got under way Tuesday and the Pentagon challenged persistent reports that efforts to fish out Osama bin Laden from his rumored bunker complex in the mountainous region has caused widespread civilian casualties.”

 

 

*Not in Kansas Anymore

 

 

 

 

                   This morning I found the media gathering-hole at the Marriott Hotel restaurant and made contact with the Associated Press contingent there. I walked the streets of Islamabad for about five hours acclimating to Islam and getting over the stares of surprise I constantly get from Pakistanis astonished to see a lone American in Converse high-top basketball shoes and a baseball cap walking about taking streetphotos.

            As expected, I find these people (regular Pakistanis) to be friendly, kind, and exceptionally hospitable. They are very interested in talking to me and nearly all who I’ve spoken to so far have expressed how sorry they feel for what happened to America and me on September 11 ...

~

                        While I was in the air on Monday it was announced on the CNN Breaking News Box that Afghan warlords meeting in Bonn, Germany had signed an historic agreement forming an interim government charged with re-building a new Afghanistan from the ground up. This morning I attended the United Nations press conference announcing the Afghanistan interim government pact and detailing the plan for the restoration of the splintered nation. The road to peace will reportedly begin with a democratic-like broad-based ministry acknowledging the right of the people of Afghanistan to freely determine their own political future in accordance with the principles of Islam, democracy, pluralism, and social justice (human rights). And that two Afghani women had been elected among the 29 state ministers in the plan ratified yesterday in Bonn. Clearly a good first step (on paper). But the pundits on TV are telling me that they think that Afghanistan’s now a loose multi-warlord alliance inherently fraught with insecurity and doomed to fail if just any two of the leading tribal warlords decided rather than disarm to start fighting all over again instead.

            An agreement counting on a multitude of factions to choose peace over feudal war might work in this most-war-weary of places, and the Bonn conference agreement (in theory) exceeded expectations in that regard. But only on paper in abstract, and only time will tell ...

 

Meanwhile, the Middle East kept exploding overnight as Israel again attacked the Palestinian authority today using American-supplied fighter jets, tanks, and helicopter gun ships. They chased Yasir Arafat and his security forces around the West Bank all day, purposely sparing Arafat’s life --- but in the process making him look like a fool.

 

*The History of Pakistan:

    The Roadmap to Misery and Hate

   (As I’ve been able to gather so far...)

 

 

                               I spent the evening at my room at the Holiday Inn reviewing the history of Pakistan [4] as I know it, reading the local English-language newspapers, and monitoring rumors on the CNN Breaking News Box.

            Everyone is holding their breath in Islamabad.

            The world is on edge.

            The Middle East is still exploding as it always seems to still be, and the repercussions of the gunfire and bombs of Afghanistan and Kashmir are felt on the streets of this heavily fortified capitol city operating under marshal law. Sandbag-fortified machine gun nests have been erected at every corner near the government district, manned by heavily-armed camouflaged Pakistan government troops. To protect the Pakistan government from the anger and discontent of its own people.

            The ones I’m out there roaming around among.

            A week following the attack on New York and Washington more than eighty percent of Pakistanis polled demanded that their dictator-president defend the radical Islamic Taliban in Afghanistan who were protecting and supporting the September 11 terrorists. More than 80 percent of Pakistanis (who’s literacy rate is only about 35 percent) would have decided (if they’d been dictator-president) to go to war (nuclear war) against the United States and the worldwide coalition against terror and on the side of the Taliban.

            As it were, the dictator-president, Pervez Musharraf (in the fringe minority among his own people) decided that Pakistan would support the American-led anti-terror coalition instead. And because of his strength, wisdom, and civility, Pakistan wasn’t bombed to bits by B-52s on the evening of October 7 --- the night the American Coalition began fighting back. And because of Musharraf, Pakistan isn’t being forcibly disarmed right now and being guided with a heavy hand by the rest of the world toward civilized government --- like what’s happening only a few miles up the road from here in Afghanistan, past the red line on the CNN Breaking News War Map.

            But that doesn’t erase the fact that eighty percent of the people I’ll be roaming among and coming in contact with during the next couple of weeks would rather have taken up arms against my white American ass than have given me use of their airspace, military bases, and troops. And that can’t erase the fact that eight in ten people who smile civilly at me as I pass them out on the street support (to one degree or another) Osama bin Laden and his uncivilized jihad and might even accept the coward as a hero.

            A hero!

           

            How did Pakistan get to this untenably hateful place in its history? Overwhelmingly sympathetic to the suppressive anti-American Taliban, and skeptical of their own country’s central government. Hopeless, nervous, discontent, conflicted, intolerant, and in many ways now uncomfortably regretful about its current predicament --- in light of how its popular extremist viewpoint and it’s ultimate allied actions are being interpreted by the civilized world --- good and bad.

 

~

                        America, was established in the 18th century and before September 11, 2001, hadn’t been attacked from abroad in nearly 200 years. We had our own bloody civil war from 1861-1865 and from the 1950s through 1991 we lived under the threat of Soviet attack by nuclear missiles. But during the last decade in between wars (and aside from the specter of crime) America became among the most secure, peaceful, and fortunate places on Earth.

            Pakistan, on the other hand, in December 2001, has only been in business for just over 54 years and today it’s among the most insecure, nervous, and seemingly most hopeless places on the planet. Before 1947 the land had absorbed the influence of dozens of cultures and sub-cultures dating from pre-history to partition from India to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

            The Indus Valley and semi-nomadic Indo-Aryan civilizations raised cows and rode horses across this land until a short visit to it (in 322 BC) by the conquering armies of Alexander The Great, a millennium before the birth of Islam in the year 709.

            For the next eight centuries after that, the land now ruled from Islamabad supported the Mauryans, the Bactrians, the Scythians, and the Shahis. In 1524 the Moghuls took control followed shortly thereafter by the imperial British (about 1600) who ruled India and the predominately Sikh and Sind cultures of its northwest until the middle of the 20th century.

 

            It was just an everyday rough-and-tumble place between all those power struggles, a tribal place never mistaken as safe by anyone or any government.

 

            On August 14, 1947 the powers-that-be announced the creation of the Radcliffe Line in India in an attempt to peaceably separate the Indian Muslim minority and the Indian Hindu majority from one another and stop religious ethnic cleansing that by that time had become commonplace. Predictably, the separation invoked perhaps the biggest human population transfer in the history of mankind when up to a million refugees were murdered as about ten million Muslims and Hindus fled for safety (in both directions) to get over the Radcliffe Line on their now holy sides of the border. The Muslims escaping India to the northwest and founding the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Since that time the place (founded by Mohammed Ali Jinnah) has evolved from a parliamentary state to a presidential state, to a martial law state --- going back and forth as the resettlement dust settles.

            It’s one of the top-10 most populous places on Earth (140 million citizens plus perhaps as many as four million Afghan refugees) and during the past 50 years this hard-scrapple desert land nearly void of industry or natural resources, or prosperity of any kind at its birth, has only managed to provide the vast majority of the millions of Pakistanis with meager livings. Less than $650 per-year per-Pakistani civilian, and much less for those in Kashmir. And the Pakistani leaders along the way have never seemed nearly as concerned with social justice and cultural equality as they’ve been concerned with their individual assets and personal status.

            The official language in Pakistan is Urdu, but there are more than 300 tribal dialects and only eight percent of Pakistanis speak proper Urdu. Farmers here grow cotton, wheat, rice, and sugarcane in small plots. Although modern cars and trucks (occasionally very new and fancy) roam the streets, they compete for space with donkeys, rickshaws, camels, and horse-drawn carts.

 

            Yet eighty-percent of Pakistanis watch television on a daily basis.

 

            The sense of hopelessness can be overwhelming the first time a regular Westerner hits the streets of Pakistan. A place so strange to most of us. But they know all about the likes of me. Because they’ve seen my kind on the satellite TV ...

 

*Fly on the Wall

 

 

                        Knowing the history of a place is a necessary element of proper research, and that’s all-and-good as an overview of an era. But being out on the streets of a place in its time (boots on the ground) is the only way to get in touch with what it must have been like to have been there.

            Being well traveled should be markedly more valuable to a scholar than being well read.

 

            For an American to become a fly on the wall of this place at this time is an obtuse yet precious thing. To watch through an independent American perspective how the people on these streets are reacting to defeat. To see through an American and global street photographer’s perspective how the extremists who came out on the streets and celebrated when they heard about September 11 felt now that Kabul had fallen and now that their mad-dog friends were on the run and hunkering down in damp cold caves at the end of the line. The ones who burnt my American flag on their streets and who (up to eight out of ten of them) felt that Osama bin Laden deserved their support and loyalty.

 

 
~

December 6, 2001

Islamabad, Pakistan

 

War Culture:

Christmastime in Islamabad

 

 

             I was suffering third-degree jet lag and then last night that sore throat I started feeling over the weekend in New York came on hard, and the advancing crud zapped my enthusiasm and kept me awake most of the night either writing, trying unsuccessfully to sleep, or just painfully monitoring the 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box for rumors about the latest news going on outside my hotel room door.

 

            I got out of my room early this morning, despite being sick, found a new hotel room and then headed to the Marriott on foot for lunch. I decided to stay in the capital city instead of the livelier Rawalpindi for its more mild frenzy, for its access only three miles away from the Islamabad Marriott press gathering hole, and of course for it’s easy access to the government bureaucracies and the rest of the war culture I’d need to move closer to the fighting.

            Every war has its own war culture and wartime personality based on local customs, who’s involved, and what’s at stake. Based on those criteria, when this World War circus came to town --- it came in Big!

            During a successful day of schmoozing for access to Kabul, I made solid contact with the international media, several government bureaucracies, several NGOs (Non Government relief Organizations) and with the local guide and fixer industry sideshows. And I also made myself known to many of the street people on the three miles of city between Aabpara Market and the Islamabad Marriott media hotel.

            During that walk I split right through the middle of the buzzing Aabpara Market I’m now living in and past the fruit and vegetable stands at Juma Bazaar and past perhaps a half-dozen heavily armed Islamabad police out on foot patrols. Past the specialty shops at Melody Market behind the heavily fortified Holiday Inn and through the Covered Market to the police-patrolled Blue Area Market and the machine-gun-guarded American Express office. Then I walked and made streetphotos through a wealthy residential area (past several sandbag-walled machine gun nests of soldiers and a few gated and gun-guarded driveway entrances) and past the throng of cabby shysters who hang out in the parking lot across the street from the bomb-sniffing-dog-secured Marriott Hotel grounds.

 

 

            I met and had lunch and a few smokes there with an Islamabad-based British Broadcasting Corporation crew, attended a European Union press conference with EU commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Development, Poul Nielson speaking about a multi-billion-dollar fund pledged by the EU for Afghan relief. I bought my morning newspaper from a mobile newspaper stand --- newspapers in both English and Arabic clipped on a guy’s bike. I purchased a copy of The News, the big Islamabad English daily newspaper. A dictator-president-reviewed newspaper that tries to make up for its lack of editorial page backbone with stabs at adding a bit of style and sophistication and some un-threatening global news access to its pages.

            I found a UN contact hanging around in the Marriott lobby who say’s he may be able to get me into Kabul, and I made good contact with an NGO aid who said he might be able to squeeze me through the intense Pakistani security and get me and my streetphoto cameras into the Afghan refugee camps around Peshawar at the Afghanistan-Pakistan red line on the  CNN War Map border.

            I’m also quickly learning that the war culture here in Islamabad is racing toward a general holiday shutdown. The big end of Ramadan  festival (Ed-al-Fitr) and the big beginning of Christmas season. When, according to sources I met today, almost all business and commerce and government shuts down, and when most of the buzzing markets nearly come to a standstill. When my hope for access will disappear with the bureaucrat’s flight home for the holidays and away from here --- because here is where (according to one UN official I spoke with today at the Marriott) it’s been one long 18-hour-a-day work rush since September 11 and we all just need to get a little bit of rest, need to get a little bit of a break from all this ...  

 

            Holiday greeting card vendors have begun popping up everywhere on market sidewalks and at corner squares --- like firework stands that pop up around Kansas towns near the Fourth of July. Many of the stands fly large banners advertising their stock of Ed-al-Fitr, Christmas, and New Year cards.

            The population of Pakistan is 97-percent Muslim --- a fact that drives many away from it because it’s so drastically mono-cultured --- but Christ is revered inside Islam as one of its most important prophets. Still --- the appearance of signs pushing Christmas cards surprised me, and made me feel a little less isolated in my work.

 

At least for a moment or two ...

 

 

*Rawalpindi    

 

 

                            This morning I hired a cabby at Melody Market outside the Islamabad Holiday Inn who knew where the city of Rawalpindi was, but who clearly didn’t know Rawalpindi very well. The ride through Rawalpindi (the locals call it Pindi), a congested, polluted, and noisy place I know I could learn to love if I had more time during a different era here --- was worth working around my confused cabby to see. I was there trying to hunt down a cheaper place to live a couple of days earlier than I’d expected. Because I’d already become comfortable enough here to establish my base camp for this shoot in more gritty and artistically-conducive surroundings than the over-protected Holiday Inn.

            I saw a lot more distrust and hate in the eyes of the people I encountered in Rawalpindi than I did in Islamabad, but I just had to get used to that, I supposed...

            As it was, I ended up checking out of the overpriced (nearly $100 a night) Islamabad Holiday Inn and into The New Islamabad Hotel at Aabpara Market in Islamabad (the place where the extremists burn the American flags on TV) for a much more reasonable $8 a night.

 

*Shopping Aabpara Market:

   Eating Out in Pakistan:

 

 

 

   “Having inherited the culinary traditions of the Moguls, the Turks, the Central Asians and the Iranians, eating out in Pakistan is a rich and unique experience.” [5]

 

 

                        I spent the late afternoon today making myself local at my new base camp at Aabpara Market by circulating some currency while shopping for my needs. My eight-dollar-a-day hotel room at the New Islamabad -- a cigarette-burns-in-the-carpet/cold-water box -- needed a clock, and I needed toothpaste. And I needed a Pakistani woolen shawl and a woolen hat (called a pakol) and an Afghan checkered scarf (called a dupatta) for disguising myself as a local whenever I might need to gain access to places generally denied to lone white American artists roaming the streets taking pictures. I also had to shop for a towel and toilet paper and for a few other everyday items I found out you need to buy in Pakistan when you rent an unheated, cold water, CNN Breaking News Box-equipped (no remote control included) hotel room.

            I also bought some very interesting street food from street-side vendors -- spiced vegetable, meat, and potato wraps -- a few bottles of Coca-Cola from a grocery merchant, and a few chocolate cookie treats from a sweet shop.

            I was the only Euro-American shopping at Aabpara Market this morning and this afternoon. In fact I was the only Euro-American I saw on the streets of Rawalpindi today or during the eight miles of meandering walks I took today from the hotel to the Marriott press pool and back. While shopping I attracted several Afghan beggars who I found could be shoed away with the help of the Pakistani merchants who I was shopping with. Merchants who would then invite me into their stalls to either lecture me about making war in their region of the world or who’d turn right around and scold me for America’s refusal to step in to solve our Kashmir problem with India. A maddening disconnect of thinking that seems universally subscribed to here. A twisted contradictory illogic that gave me headaches today, aggravated me on a couple of occasions, and ate up valuable time I could have spent back out on the street making streetphotos. Out on the street where hordes of kids would inconveniently follow me around --- as if I were a celebrity --- smiling and blurting out over and over again at me in their only English:

            Hello, how are you?

            Hello, how are you?

            Hello, how are you...?

 

            It was an exhausting walk through the markets today, but during the walk I also met many informative people who didn’t aggravate me or waste my time, and who I learned cultural nuances from. I found a man who said he supported the Taliban (all the way) in the war, but who after a conversation, some tea, and a negotiation --- agreed to process my film I shoot here. And whom I agreed (after the fellowship and some time to read his personality) to trust with it.

            I found a towel, an alarm clock, the woolen shawl, some toothpaste, and some take out dinner. It was Ramadan (the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, believed to be the month the Holy Quran “was sent down from heaven”) and it was OK for me to purchase my food and cigarettes during the day at Aabpara market. But during daylight hours I was only allowed to consume them in the privacy of my own hotel room or in the restaurant or lobby at the press pool at the Marriott Hotel.        

 

~

 

 

                        I got back to my Aabpara Market base camp after my day just in time to go shopping again for an hour or so before it got too dark, Just in time for Ramadan Taraweeh (breaking-the-fast) prayers. And just in time for me to pass out for a while due to my sore throat and cold, and another frantic jet lag sleep attack. I crashed solid until about 11:30 p.m., ignoring my flu on awakening in favor of watching today happening live in Washington DC on the CNN Breaking News Box, with my pen furiously scratching notes on a white legal pad.

            Watching the CNN Breaking News Box in my room and writing my journal. Because jet lag wouldn’t let me sleep. Because the blackness of night and the creepy exotic amplified singsong calls to night prayer over loudspeakers down the street spooked me. And because common sense wouldn’t allow me to roam these streets alone in this place at that late hour.

            I thought about my successful day out while soaking in the flavor and sounds of Islam outside my hotel room window. A day spent feeling out the mood of this place in this time. Watching Afghan refugees out on the streets scratching for a living. Hearing the sounds, the smells, and the feel of this exotic marketplace I’m living in. Making contact with the media and the war bureaucrats and the war fixers and the NGOs. Schmoozing with the cabbies and merchants and street people and police and the Pakistani soldiers who serve at the discretion of their absolute dictator-president. Uniformed peacekeepers with automatic rifles patrolling the marshal-law streets, keeping them safe for wandering photo-snapping global street artists like me. Trying whenever I’m out on the streets never to reveal my true anxiety at being a lone American fly on this angry Islamic wall at this most globally significant (but dangerous) of times.

            Sprawled out on my bed in room 222 of The New Islamabad Hotel in the middle of the night.

            No hot water. No heat. No remote control.

            Only a warm blanket, two locks on the door --- and a desk chair jammed under the doorknob just in case.

            And when you come to the New Islamabad Hotel in Aabpara Market in Islamabad, you’ll want to bring along a roll of your own toilet paper --- because at eight dollars a night (just about anywhere in the world) --- you don’t get many perks.

And here at the New Islamabad --- as it turns out, TP is a perk.

 

 

~

December 7, 2001

Islamabad, Pakistan

Pearl Harbor Day

(Two-months since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan)

 

 

                It was Pearl Harbor Day today, and there I was at the outskirts of the Kashmir Line of Control and at bureaucratic ground zero of the combat response to the September 11 surprise attack on the United States of America.

            Much too ironic to comment on --- I suppose...

            A reported final surrender of Kandahar still seemed muddled up in details. (Kandahar is either the battle that would never end or it’s the story that the media wouldn’t stop ending before its time.) But it was reported today that the military stronghold and spiritual capitol of the Taliban movement had fallen from all sides and that a final surrender of Taliban weapons would begin today.

 

*The Lay of the Land:

Wading Through the Culture of the World War on Terror

 

 

                                I woke up this morning after a three-hour jet lag nap still inflicted with the nagging soar throat. But I got out of the New Islamabad Hotel early to try to shake it off. I took six rolls of photos in and around Aabpara and Melody markets from sunrise until eight o’clock this morning. I captured the market waking up and cleaning itself off from yesterday’s business and I ended up capturing a few decent street photographs, but I actually spent much of the time watching my back and chatting up the merchants so I might feel as if I have a friend or two here. So the market might eventually feel more comfortable around my camera than it’s been so far. Although all in all, the Pakistanis of Aabpara Market in Islamabad (near the end of the Afghan Terrorist War of 2001) were extremely weary of foreigners in general and particularly distrustful of Americans in particular.

            As I went about my business making images I tried to chat with some of the merchants about my street photography mission working their market, but the whole thing lost a lot in the pig-English hand-signal language we all tried to use. But then I found my own translator (a clock merchant I’d bought an alarm clock from yesterday) and he explained to the market people who’d gathered around to listen that I was an American streetphoto artist, and that I’d be around for a few days or more photographing the streets of Islamabad, and in particular the streets of Aabpara Market.

            They seemed to take the news well.

            Several shook my hand with both of their hands and after letting go raised their right arm across their chests to settle their flattened right hand over their heart, the sign here of a greater-than-typical greeting --- a sincere and honored greeting.

            Now the word would get around, that a crazy American artist was living in the market at the New Islamabad Hotel and that one of his missions was to make street photography of their Aabpara Market as part of his ongoing lifelong global street photography project. That was what I wanted because that would help me produce better photographs. Of course that also left me more vulnerable to attack or worse --- however, I was betting that I’d find a way to stay out of trouble while doing my work in the typical manner I’ve become accustomed to over the miles and through the years. That is --- from the inside out rather than from the outside peeking in.

 

 

 

            Aabpara market has been the location of many of those American flag burnings I saw on the CNN Breaking News Box early on in the war, just after September 11. Demonstrations that intensified after the bombers started attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan on October 7, but which then all but died off after the dictator-president of Pakistan imprisoned a few demonstrators and especially after the Taliban were beaten into a corner this week and their al-Qaida mercenary forces were sent fleeing across borders or digging into caves. At a place not far from what could end up becoming my next stop if I can’t find a safe way to get to Kabul. At the border near Peshawar at the Khyber Pass near the Afghan White Mountain station of Tora Bora, on the red line on the 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box War Map.

            Some of the people who haunt this Aabpara market in Islamabad --- perhaps a dozen or so out of every 100 people on the streets that I’ve noticed --- would give me the skunk eye whenever I walked past them. They’d look sideways at me, scoff at me, or even spit on the ground in my general direction. And some of them would level me with (what I ended up calling) Kalashnikov stares. Chilling machine-gun stares out of un-blinking cold dark eyes. However, with a landslide approval rating from the clock merchant and from the market people who gathered at his shop to hear about my art mission, and the fact that most Pakistanis are civilized, hard working, friendly, curious, hospitable, and generous people --- I became somewhat more comfortable being known as the lone American artist living here and walking the streets of Aabpara Market.

            After being here for several days and being out and about most of the daylight hours, I’m still the only Euro-American I’ve seen walking around alone on the streets. And from what I’ve heard from some of the merchants I’ve encountered, I should expect to be here for months or even years before ever seeing another one not accompanied by a local guide with a waiting taxicab parked nearby at the curb.

            When I did need a cab ride to make it to an appointment on time or to the start of a press conference or to secure credentials, I’d pay about a dollar for my thirty-cent ride --- the penalty for being a camera-toting non-Pakistani American. Being American and being presumed rich can cost an American artist an arm and a leg to cab around a war theater and the ride generally cheats me out of powerful photographic moments that zip by too fast to capture from a speeding car.

            However, I’ve found out during the cabbing around I’ve been forced to do here since I arrived that the average Pakistani cabby generously decorates the inside of his windshield and dash board with various cultural do-dads of visual interest worth photographing through. Fuzzy dice (of course) and Quran compact disks dangling from rear view mirrors. Islamic or Arabic-lettered decals stuck to the borders of the windshield and side windows. Military stickers, cartoon action figures, sport memorabilia, and the like --- placed here and there about the dashboard and the windows. So since I arrived I’ve found that even when I’m forced to take a cab now and then, I’m still shooting pictures because of the charm I find using the adorned windshields as streetphoto foregrounds.

            But mostly I walk around so I can maximize my chances of running into a perfect moment somewhere on the sidewalks, out on the streets, from inside the markets looking out.

 

*Odd Men Out

 

 

                    The sore throat and cold and jet lag have left me sleeping restlessly in one to four hour spurts at almost any odd hour of the day. After breakfast today I shot another roll or two of film in Aabpara Market between eight and nine o’clock and then walked the three miles across town to the Marriott to once again gage my chances of weaseling a ride into Afghanistan.

            After nearly a work-week’s worth of over-priced four-dollar breakfasts at the Marriott hanging around the Associated Press, BBC, Al Jazeera, Reuters, and all the others --- eating high-dollar/low-taste breakfasts and discovering that this awful overpriced meal was the only networking opportunity in Pakistan for the likes of me, not just the first one --- I realized this war culture wasn’t much like those other war cultures I’ve wandered around in the past.

            No easy drinking at the regular hotel bars at night.

            No press corps association.

            Just friendly breakfasts with second and third-string crews stuck in Islamabad filming press conferences and wishing they’d gotten to go to Jalalabad two weeks ago after Kabul fell. When the Grand Trunk Road over the Khyber Pass opened up briefly and the international press corps broke the Pentagon monopoly on battlefield reporting by risking life and limb to rush the front lines of the Eastern Alliance troops at Tora Bora.

            Like firemen to burning buildings --- rushing into a war zone while refugees are rushing out. A natural gotta'-be-there reaction from that type that defies logic. Even the logic of the value of beaming the story back home on TV.

            Now these odd-men-out among the press corps are stuck in Islamabad on the outskirts of the action, close enough to smell the war --- but out covering global, regional, and local government issues and the rest of the war culture instead. Enduring unending news briefings and boredom in Islamabad instead of bombs, bullets, and glory at the front.

            It’s important stuff happening down here in the capitol.

            War coalition news conferences, European Union news conferences, Pakistan government news conferences, Afghan non-governmental relief agency news conferences, United Nations news conferences, and many more one-time news briefings due to occasional special visits by global VIPs.

            It’s very important and heady stuff.

            But all the news crews here realize is that their top-notch people on the media food chain have been rotated into Afghanistan while they’ve been relegated by rank or bad timing to setting up microphones and cameras at news conferences and asking questions of bureaucrats in suits and ties instead of special force troops and Afghan Alliance warriors.

            Well, in a way, global street photographers are a little bit like that too. But instead of seeking baron mountain combat, they seek the streets of the battlefield arena. So today I began in earnest my effort to capture defining streetphoto images of the outskirts of World War III. And I also began efforts I hope will morph my trip into perhaps an even more expansive Christmastime in Kabul photo essay, Christmastime in Jalalabad,  or Christmastime in Taliban championed Peshawar.

            I’d been photographing Islamabad for several days now, and now I wanted to get closer, a little more involved in the thing. And now was the time for that effort. An accelerated effort that began today with what I thought was a leadoff home run.

            A Reuters journalist I met at the Marriott gave me the name of a United Nations official he said might be able to hook me up with a ride to Kabul on a UN jet. And so I spent quite a bit of my time today running that access down.

 

*As You Wish
... where all the cab drivers are Pakistani ...

 

 

                After getting the name of the UN guy who might be able to fly me to Kabul, I walked past the omnipresent and annoying gathering of cabbies who camp just outside Marriott territory hounding the press to use their inflatedly priced services. You can get a thirty cent cab ride there for about five or ten dollars. You get the best and shiniest rides in town, and your cabby is likely to speak a bit more English, but the overpowering sense you’re being gouged by those shysters fogs the more comfortable experience the slicker cars provide.

            Of course the global journalists who are here and who are backed by global corporate funding that just doesn’t care how much it has to pay to gather its news, aren’t concerned about being gouged. News is news, and if it costs $10 to ride two kilometers, then it doesn’t even show up as a blip on the corporate expense report radar screen.

            I make my bread and butter by avoiding $10 dollar cab rides in order to make street photography closer to the people I’m studying. I’ll even avoid dollar cab rides I get offered from smaller, older, and more beat up cabs that hail me along the streets away from the Marriott shyster cabby zone. In order to learn more about the culture I’m studying than I would from just a cabby, and to use the opportunity to capture perfect moments of historic significance with greater understanding of the condition at hand.

            I’ve always thought that street photography (like life) should be a contact sport --- not just a walk in the park leering at and spying on street people.

            Even the cheaper cabs have a method of separating you from more of your cash. How much for a ride to Aabpara Market, I’ll ask them. And the cabby will counter with, as you wish... And as I’ve discovered, the as you wish tactic always costs more because it counts on those not familiar with accepted rates to always pay more. And so (as I wished) I walked around alone on the streets of Islamabad instead of riding for about four more hours today. Meeting people and making photographs as I went about my bureaucratic shuffle trying to get me and my streetphoto cameras a little closer to a different outskirts of World War III than Islamabad.

 

 

*The Push to Kabul

 

 

                       ... So I began the big push to get to Kabul today by walking past the Marriott cabby throng, simply shaking my head no at all the insistent come-ons. A few kilometers of sidewalk, street, and marketplace later I walked up to and entered the United Nations offices at the Saudi-Pak Tower, a modern skyscraper in Islamabad’s Blue Market area. While clearing security there I began a conversation with a man named Shahid Mehmood, a Pakistani educator and an organizer of an NGO agency specializing in the education of displaced Afghan youth in the Afghan refugee camps at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border near Peshawar.

            While chatting with him I told him why I’d come to the Saudi-Pak Tower --- to see the United Nations guy and to try to talk my way past (what I was made to understand from talking to journalists at the Marriott) was a $2400 round trip on a UN flight to Kabul. (A BBC cameraman at the Marriott breakfast table told me he thought the $2400 charge was, “The UN’s idea of a free press.”) And I told Shahid that my aim for being at the Saudi Pak Tower was to shoot the moon and appeal for an exemption of that fee on the basis of being a non-corporate (insufficiently funded) global artist and to try to score myself and my streetphoto cameras a free ride to the streets of Kabul.

            Shahid told me I’d been misled about the $2400 charge, and he told me that he knew that the United Nations official I’d come to the building to see had already fled the country for the holidays and that he wasn’t even the right person I needed to see to weasel my flight in the first place. Furthermore he told me that he’d help me go about the proper procedure if I had time to wait for him to finish his own meeting there. So I confirmed the man I’d come to see had left town, and I waited for Shahid in the lobby while he had a half hour-meeting upstairs, and then he and I went over to his nearby home where we took our shoes off before entering the house and where we broke the Ramadan fast together with some tea and sweet bread. (Shahid was a Muslim, but not devout enough to impolitely let a non-Muslim guest break the fast alone.)

            I met Shahid’s family --- his son, his daughter, his wife --- and I met the visiting Buddhist scholar from Japan who was living with Shahid and his family in Islamabad’s Peshawar Bazaar district.

            During our conversations I recited a poll [6] for them that I’d heard reported to me on the CNN Breaking News Box last week that lifted all the hearts in the room at the telling. According to the poll, in March 2001 --- prior to September 11 --- 45 percent of Americans had a high opinion of Muslims. The same worded question about respect and overall opinion was sampled in December 2001 (last week) and a surprising 58-percent now said they had a high opinion of Islam. We discussed how this could have happened because Shahid and his family would have expected the number to have gone down, due to the cruelty of the attack and the fact that all the attackers were Muslim and that the streets of Pakistan were rife with anti-American clamor.

            I told them that I thought the rise in respect may have been due to Pakistan’s immediate state-sponsored alliance against both terrorism and the Afghan Taliban who encouraged it, and I told them I thought another reason may have been the unanimity from the Organization of the Islamic Conference --- a 56-0 vote to back the US coalition in its Afghan fight.

            My Muslim hosts and their Buddhist house guest also were surprised and delighted when I told them how it had been difficult to find a copy of the Quran in American bookstores for weeks after the attack, an indication of how some Americans were choosing to react to September 11 in a constructive, educated, and curious manner.

 

            Shahid mentioned that his NGO was concerned about Pakistan’s literacy rate. A rate he said the government claimed at or above 50 percent but that he thought was far closer to only 30 to 35 percent.

            We chatted about a lot of cultural and war-related issues, among them whether the US might attack Iraq next (we all agreed that would be expected if the US government could prove they had anything to do with the attack on September 11) and we all took a walk around the neighborhood and through a nearby Christian slum. And I remember how odd it felt to be around the three Muslim women who had put on veils and scarves to cover all but their eyes for the walk and who then discarded the extra wraps once we were back inside the house.

            I read in my travel guide that women in Islamabad and Karachi are more prone than the rest of Pakistan to going out without a veil, due to the greater degree of education among the ruling class. I’ve seen evidence of that already, about one in 12 women by my count in Islamabad go bareheaded versus about one in 50 I saw in Rawalpindi.

 

            I savored the tea I was served at Shahid’s house --- which was (by far) the best cup of tea I’d ever tasted anywhere I’d ever been around the world, including England. In fact, later in the day I mentioned that cup of tea to an Englishman I ran into at the Marriott and he scoffed at me --- saying it couldn’t have been as good as the tea served in England.

            I reminded him that the English had stolen their whole little tea tradition from these parts. He scoffed again and said, “Yes, well... it came from here --- but it was perfected in England ...”

 

            Yes, well...

~

 

                         As we took the cab from Shahid’s home to the Marriott across town, (it cost Shahid only thirty cents for both of us,) I realized two things. That I was quickly becoming off my feet with illness, and that I was diminishing in strength despite the magnificently uplifting tea I’d just had. I was sick and getting sicker by the minute and I already felt way late for collapsing when the 2:30 p.m. daily United Nations press briefing began. About how plans had been announced to re-start UN relief convoys from Pakistan to Afghanistan up the Grand Trunk Road through Peshawar after New Years Day, and only then if the roads could be made safe enough by that time from bandits and from the war. Afterward, I approached the woman Shahid told me I needed to speak to about UN flights, and I began weaseling as best I could in my weakened condition.

            I never had high hopes of getting to Kabul. The Grand Trunk Road between Islamabad and Kabul looked like a promising route a month ago (after Kabul fell) and at that time I announced to Janet that if the roads were safe enough I’d be going up to Kabul. It was at that time that the issue Janet and I had been avoiding and referring to among ourselves as the K-word came out into the open. Of course Janet was angry and a little bit scarred at first, but as she followed the news she became a bit more comfortable with the notion of me going up that road --- if not resigned to the fact she married a guy who’d do this to her.

            Not a week went by after the overt K-word became the covert Kabul trip when (while in Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving) my dad handed me a newspaper clipping about four journalists trying to go up that road between Jalalabad and Kabul who were executed by bandits or by retreating Taliban, and I immediately reversed my decision to go up there no matter what developments dared me to do so. I made that decision for Janet and for my dad and for all my friends who wished that I’d come home in one piece. And I made the decision because on this trip the war itself wasn’t the aim of my project as it had been in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala during the Cold War. My aim was the streets of Islamabad and maybe the streets of Peshawar or Jalalabad or Kabul on the outskirts of the battlefront. And only if I could drop myself safely enough into one of those places currently away from most of the bombing and fighting.

            I wasn’t about to take the chance of being kidnapped or executed going up a road just to get to more imbedded streets. After the execution of those four journalists I announced that until multi-national peacekeeping troops secured that road and there was a system of respect for the law there, I wasn’t about to take the 50-50 chance that I’d be robbed or beaten or killed en route. The Marriott press people told me they’d heard of only one freelancer recently who’d vowed to try out that road. And that one, they said, had deep-pocket bribe money to spare on his effort but had yet to be heard from since he’d left Islamabad the day I arrived last Monday. It sounded to me like journalism legend, as nobody at the breakfast table had first-hand knowledge of the freelancer, just grapevine chatter. But they assured me that nobody in their right mind (not even a determined journalist) would care to commit suicide going up or down that road for the weeks or months to come, well past the time and the budget I’ve allotted myself on these streets.

 

            It had just been announced at the press briefing that even the UN wouldn’t be trying the road from Peshawar to Kabul until after New Years Day. So with the only overland route eliminated as an option, the only way to get to Kabul from here now would be by air. And since I didn’t have $2400 to pay the United Nations, Shahid’s news that he was sure the flight was free lifted my spirit and despite the oncoming flu, I got the feeling that I just might have a chance at shooting this Kabul moon. So I approached Stephanie Bunker, Public Information Officer for the United Nations Development Program with renewed vigor against the creeping crud.

            I explained my funding restraints and my artistic mission (she gave me an undefined “Whooooo” when I told her I was a global street artist from Kansas), and I explained my desire to hitch a ride to Kabul. She was enthusiastic, and she gave me the name and phone number of a UN flight operations clerk at the UN Afghanistan flight operations building in western Islamabad. She urged me to call him immediately because she said she’d soon be out of the country at UN headquarters in New York for a week or three and thereby wouldn’t be able to vouch for me. I went right out to the Marriott phone center, and called the flight operations director who --- no questions asked --- said he was writing my name on the manifest for the Tuesday morning flight out and told me to stop by his office sometime before Monday morning to fill out some paperwork.

            It seemed as though my little red-line-on-the-terror-war-map street photography project was about to expand to the streets of Kabul as well ...

 

            I’d hit a leadoff home run in my bureaucratic battle. 

            I was simultaneously giddy but sick, and so I gladly paid two dollars for my thirty-cent cab ride three miles back to my hotel room at Aabpara Market where I finally succumbed to the awful flu I’d felt creeping up on me since I was at Ground Zero in New York last Saturday.

            Physically spent from the jet lag and the stuffed-up nose and the coughing like a mad man, I took a Sudafed 12-hour cold pill --- called Janet and told her about my luck getting to Kabul --- and then gratefully fell right off to sleep at 8 o’clock. Happy to have started the trip taking pictures for a few days on the streets of Islamabad, and now thrilled to be fixed up with access to the streets of Kabul as well.

            Heavily medicated and flat on my back on my bed in room 222, planning to recover, planning to beat the jet-lag, planning to write, and planning to leave the hotel on the weekend only to do the necessary paperwork at UN flight operation headquarters on Saturday morning ... 

 

 

~

December 8, 2001

Islamabad, Pakistan

Hung by His Neck From a Streetlamp

 

 

                         The news today reported progress in ground attacks and aerial bombardments against the cave complexes at Tora Bora, just outside of  Peshawar. And the possible final days of al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden there.

 

Headline News*[7]

*  “Just a month ago the Taliban controlled 90 percent of Afghanistan. Now they control none of it.”
 

“Kabul is still rejoicing after the fall of the Taliban and are re-emerging activities that were banned under Taliban rule."
 

“In Kandahar, white Taliban surrender flags have been replaced with the red, black, and green flag of  Afghanistan when it was ruled by a king --- prior to 1973.”

 

* Taliban Mayor of Kandahar Hung by His Neck From a Streetlamp

 

* Looting Beginning to Wane in Kandahar: Kandahar Radio Station Resumes
    Broadcasting

 

* US Marines at Camp Rhino Destroy Probing Convoy

 

* Kandahar Reported Tense Among Rival Armed Groups: 200 Arabs Still
    Holding Out at Airport

 

* Heavy Bombing at Tora Bora

“Above the village of Malawa the Arabs and their cronies fought fiercer than the Taliban because they had much more to lose. As non-Afghans they stood a greater chance of being executed after surrender.”

 

“American warplanes bombed the Tora Bora cave complex where locals believe Osama bin Laden is hiding, however bombing was far less intense today than in recent days.”

 

* Several Clashes Between Rival Warlords Break Out in Several Areas of
    Afghanistan

 

* Pakistan Sending More Troops and Helicopters to Afghan Border in Blocking
   Anvil Movement

 

*Terror Explosion at KFC in Karachi Injures Five

 

*GOP Prevails on Anti-terror Spending Bill: Said Yes to $20 Billion, no to $35
   Billion

 

*UN Flight Ops:

   The UN’s Idea of a Free Press ...

 

                       I spent the night on Friday as I had since I arrived, sleeping in two to four-hour shifts. Alternating TV updates on the CNN Breaking News Box with fits of sleep and occasional waves of writing. I got out of bed, and got dressed at about 7:30 a.m., took another set of cold tablets and took a few more photographs around Aabpara Market as it was waking up, and then I took a cab to the UN flight operations office to fill out my paperwork for my Tuesday flight to Kabul.

            The man I’d spoken to on the phone yesterday wasn’t in the office and my point person Stephanie Bunker was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean by now on her way to New York. And the fellow in charge assured me that there was no way on Earth I’d be flying to Kabul with the United Nations for less than $2400 --- and who furthermore added that at $2400 it was a bargain because the fare had just been halved from the $4800 it had been just a couple of weeks ago before the journalist’s overland rush to flood Afghanistan in heavily armed convoys began. He told me an exemption to the fee had never been granted. Not to anyone, including some pathetic non-corporate street artist from Kansas. (He didn’t say that, but that’s the way it felt).

            Well, the temperature of my fever skyrocketed at the thought that I’d been boxed out of what I thought was my previously weaseled trip to Kabul --- that I’d been cheated out of the lead-off home run that I thought I’d hit yesterday. The sweat beaded up on my brow, the dehydration side-effect from the cold tablets I’ve been eating full time like candy since I got here took hold and (combined with my anger) became a greater factor in my condition than my condition itself. And as I hopelessly whined to the unsympathetic UN flight operations manager about my streetphoto mission, my mouth dried up completely and my lips started smacking wildly as I bitched.

            No $2400.

            No sympathy.

            No UN flight.

            No Kabul. 

            My leadoff home run instead went foul ...

 

Tora Bora Heats Up The News