Drawn to the Front

Ted Rall, war reporter, is just back from the Afghan front--a place as nonexistent as his reporting credentials, he says. “Anywhere in Afghanistan is arguably the front. It’s any bend in the road, it constantly changes, it could easily be called The Side or The Back.”

Rall has never covered a war before, nor has he ever worked as a reporter. Most days, he’s an award-winning political cartoonist, author and a world-class cynic--the kind of guy who likes to marinate in a warm bath, then draw his corrosive cartoon characters from an easel at home in his slippers.

With no experience and no actual battle lines to cover, Rall considered himself ideal for the Afghanistan correspondent job. How bad could it be? He’s had a passion for Central Asia since childhood, when he read about it in National Geographic. And wouldn’t it be great to see Afghanistan on “somebody else’s nickel?”

It wasn’t hard for him to get an assignment. “There apparently aren’t a lot of American journalists dying to go to Afghanistan,” he says. And he does have two Robert F. Kennedy awards (1995 and 2000), and a Pulitzer Prize finalist’s title to wave as credentials. In any event, two local radio stations (KFI-AM and KLAC-AM) and one newspaper (the Village Voice in Manhattan) hired the 38-year-old curmudgeon to take the trip and send back stirring communiques.

He enlisted his wife, Judy Chang, 37, to take pictures, since her dot-com job had recently ended. On Nov. 16, the pair flew to Tajikistan and immediately joined a convoy of 45 real reporters, who were traveling to the Afghanistan border.

Rall believed he was a step ahead of his colleagues, because most of them had never been to that part of the planet. He, on the other hand, had traveled there extensively, and even led a quirky five-week tour for 24 people in 2000 to countries whose names end in “stan.” (Tajikistan, Turkhmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrigyzstan.) They couldn’t enter Afghanistan because “there was fighting, as usual.” Rall charged no fee for his services. He did it out of his love for the area and his interest in “random human experimentation.”

From that experience, he says, “I knew some pitfalls we might encounter in Afghanistan. But even I was astonished by the insanity of the conditions we found there.”

The first thing he realized is that “things are even worse than they are portrayed in the media. We’re talking about a country that uses treads from ancient Soviet tanks as speed bumps in the few existing roads. A place in which all housing and other buildings in village after village has been totally flattened, erased, by bombs. A place where people talk only in past tense.

“They’ll say, ‘I had a great friend, but he died. I had a good father, but he was killed. There was a town here, but it’s gone. A museum there, but it was bombed.’ Afghanistan is all about what was, not what is. Because there is nothing now. It’s like driving through a ghost town in Nevada, except it’s almost the whole country,” Rall says.

To get from the border to the town of Taloqan, about 20 kilometers into Afghanistan, the reporters had to negotiate for their own transportation. There were plenty of rides available, Rall says, because Afghanistan “has an even more developed car culture than Los Angeles. There are SUVs, Jeeps, leftover Soviet trucks. Osama [bin Laden] bought loyalty by giving these vehicles to his followers.” But there was a hitch. “For a 20-kilometer ride, the Afghans wanted $1,400 per person,” Rall says, still sounding amazed. The appropriate fee would have been about $1, he adds.

Right away, he says, he noticed “a kind of civil war between TV and print media.” “The big TV guys, like the BBC and CNN, came with pockets bursting with cash. They paid the most exorbitant amounts for even the smallest service.”

Some paid the asking price for the ride to Taloqan, he says. Most bargained and paid between $400 and $800. Rall was in despair. He and his wife only had $7,000 for the entire trip, he says, and at that rate his money would be gone before he had done his work. “I was like a kid waiting for a kickball. I waited and waited. Finally, when all the others had left, we got someone to take us for $20 each.”

Of course, he got there before the others, because the drivers took the big spenders in a huge, unnecessary circle in order to justify the immense fees they had been paid.

The press contingent ended up in the relatively intact town of Taloqan because the siege of Kunduz was taking place not far away. “Kunduz is at the crossroads of the only two major paved roads in Afghanistan. We had to wait for Kunduz to fall so we could travel past it. If we tried to get around it on the few atrocious unpaved roads, there was certainty of being robbed and killed,” he says.

Everyone checked in at the town’s tiny Foreign Ministry, where they were assigned to stay in different houses, according to what they could pay. Rall says the BBC and CNN people stayed in “the only house with a real toilet and electricity. It belonged to a Northern Alliance commander.”

The Ralls, two Washington Post reporters and three from Portuguese radio and TV, stayed in a house with no furniture, electricity, heat, water or toilet--”only a hole in the ground outside near the family rooster.” Others, mostly from the foreign press, stayed in similar houses nearby. For this, each paid a minimum of $25 per night, he says.

Each media group was assigned by the ministry to a translator and a driver for a fee of $120 per person per day.

“The first morning we said, ‘Take us to the front.’ Off we went, zipping down the highway, the wind blowing through our hair. It’s very surreal. You’re in this late-model car, you’re listening to Indian movie music, you’re charging your satellite phone on the cigarette lighter--and all the while you are passing refugees from the siege of Kunduz, fleeing the other way. You’re also passing slow convoys of tanks and armored personnel trucks, all going the same place you are. And overhead, F-16s are circling lazily, trying to draw out enemy fire. You don’t really know if you will come back dead or alive.”

The front was very weird, he says. It was a bend in the road, which looked like a parking lot--filled with people who’d driven their cars there to get away from the shelling. “This is a war without real battles. Typically what happens in a place like Kunduz is that the Northern Alliance surrounds the town, then the Americans drop bombs to clear out the Taliban so the Alliance can go in and take their place.”

Typically, he says, the Taliban got tired of being bombed. So its members would come out in abject surrender and physically embrace their rivals. “After this, they literally run to the nearest place where they can get their beards shaved off and buy those hats that the Northern Alliance wear. They ditch their turbans ... get a shave, and the next day they are Northern Alliance troops. So when we say we’ve won, you have to understand that many of today’s Alliance troops are yesterday’s Taliban. This is a fashion war,” he says. “They could change hats again tomorrow--and they probably will.”

Rall and his wife had been “hanging out” in the war zone for a couple of hours, watching relatively little happen, when he “got a bad feeling that something awful was about to occur.” He yielded to his impulse to leave, and shortly afterward “the parking lot” was shelled by the Taliban, and most people in it were injured or killed.

In the few days Rall and his wife were in Taloqan, three members of the press in his original 45-person convoy were killed.

A reporter who was interviewing Taliban prisoners was set upon by the prisoners, and Rall says that eyewitnesses with whom he spoke said the man was “torn apart.” Northern Alliance soldiers nearby either could not or did not protect the reporter, Rall says.

A cameraman in their group was killed by Taliban shelling. Another cameraman, a 42-year-old Swede staying down the street from the Ralls, was murdered in the middle of the night. “Three soldiers came knocking on all the doors. We heard them and didn’t answer. Others heard and didn’t answer. The only one who answered was the Swedish guy. They killed him and took his money. They were going to kill the other five press members in the house, but a translator who was sleeping there prevailed upon them to have mercy. He told them, ‘It’s Ramadan. You shouldn’t kill them if you are Muslim. They have families and children.’”

Although the official number of journalists killed is eight, Rall believes many more deaths may have occurred. And he has noticed other oddities in reportage, he says. “Prior to our arrival, a French journalist was killed. I confirmed with eyewitnesses that she was gang raped, horrifically mutilated, her body found nude. Yet all the reports said only that she had been shot. No details of what happened. I get the impression that nobody is really interested in the death of journalists in Afghanistan.” (According to news reports, a French radio reporter named Johanne Sutton was killed in Afghanistan on Nov. 11.)

After the Swedish cameraman’s death, remaining members of the convoy realized they had to leave town. “Let’s face it. These guys knew we had money. They had driven us to this place. They knew exactly where we lived. We wouldn’t survive them if we stayed.”

Some went on to Kabul, but not the Ralls. “It would have cost $3,300 for each of us to hire transportation. If we spent it to go there, we wouldn’t have enough to get back.” More important, Rall says, the difficult conditions were getting to many of the more seasoned journalists, and certainly to his wife and him.

“War you can live with. But when you are being hunted down like prey for the money you carry, when you are in a country where every man over 13 carries an AK-47 and wants to point it at you, when almost every breath you take is filled with toxic dust--Afghan dust is the consistency of flour, and even a dog walking on a road causes a cloud to rise so that you must breathe it,” he says.

To make matters worse, the country’s brutal drought means there is no water; certainly none that is clean.

Rall came home on Dec. 16, having filed reports for the Voice (where his political cartoons are a weekly feature) and daily radio reports by satellite phone. Doug Simmons, managing editor of the Voice, calls Rall’s war reports “well-reported, insightful and intensely contrarian. One story, for example, was headlined ‘How We Lost the War.’ As far as I know, his story was the only expression of such a sentiment and argument that’s appeared in the press.” Rall is writing a book on what he calls his “12th century experience” in Afghanistan. It will not be a pretty tale.

“I have reached a level of cynicism even I would never have thought possible,” he says.

Bombing and destruction have been “over the top,” he says. The country has no infrastructure--no paved roads, running water, electricity. He’d like to see guns confiscated from the populace--”but you’d have to kick down every door. They have a guns-and-heroin culture there now.”

Rall says average citizens are extremely hard-working and loyal. “Even in the midst of all this, it is amazing to see them plowing the dry ground, trying to graze animals in what appears to be dirt. Somehow, they are growing pomegranates and managing to save a few scrawny sheep. Imagine what a fabulous country they could build if they had a few decades of peace.”