|
 oublespeak,
laziness, ignorance, and incompetence have all been abundant in
the mainstream press coverage of Afghanistan. And even worse, American
reporters are regularly being played by dubious sources in the Afghan
interim government's defense and intelligence ministries —
the very folks who may have brought you the assassination of Transport
Minister Abdul Rahman last week.
Ever since
the recapture of the north from the Taliban, one faction in the
Northern Alliance, the Panshir Valley Tajiks loyal to the late Massoud,
has been attempting to belittle, besmirch, and now to overthrow,
their powerful rivals: General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek,
and Ismail Khan, a Tajik from Herat.
The problem,
for our national interest, is that the leaders being attacked are
those who took back the north from the Taliban, captured and turned
over the prisoners now in Cuba, and who are still trying to rout
out Taliban and al Qaeda remnants. The attackers are the faint-hearted
lot who twiddled their thumbs on the Kabul front for weeks while
Dostum and Khan did the dirty work of fighting the Taliban.
It's bad enough
that Dostum and Khan's regions — with six of Afghanistan's
approximately 20 million people — haven't received any of the
American aid sent to the central government. But when American reporters
throw their weight against them they're doing it for little reason
other than intellectual laziness. They can't be bothered to do the
legwork to find out who the good guys are.
What is happening
in Afghanistan is precisely what pro-Western Islamic leaders have
long noticed: The American press will try to destroy the very elements
who most love America. As Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress
told me shortly after September 11, the Muslim world's progressive
elements have often felt abandoned by the United States.
A piece by
Peter Baker, in the February 8 Washington Post, makes apparent
the major role of the press as an unwitting dupe of partisan interests
struggling for power in Afghanistan, but the New York Times
has been at least as culpable and far less competent. The New
Yorker has also published some dodgy longer pieces that seem
to have eluded their famous fact-checkers.
Baker's focus
is on the claim of Defense Minister Fahim's deputy Keram that General
Abdul Rashid Dostum is receiving money and weapons from Iran —
and perhaps from Iran's religious chief, Ayatollah Khamenei.
On the face
of it, this is highly unlikely. Through the fall's anti-Taliban
campaign and up to the present, Dostum has worked closely with the
United States military. There is little reason for him to antagonize
us, his powerful backers, in favor of a weaker, problematic state
with its own complicated motives in the region. Then too, Dostum
is a former Communist, a secularist, an anti-fundamentalist, and
the least Islamist of all the Afghan leaders — not the sort
of man Khamenei would want around.
Far from supporting
Dostum, American intelligence sources say that an Iranian-funded
and -trained Afghan Islamist group closely associated with the Panshiri
Tajiks, Sepa-i-Mohammed, is currently trying to undermine both Dostum
and his fellow-scapegoat, Ismail Khan.
But common
sense does not detain Baker on his way to serving his Afghan puppet-masters:
Dostum ostensibly
was a member of the Northern Alliance, the ethnic Tajik-led militia
coalition that drove the Taliban from the north with U.S. help
last fall and whose leaders now hold several key posts in the
interim government. But he has made only grudging nods toward
the new central authority.
Dostum "ostensibly"
a member of the Northern Alliance? They would have gotten nowhere
without him. Dostum was the major Afghan factor in the Taliban's
defeat in the North, working more closely with the American military
than any other leader. While the Panshiri-Tajik militia sat on the
weapons provided them by Iran and Russia — not distributing
them to other Northern Alliances forces, and stalled in safety in
the Panshir Valley north of Kabul — Dostum's poorly equipped
men fought bravely on horseback to defeat the Taliban's tanks.
Now why might
Dostum have made only "grudging nods" to those who are
now trying — successfully, it seems — to take credit for
his victories? Could it have anything to do with the fact that while
Dostum and his men fought on behalf of the whole country, they have
been given no real power (except in the region he has long governed)
and no economic aid?
Baker leaps
into the trap set for him by the Panshiri-Tajik faction:
Keram, one
of interim Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim's closest aides, returned
three days ago from a mission to Mazar e-Sharif, where he said
he confronted Dostum's lieutenants about the reported aid from
Iran. They denied it, Keram said; Dostum was in India at the time.
Keram said the Iranian aid was obvious and that he has documents
to prove it, though he did not produce them for inspection.
He "did
not produce them for inspection": Did it ever occur to Baker
to ask to see the evidence, whether weapons or documents?
And had he been refused, wouldn't that at least set off warning
bells? Does Baker ever consider that these "government authorities"
have every reason to try to blacken Dostum's reputation and diminish
his power? And what about Dostum's denial? Might a reasonable reporter
ask Dostum about the charges? Why is he assumed guilty until proven
innocent, on the basis of documents that no one is allowed to see?
The scenario
Baker buys into ignores the historical facts. It's the Panshiri
Tajik faction in Afghanistan — Massoud's men, and later Fahim's
— that actually received Iranian support throughout the Taliban's
rule.
Baker makes
sure to attack Dostum's character, again without evidence:
Known for
his brutal methods, the ethnic Uzbek warlord repeatedly betrayed
allies in every phase of Afghanistan's 23 years of war and has
been linked to some of the period's bloodiest massacres.
"Brutal"
has practically become Dostum's first name in the American press,
but no one has ever put in writing just what he is supposed to have
done, or shown any evidence against him. He did change sides —
but so did press golden boy Hamid Karzai (who arguably changed sides
more times).
In the last
charge, of massacres, Baker reveals his utter ignorance of Afghanistan's
recent history. At the very end of his article, Baker really puts
his foot in his mouth:
"The official
said that the interim government has considered dispatching another
ethnic Uzbek commander, Abdul Malik Pahlawan, to deal with Dostum.
Malik, once Dostum's second-in-command, betrayed him to the Taliban
in 1997, setting off a string of massacres as Mazar-e Sharif changed
hands twice. Malik 'has the ability to defeat Dostum, but we don't
want to start fighting again,' the intelligence official said. 'We're
keeping quiet and we're waiting to see what happens.'" In passing,
we might ask why Dostum and Malik are identified as Uzbek (Malik
is actually half Pashtun), while none of the other Afghans mentioned
in Baker's article — Hamid Karzai, General Fahim, Keram, Agriculture
Minister Anwari — are ethnically tagged.
Malik's betrayal
just happened to "set off a string of massacres"? Malik
has been recognized as a war criminal in just about every book and
Amnesty International or United Nations report on this period. And
it was the "brutal" Dostum who called in the U.N. to investigate
the mass graves of slain Taliban POWs Malik left behind him when
he fled to — ready for this? — Iran.
Brief history
review: Malik, after temporarily pushing Dostum out, had invited
the Taliban into Mazar on May 25, 1997. Two days later, the Taliban
were defeated by an indigenous uprising, but Malik, recognizing
that he might end up like the Taliban, switched sides and remained
in power in Mazar. Under Malik's administration, massacres of several
thousands were carried out — not only of Taliban prisoners
of war but also of many local civilians. Malik's incompetence as
a military leader led to the Taliban's return to the outskirts of
Mazar. Dostum came back from his exile in Turkey in September 1997,
raised an army from scratch, and pushed the Taliban back.
In November
1997, back in power, Dostum contacted the special rapporteur for
human rights for Afghanistan, Professor Choong-Hyun Paik, to investigate
mass graves in the Shebergan area, and took him to the sites himself.
According to Ahmed Rashid's often-cited Taliban, more than
2000 Taliban POWs had been massacred. (Here is the U.N. secretary
general's report
from March 12, 1998, on the mass graves.)
Dostum also insisted on respecting international conventions regarding
the luckier Taliban POWs who survived captivity under Malik, releasing
them unilaterally, as the U.N. noted.
That "brutal warlord," Dostum, sounds as though he has
been trying to play by the rules Americans like all along: by not
mistreating POWs, and respecting human rights and the United Nations.
Where are the brutal misdeeds, the massacres?
Speaking of
murder, the Kabul airport assassination on Thursday of Transport
and Tourism Minister Abdul Rahman still remains murky, but it is
reported to have been the work of high officials in the defense
and intelligence ministries. This might suggest a credibility problem
in Baker's method of using " a high-ranking Afghan intelligence
official, who asked not to be identified" for one's view of
the political landscape.
Unfortunately, Peter Baker's rewriting of history and manipulation
by factional elements is by no means an isolated case. Perhaps the
worst offender among American papers has been the New York Times,
whose reporting on Afghanistan is at least as biased as the Post's
and far less coherent. And the worst Times reporter in Afghanistan
is beyond a doubt Carlotta Gall, who, as I detailed in a
January 4 New York Post op-ed, went so far as to not
report what Dostum said at a press conference in which he warned
that the Taliban are still a threat — and offered to go after
them with his own forces. Instead, Gall replaced his words with
her attacks — again without any evidence — on his character.
Other New
York Times reporters have joined in the hatchet job. Jane Perlez,
writing on November 19, discussed "the ruthless Gen. Abdul
Rashid Dostum," "known for his particularly brutal behavior
towards soldiers and civilians." Between soldiers and civilians,
that wouldn't seem to leave anyone he isn't brutal toward...
funny that his people seem to love him.
Again in the
Times, on December 25, Amy Waldman wrote that Dostum has
"a very checkered human-rights record dating back to the mid-90s."
Her source? "One Western diplomat." Who? With what connections
in the Afghan government? Was he or she in Afghanistan in the mid-'90s?
Waldman even
quotes a rival general on the subject of Dostum's alleged incompetence
to serve in the interim government: "He is illiterate —
not educated. He doesn't have the competence to be deputy defense
minister of Afghanistan." Needless to say, Dostum is literate.
This couldn't have been so hard to verify, so why quote obvious
liars? The Indian writer Pankaj Mishra, writing in the January 17
New York Review of Books, refers casually to Dostum as "the
notoriously ruthless leader of the Uzbek militia," again without
examples or evidence. In a biweekly journal, there is no excuse
for fact-checkers' failure to interrogate Mishra on his careless
slurs.
Why are reporters
so willing to slander a man they have nothing on? Why do they fall
so easily into doing the work of Dostum's Afghan enemies? And why
don't they bother to interview the man? Besides Pelton's piece,
exactly one interview with Dostum has appeared in English since
September 11: a January 8 Q&A by veteran Turkish journalist
Asla Aydintasbas on
Salon.com.
A number of
factors are at work. Robert Young Pelton, the American journalist
who has spent by far the most time with Dostum since September 11,
says of his three weeks trailing him for a National Geographic
Adventure piece):
Dostum is
in meetings from the moment he gets up till after midnight. He
doesn't have the time to reach out to the press, and journalists
are afraid to approach him for an interview. They come with a
preconceived idea that Dostum controls this region by force and
they're intimidated. The biggest joke is that he is a very shy
guy, a little bit uncomfortable with strangers. In the three weeks
I was with him I never saw him yell at anyone or raise his voice.
He's a very mild-mannered guy.
Another part
of it is his appearance. It's tough to communicate to him that
he has to shave and wear a suit, but he's usually out in the field
for a week at a time and he doesn't, he gets kind of scraggly.
He has a nice smile, when he smiles he looks like a little kid.
But he has the habit I've seen in other Central Asians of freezing
into a grimace when he's photographed. He doesn't photograph well.
And for this
he should be crucified? Isn't it a journalist's business to ask
for an interview? To see beyond — or see the reasons for —
a-less-than-glamorous appearance? There is also a class bias involved.
Dostum is from a peasant family and had to leave school after the
seventh grade. Like the Green Berets he fought beside, he's never
had a Saville Row suit. As Pelton puts it in his National Geographic
Adventure article, "These soldiers.... come from much the
same background as Dostum's: sons of miners, farmers, and factory
workers; men whose only way out of poverty is the military."
But sensitivity to these factors is beyond the crop of moral and
intellectual midgets currently reporting this war. So instead of
doing their work, journalists go on repeating what they've read
in others' reports: "brutal warlord," "ruthless warlord,"
and so on, without even the imagination to vary their insults.
Then there
is the issue of the hidden agenda of some of those whose bias toward
Dostum has been particularly outrageous.
A quick Google
search reveals, for example, that the Times's vitriolic Carlotta
Gall is the daughter of Sandy Gall, a British citizen with long-term
involvement with Afghanistan and who was a vocal Massoud supporter.
Massoud and Dostum were sometimes allies but sometimes bitter rivals,
and Sandy Gall's writing about Afghanistan is peppered with references
to the dangers posed by Dostum — check it out on Google or
Lexis. Perhaps the New York Times might have thought about
the validity of sending her to "report" on her family
enemy?
In the wider
press, Ahmed Rashid's remarks have been most influential. This Pakistani
journalist is far from incompetent. But on the subject of Uzbeks
in general and Dostum in particular, he goes off the deep end —
for instance:
"Over six feet tall with bulging biceps, Dostum is a bear of
a man with a gruff laugh, which, some Uzbeks swear, has on occasion
frightened people to death."
Washington
Post reporter Kevin Sullivan credulously repeated the same fantasy
on December 25: "In Bonn, they decided that with the support
of the United Nations they would rebuild the army," said Dostum,
a burly bear of a man whose laugh alone is said to terrify his rivals."
Rashid is a
man who likes his ethnic generalizations: "The Uzbek people,
the roughest and toughest of all Central Asian nationalities, are
noted for their love of marauding and pillaging," he tells
us earnestly, and later gives this gem: "Mahmoud Ibn Wali,
a sixteenth century historian, described the early Uzbeks as 'famed
for their bad nature, swiftness, audacity and boldness' and revelling
in their outlaw image. Little has changed in the Uzbek desire for
power and influence since then." Well, yes, I prefer to get
my ethnic stereotypes from 16th-century sources too.
Is it fair
to tar a man you've never interviewed on the basis of his ethnic
group's medieval history? Does ethnic bias not matter if the ethnic
group in question is small and, in the United States, powerless?
Rashid's influence can be seen even in the Baker article, where
only the Uzbeks were identified by ethnicity. Should anyone so openly
prejudiced against Uzbeks be trusted to write about Uzbekistan?
Rashid's January
14 New Yorker article is a one-sided attack on Uzbekistan's
government, written from a standpoint of sympathy with Islamists.
He concludes that the repression of the Uzbek government will lead
the terrorist I.M.U. party to find supporters and, as in his earlier
Taliban, one gets the sense that Rashid has forgotten that
these Islamists are not fighting for democracy and the end of repression,
but merely to exchange one form of brutality for another.
And speaking
of The New Yorker, Christopher de Bellaigue's January 21
piece on Herat is in large measure an attempt to extend to the previously
uncontroversial, indeed exemplary leader Ismail Khan the same smear
campaign already used to great effect on General Dostum.
De Bellaigue
writes of Khan, "He was an authoritarian ruler, people said
afterward, recalling the time when he was last in power. The fear
was that he'd be just as repressive now." A few questions:
Which "people"? From which faction? And exactly how was
Khan "repressive" by Afghan standards?
According to
the general consensus in published reports until recent weeks, Khan
was a relatively enlightened ruler supporting women's education.
Along with Mazar, his was one of the most peaceful areas of the
country in the pre-Taliban years. Even Ahmed Rashid's take is favorable.
Can de Bellaigue document Khan's alleged repressiveness, or is he
entitled to besmirch his reputation without evidence? Why didn't
he bother to interview Khan? (Or does he, too, have a laugh that
kills?) To quote both positive and negative sources? But as we have
seen with Dostum, responsible journalism is beside the point when
a reporter "knows" the truth already.
The attacks
on Ismail Khan appear to have begun with American envoy Zalmay Khalilizad's
speaking to a Washington Post reporter, Edward Cody. Khalilizad,
a Pashtun from Mazar, told Cody that the Iranians were supplying
"arms, money and trained combatants" to Khan (January
18). Khan denied the charges, as did his son Mir Wais Sedeq, while
in the United States as part of Hamid Karzai's delegation.
But in a pattern
grown familiar, the unsupported insinuations blossomed in the hands
of New York Times correspondents. In a particularly egregious
violation of good journalistic practice, Carlotta Gall quoted "one
influential businessman, who gave only his first name, Siddiq,"
as her sole source for the very serious allegation that Khan has
been receiving arms from Iran (New York Times, January 22).
Can you imagine her newspaper accusing an American governor or mayor
of a similar infraction based on "one influential businessman,
who gave only his first name, John"?
These dubious
accusations have subsequently been tied to charges that Khan is
somehow trying to usurp power from the central government. But it
is important to realize that "central government" has
a very different meaning in Afghanistan than it does in the United
States. Afghanistan has a tradition of regionalism; even its king
was imposed only by the British. Khan's power base existed long
before the Taliban. It's a regional government — along the
lines of a state in the United States — and the only sort of
government that has historically functioned in this multi-ethnic
society.
American reporters, however, have decided that they know what's
best for Afghanistan: the permanent rule of interim government head
Hamid Karzai. This undistinguished bureaucrat represents no region
or ethnic group, which makes him an excellent puppet for the State
Department. Whether it makes him a good leader for Afghanis doesn't
interest the liberal press, whose fawning coverage ignores his long-time
ISI and Taliban links for a bizarre obsession with his "aristocratic"
or "noble" background (which gets a mention in nearly
every article).
Take Guy Trebay's
discussion of Hamid Karzai's visit in the January 31 New York
Times: "The clothes appeared to be a natural complement
of his precise diction and a bearing that was invariably described
as noble." Surely an attractive way with a cloak is not usually
considered a qualification for governance. Nor is a "noble"
bearing or background a prerequisite for leadership. Why are journalists
promoting overseas the hereditary aristocracy we overthrew in our
own country? And for liberals to decry "warlords" and
praise "aristocrats" is beyond stupid: The most prestigious
and ancient noble titles were won long ago by force of arms. Today's
"aristocrats" are the descendents of men like Dostum.
And while reporters
burnish his ancestry, Karzai's highly questionable political antecedents
are brushed over. He made his first significant appearance on the
Times's radar screen on November 14, in a piece by Jane Perlez.
When she mentions there that he was "a deputy foreign minister
in the pre-Taliban era," she remains mysteriously silent about
whose government that was. Guess what — Karzai served in Rabbani's
government, just like the "ruthless" Dostum she decries.
And just like Dostum, Karzai has had his changes of heart.
First, Karzai
was with Rabbani. Then he supported the Pashtun tribal commander
killing people in Kandahar. Next, he supported the Taliban —
early and often. At least the December 6 Washington Post's
John Pomfret admitted outright, "Hamid Karzai was an early
supporter of the Taliban." Now finally — maybe —
he's on the same page as we are.
The most worrisome
of these varied affiliations is of course with the Taliban. Karzai
seems to have had little quarrel with the Taliban as long as they
were an Afghan phenomenon, as Pamela Constable reported in the Washington
Post on August 21, 1998, the day the U.S. sent cruise missiles
against bin Laden: "If radical terrorism has found a breeding
ground in Afghanistan, it is because of outside forces," said
Hamid Karzai. "There were many wonderful people in the Taliban,
many moderate and patriotic people, but the control from the outside,
the interference from Pakistan and the radical Arabs made it hard
for the moderates to stay there and help," said Karzai.
Most of the
Rome group, to which Karzai belongs, have maintained close links
with elements of the Taliban senior leadership up to the present
day, and Karzai helped the Taliban with their military efforts as
late as 1997-98. Karzai's father — the respected leader on
whose coattails he rode to power — was assassinated by the
Taliban in July 1999; yet Karzai never criticized them, much less
avenged him.
This "ally"
was eager to disassociate himself from the United States even as
we were helping him to power. On November 2, Marc Kaufman reported
in the Washington Post that Karzai's brother Quayum denied
that Hamid was receiving American help. On November 9, the Washington
Post's Molly Moore reported that Karzai denied being rescued
by an American helicopter and whisked out of the country. Why the
doubletalk? Karzai was trying to serve two masters, the Pashtuns
and the United States. He still is.
As Karzai's
behavior during the negotiations for the surrender of Kandahar shows,
his real loyalties are to the Pashtuns — not to the nation
of Afghanistan or to the United States. He was prepared to let Mullah
Omar go — and not coincidentally, that gentleman still eludes
our grasp.
Karzai has
a curiously one-sided view of what an ally is. It's fine to ask
for American peacekeepers to prop up his unpopular regime, but quite
another matter to find the men we're after. An illuminating
January 29 Associated Press report by Sandra Sobieraj on Karzai's
Washington visit makes the point:
The Afghan
leader was succinct — and curt — when a reporter asked
about the failure to capture bin Laden so far. "We are looking
for him. He's a fugitive. If we find him, we'll catch him. Thank
you very much," Karzai said, turning on his heel and ending
the joint news conference.
The collapse
of journalistic standards in Afghanistan has frightening implications
for American reporting overall. There, however, it may cost many
lives. While the United States Army, together with the Northern
Alliance, may have won the war, the American liberal press is losing
the peace in Afghanistan. And by backing the wrong people, the press
is increasing the likelihood that Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden &
co. will escape justice for a long while.
Robert Young
Pelton, the only American who has bothered to interview Dostum,
observes:
People seem
to think leaders take power in Afghanistan, but actually they
give you power, because they think that you will treat them fairly,
listen to their needs. When I saw Dostum talking with his people
he was trying to communicate that it was okay for them to talk
amongst themselves and dissent and have elections. He was saying
that he couldn't fix all their problems for them, that they would
have to elect leaders and do things for themselves.
What's horribly
ironic is that Dostum is absolutely gaga on America. He's basing
his party's platform on the American Constitution. He's working
his butt off to get things working again in the North and he doesn't
realize that he doesn't have much active support in Washington.
We really need to tell the State Department, Why the hell aren't
you in Mazar talking to Dostum?
|
