TO AFGHANISTAN AND BACK
by Ted Rall
Nantier Beall Minoustchine (NBM)
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, BBC World News aired a television documentary on preparations by America and its war coalition allies to invade Afghanistan. A British reporter interviewed a young woman in the American reserves who found herself leaving her husband and kids for an indefinite stint in uniform. Weeks had passed since Al Qaeda terrorists had done the deed on New York's World Trade Centre. "Is there something that the U.S. should be doing out in the world to mitigate the hate that a portion of the world holds for the country?" the journalist asked. The woman blinked and admitted she'd never thought about anything like that. She was an American and she hadn't done anything to make anyone hate her.
The BBC concluded that Americans were not engaged in a great deal of soul-searching just then.
With the inevitable invasion of Afghanistan came a secondary invasion by American journalists. Billed as "the world's first instant graphic novel," Ted Rall's To Afghanistan and Back is the product of two-and-a-half weeks spent in Afghanistan at the height of the war. A syndicated columnist and cartoonist, Rall has filled the book with his field reports for New York's Village Voice and other publications, as well as a comic portrayal of his journalistic travails.
"I'd come to see Afghanistan to get the truth," writes Rall. "The truth turned out to be obvious and clear; why wasn't it that way in my living room back in Manhattan?"
While most U.S. media eagerly took a propagandist role, Rall explains that after September 11, he continued to do "the same snarky cartoons and columns as before." He wondered in print why "McCarthyism – even overt racism – was back." When, as Rall puts it, the president "promised to lie to us" (Bush had said publicly that nothing would be done to jeopardize the success of military operations) and, Rall continues, "when the Democrats let the Republicans deliver 'the democratic response' to Bush's speech, it sent a clear message: There is no opposition."
Once in Afghanistan, Rall excels at providing, in both print and comic form, a glimpse of the war (and war in general) that his countrymen in the region generally did not. He experienced a war zone characterized by long stretches of mind-numbing boredom followed by glimpses of hell – a place so desperately poor yet so ubiquitously armed that it didn't take long before international journalists became targets.
Throughout his narrative, Rall delivers commentary that is both frank, blackly funny, opinionated and utterly removed from the day's CNN-style U.S. military press release regurgitation. "Contrary to the propaganda back home, the U.S.A.F. bombed anything and everything," he writes. An accepted part of life in the war zone, this is a wild accusation back home. He asserts that the invasion is a smokescreen in aid of a planned oil pipeline from Kazakhstan through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea.
Rall also writes that America's local allies, the Northern Alliance, are the same people as the Taliban – literally. He looked on as 100 Alliance soldiers engaged in a gunfight – between themselves – over a captured SUV. The "cooler" heads among some Taliban POWs tried to break up the fight. Many were wounded, a 16-year-old was killed.
Of his fellow reporters, Rall was less than impressed: "The only journalists I could hold a decent conversation with were the British, but most of them were assholes." So there, BBC.
The U.S. war with Afghanistan is rife with cruel irony. Rall does it justice by searching for insight and by being honest about his findings. "The Taliban had been simple-minded, cruel hicks," he writes. "But they'd brought law and order. Now that the Northern Alliance had restored anarchy, one couldn't help being disgusted with the Afghans for tolerating these thugs."
Rall remarks to a reporter acquaintance in Taloqan that "nothing is even slightly like they say." The scary reply: "Come on – you know journalism is fiction."
While many of his colleagues ditched objectivity in support of the war effort, Rall proved they didn't need to. The book has received a good measure of acclaim and The Nation has called it "some of the best war reporting from Afghanistan by an American journalist." Perhaps it's American journalists who are in need of a good soul search. |
