War Zones for Idiots

Travel Stories: The "World Series of Journalism" had begun in Afghanistan, and Tom Bissell didn't have to qualify to play. He just had to show up.

I am certain that nearly every journalist, no matter what they typically cover, must have felt the same thing. Nothing less than the biggest event in half a century was unfolding, making every other story comparatively meaningless. The National Anthem had just been sung at the World Series of Journalism, and you did not even have to be good to get to play. You simply had to show up.

Of course, I had nothing even approximating the training or support that would prepare me to report on war. (The closest I’d come to experiencing violent unrest was in college, when I was tear-gassed during a riot. The tear gas had drifted into my open bedroom window. I was asleep.) But I did have—at least I thought I had—a microscopic in. Uzbekistan’s willingness to allow the U.S. military to launch missions into neighboring Afghanistan made the nation, arguably, America’s most useful ally in the war against terrorism. It was also the place I spent a Peace Corps stint in the mid-1990s and had visited several times. I speak primitive Uzbek and have many Uzbek friends. Just months before September, I had spent six weeks there researching an article on the ecological disaster of the Aral Sea, deepening my feeling for a part of the world I had, quite unexpectedly, come to love. So in early December, I headed back to Central Asia with vague notions that my knowledge of the region, combined with a hale streak of cowardice, would keep me out of too much trouble.

But from the moment I reached Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent—a relatively worldly, immensely pleasant city in my previous experience—everything went wrong. I was mugged by two men in broad daylight, lured toward one of them after he claimed to have found a large wad of American cash. (“Oh, that old trick,” the American embassy’s security officer said to me afterwards. “It wasn’t old to me,” I replied.) A few nights later, my youthful translator and I were collared by the Uzbek police and dragooned into a nearby station, where I watched helplessly as he was shaken down. “A man must experience these things,” he told me, vocal chords trembling. He quit the next day. The following night, a group of initially friendly men approached me. Within minutes I was fighting two of them off. A few nights after that, two drunken Uzbek police officers detained me for being in an “illegal area” and robbed me of forty dollars.

Had the proximate pressure of war blown the city off its hinges? To my disgusted consolation I learned of the curious goodwill gesture made by Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, a few months before my arrival. Officially in recognition of Uzbekistan’s tenth year of independence, unofficially to lance the boil of horrendous prison overcrowding caused by Karimov’s policy of arresting the observant Muslim male population, thousands of pickpockets, rapists, and thieves had been released and now infected the streets of Tashkent.

After a few long nights of waiting out unknown midnight doorbell-ringers, the American embassy’s security staff finally evacuated me from the apartment I had rented. With my budget now in total disarray, I wound up staying with Michael Andersen, a journalist I had met earlier at Tashkent’s Presidential Palace. The Central Asian correspondent for Denmark’s largest newspaper and radio show (not to mention a fluent English- and Russian-speaker and a former professional soccer player), Michael was tall and blond, with the damnably good looks of a scholar-jock. He lived with his wife and two children year-round in Tashkent, had reported from Bosnia and Chechnya, and counted as friends several former Eastern Bloc presidents. As a left-wing European intellectual, Michael was contractually obligated to loathe the American war effort, a position the resident New Yorker in me found mind-boggling. Our conversations tended to unfold rather as follows:

“Do you honestly believe that America is the greatest country in the world?” he’d ask. “That’s hardly a fair question.” I’d reply.

“Keep in mind I cherish what America stands for. I cherish it.”

“And if I may say so, that question basically reeks of sniping by European eunuchs resigned to their—.”

“It’s the arrogance I can’t stand. ‘They won’t do what we say? Bomb them!’”

“I’m from New York. And anyone in New York during the attacks—”

“It was not an ‘attack.’ This was a criminal action. It is a legal matter.”

“. . .”

“And now you are creating the next generation of terrorists with these bombs. Don’t you understand that? Every civilian who dies, every orphanage that’s turned to rubble—”

“Michael. I’m from New York—”

“This has been established.”

“—I’m from New York, and I don’t want all Arabs to die. I don’t want Muslims to die. So why should I hold these people to a lower moral standard than the one I—”

“Legal question.”

“Do you honestly believe that if this had been turned over to the World Court anything at all would have been accomplished?”

“Of course not.”

But Michael was friendly and funny, a human Swiss Army Knife of resourcefulness. He also had something that had hitherto eluded my disastrous visit: a story.

It appeared that thousands of tons of aid—blankets, food, clothing—moldered in warehouses in Termez while, just seventy miles on the other side of the Amu Daryu, thousands of Afghanistan’s IDPs (“internally displaced persons”) were starving. The Friendship Bridge was the most direct path to relieve the suffering, but Uzbekistan’s fear of refugees and militants was such that it refused to open the long-sealed bridge until the United States guaranteed the bridge’s security. Eventually, Colin Powell flew to Tashkent and, with great fanfare, announced that “the Freedom [sic] Bridge” would open “tomorrow.” But close to two weeks later, from what anyone could discern, little if any aid was actually making it through.

Michael wanted me to cross into Afghanistan with him to see the condition of the starving IDPs for ourselves. Much of northern Afghanistan was now under the control of the Northern Alliance, he reasoned, and the roads were reported to be safe. I had my doubts about this, but I told Michael that, if he got permission from the Uzbek Ministry of Foreign Affairs to cross the bridge, something I did not in the least expect to happen, I would go with him.

A few days before Christmas, however, Michael called. “It’s all arranged,” he excitedly told me. “We can get bridge passes. We’ll be back in time for Christmas Eve.”

Well then.

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