To mark the OPC’s 75th anniversary, Dateline magazine has assembled a look-back through the decades with some of the best foreign correspondents and photographers in the business who have sent us their memories of the biggest stories of their respective eras. We’ve broken it down by decade: 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010-2013
At first I didn’t realize what had hit the windshield. When a rock slams into glass it doesn’t always come through. Instead, all that is visible on the seat are the broken shards.
The year was 2001 and it was October. Kabul had fallen to the Americans and scores of reporters had walked with the Northern Alliance into the city. But I was on my way from Quetta, Pakistan, towards its sister city in Afghanistan, Kandahar, where the Taliban still ruled.
It was the beginning of one of the most important lessons Afghanistan taught me. The ability to travel is the ultimate barometer of possibility, both for Afghans and for journalists. And with that as a measure, Afghanistan, had been on a downward slide, becoming ever more dangerous over these past 12 years of war, but most precipitously over the past seven years. Now only Kabul and a few places in the north were safe for overland travel. And, even Kabul was looking precarious.
Back in 2001 though, before the war’s end, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan—as the Taliban called their government—gave out 100 visas at their last consulate, in Quetta, to foreign journalists to come into their closed country and see the ravages the American bombing had wrought.
A day later, a convoy of cars, each carrying two or three journalists and their translators, careened across the Khojak Pass into what had been a closed country. In reality it was still closed. We were guests, there on sufferance. Still, under the code of Pashtunwali, we were protected. It was a position that as Westerners, and especially Americans, we would not enjoy again in the Taliban community.
A truer sense of how we were seen came from the Afghan men who lined the half paved, half gravel road that led from the Pakistani border post of Chaman to Spinboldak. They stared silently as our cars rattled by. There was none of the cheering or welcome that my colleagues were experiencing in Kabul. And after a few too many white faces, they heaved the rocks.
The sound of glass of breaking had a sort of honesty to it. We would not, could not, be welcomed. The mistake was to think we were. We were unarmed members of an armed invasion that was trying to kill these men or their brothers or cousins. Still, that was one of the few times I travelled in Southern Afghanistan with complete confidence that I was protected.
In successive journeys it became more and more clear that as important as travel was for me as a journalist, it was even more important to Afghans. If people are afraid to leave their homes or move beyond the limits of their fields, or, if they live in a city and worry about whether they will arrive at work or make it home, there can be no political development and little commerce.
For journalists, if you cannot get there safely and, most impor – tantly, get back, you cannot tell the story with your own eyes. For those of us, who like me, travel mostly un-embedded, mostly to places on the edge of danger, the constant calculation is: how much risk is the story worth? The best stories often demand the greatest risk, but you can also take great risks and get almost nothing.
Early on, I became a travel fanatic, anxious to hear about every road, village, bridge that had gone out, illegal checkpoint, and questionable policeman. The Americans were rarely any help. They had too many rules and were too scared. If you weren’t em – bedded with them, they would leave you literally in the road as they did a Time magazine writer last year. Fend for yourself, who cares, you didn’t start with us, so tough.
But those first days of 2001 and 2002 were a heady time. The Taliban had mostly fled and we wandered with abandon, driving anywhere that our cars could navigate: to the Pashtun south and east, to the north, up the Panshir valley to the foot of the Hindu Kush. The greatest danger then was a flat tire or, in winter, getting stuck in heavy snow. We negotiated our routes with local warlords, getting protection to the limits of each one’s realm and then linking up with the warlord whose domain cov – ered the next stretch.
There were occasional chilling moments, a reminder of darker realities: We were robbed at gunpoint by three men on motor – cycles who were armed with AK47s at dusk on the Kabul-Kanda – har highway in July, 2002. The men were tattered, poor, desperate and yes, dangerous.
Still, it was possible then to drive all the way from Kabul to Oruzgan and wander through small villages, asking about civil – ian casualties without fear of kidnapping or attack. The villagers still hoped that we would have something to offer them. The Americans were already bombing Pashtun villages to hit a few Taliban and leaving dead women and children as collateral dam – age, but in the early days, the villagers were still patient.
I traveled three times that year to Khost Province, crossing Logar Province, where six years later my colleague David Rohde would be kidnapped and taken to Pakistan. I did not wear a burkha and no one suggested that I should.
Fast forward to 2006. My trip that summer to Khost was a different matter. We had heard the situation was turning. I was veiled although still not wearing a burkha; that would not come until 2010. We stayed at a guest house on the edge of town: a simple place without electricity, near a pastoral field that washed up against the wooded mountains.
I awoke at dawn to an explosion. I started up, looking for the photographer who was in a nearby cot. “What was it?” we asked the guesthouse manager. He shrugged: “Oh, they were testing a bomb, I think,” he said.
“Oh. I see. Here in the city?” I asked.
“Yes, it happens,” he said.
Two days later as we turned the car towards home, we almost drove into an attack—a man with an semi-automatic weapon near the middle of town was openly shooting at a passing bus. What I was seeing and hearing was the return of the Taliban, but even then, I didn’t entirely understand how much was falling apart.
By 2008, The New York Times had already had a Western reporter kidnapped; a second was taken in 2009 along with an Afghan translator, who was later killed during the rescue. In Dec. 2009, two French journalists were kidnapped and held for a year. In 2012, two Canadians were taken in Wardak.
Kabul was still safe, but the roads were not secure. People flew from one big city to another.
Today, with the exception of the road between Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul and Jalalabad, there are no two major Afghan cities which are safe for foreigners to drive between.
Even moving around at night in Kabul, a place that until recently had a lively social life for the large expat community, has become a dubious proposition.
On Jan. 17, suicide bombers hit a Kabul restaurant frequented by foreigners, the Taverna du Liban, killing 21 people, of whom 13 were expat officials and aid workers.
No one attack halts coverage, but as Afghanistan slips from the headlines anyway and the constraints on movement make it more frustrating for reporters to cover, the curtain will slowly fall on the country. The voices of many of its people could once again become as little known to the outside world as they were during the Taliban.