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I got my first piece of hate mail back in October 2001. I was in Kabul, alone, the only westerner there during those last weeks of the Taliban rule. I had written a story for my employer, The Associated Press, about the lives of ordinary Afghans during the nightly bombing raids by U.S. and coalition bombers.
It was a series of vignettes: There was a little girl with matted hair that framed her dirt smudged face begging for food and telling in a small whispering voice of how she cried and hid at night when the planes came; and there was an old man, with a white beard that seemed to reach to his navel, hugging his knees, trembling and pushing himself so hard against the wall that it seemed he was trying to burrow within to escape the thunderous pounding of the bombs that shook the buildings.
"How would you like it, Kathy Gannon, if your mother was tied to an airline seat and her plane was driven into the WorldTradeCenter. You like those terrorists? You don't like America? What kind of an American are you? We're the good guys. They're the bad guys."
It was a bit of a jolt. I read the email in the darkened basement of the AP house; the only light was from a single kerosene lantern.
The power was gone.
Every night at 9 p.m. the Taliban would cut the power thinking that if it was dark the bombs couldn't find their target. It didn't occur to these village mullahs, who had brought the wrath of the world upon them by refusing to give up Osama bin Laden, that the most sophisticated military in the world didn't need a light bulb to identify its target.
George Clooney's movie, Good Night and Good Luck, the story of Edward R. Murrow's brave broadcasts of the 1950s that challenged Sen. Joseph McCarthy's black-and-white worldview seems a powerful reminder of how much today looks like yesterday: How today fear drives and justifies policy, how the murky gray that defines complex issues has been abandoned for the more comfortable black and white, good and evil view; and how as a result innocents have been hurt, terms have been redefined and particularly disturbing from a journalist's viewpoint how history has been rewritten.
Lies told about men and movements, who are reviled by the west for their actions or beliefs, have gone unchallenged to become historical fact; torture committed by the West has been downgraded to abuse; actions once considered abhorrent are today commonplace, such as secret arrests of people whose frantic family members learn only months later that their missing are safe, and in U.S. custody.
I know Afghanistan and Pakistan. I have spent 18 years in the region. It's alarming just how wrong the information is that comes out of my part of the world, the fiction that has been stated as fact by people who should know better, people of the CIA, for example.
Richard A. Clarke, in his book “Against All Enemies” said that the Taliban brought Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan, and wrote that the Taliban's one-eyed leader Mullah Omar wanted his old friend, bin Laden, back in Afghanistan to fund terrorist training camps.
It's historically, and factually wrong yet it was an easy piece of fiction to buy into because it was said about a movement that was despised. But the Taliban didn't bring Osama to Afghanistan. The fact is that the very men embraced by the U.S. and its coalition partners to help defeat the Taliban and bin Laden's Al-Qaida network were the same people who gave bin Laden refuge in Afghanistan back in 1996 when Sudan ordered him to leave.
They were also the same men who ran terrorist training camps throughout their time in power between 1992 and 1996.
But say that even today and you are branded an apologist for the Taliban.
It was rare to find an Afghan who was unhappy to see the back of the Taliban back in 2001, but it was equally rare to find an Afghan who was happy to see the faces of the Northern Alliance back in power.
But saying that at the time invited ridicule and snide accusations of being a "Taliban-sympathizer" or of being opposed to women's rights and the right of children to fly kites.
Yet in power today in Afghanistan are men like Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who once led bands of men who raped and scalped women during the early 1990s; today's governor of eastern Nangarhar province is one of the biggest drug dealers in the country; one of the ministers responsible for anti-narcotics in Hamid Karzai's current government is an equally well-known drug dealer; and the governor of Kabul was accused of overseeing the killing and subsequent mutilation of rival mujahedeen whose bodies were buried in plastic bags near the border with Pakistan back in the late 1980s.
In power today in Pakistan are Washington’s allies who forcibly withdrew the passport of a woman, who was gang raped to settle a tribal feud, to prevent her from traveling to the U.S. saying she would hurt Pakistan's image abroad. And still worse Pakistan's military dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, said Pakistani women cry rape so they can get visas to the U.S. and Canada.
Musharraf's tactic of turning the table on the messenger to avoid looking at the message is a tactic that has been well honed in the west.
One evening I watched an American news channel and on it an analyst who criticized an Israeli policy, was asked by her interviewer if she was anti-Semitic. She was stunned. Her face had the shocked look of someone who had just been slapped. She was immediately defensive and her criticism of a political decision by a democratically elected government was lost. It was insulting to her, to Israel and to the profession of journalism.
Edward R. Murrow's story is not only a powerful reminder of the need for a critical thought-provoking press, but also a sad reminder of how for a time after Sept. 11, 2001 we abrogated that responsibility.
Kathy Gannon (www.kathygannon.net) was the 2003-4 Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of I is for Infidel, From Holy War to Holy Terror, 18 Years Inside Afghanistan.
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