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Fun for Fools

By Rob Schultheis

To a student of human folly and institutionalized ignorance, the current situation in Afghanistan offers a cornucopia of endless delights. I mean, how much can it get than turning on the television and seeing that brain-dead huckster Ben Stein and fool-for-all-seasons William Kristol posing as authorities on Afghanistan, recommending that we withdraw our troops and allow Taliban and al-Qaeda to take over again? (I'll wager that neither of them could name the country's five largest cities describe halfway accurately the difference between the Sunni and Shi'a versions of Islam, or draw a simple map of the country showing the major mountain ranges, the river systems, and the nations bordering Afghanistan on all sides.

Ye gods, from what satanic Rolodex do t.v. news producers and "talent" bookers pluck these schmucks with echo-chamber skulls, over-active tongues and under-performing intellects? It doesn't take much to be an Afghan "war correspondent" or instant pundit on the place these days, that's for sure. I was in Afghanistan just before the 9/11 attacks, and returned shortly afterward, and gor blimey, viva la difference! Before 9/11 there were 10 or so Western journalists in the country at any one time, including, in this case, me and my longtime photographer friend Ed Grazda. In the past, Ed and I had worked for some of the most prestigious rags in the news business, Time magazine, The Washington Post, and so on; frequently the powers-that-be even advanced us enough money, a thousand frogskins or so, enough to buy a cutrate bucket-shop round-trip ticket from New York to Islamabad or Peshawar. We covered other expenses by working for every venue imaginable simultaneously, shooting bang-bang footage and flogging it to the networks, videotaping with one hand, tape recording a radio interview with the other, and pausing to scribble notes for a piece for Amateur Meteorologist titled "Does Carpet Bombing Alter Patterns of Rainfall?" I realized how desperate I had become on one particularly "over-employed" journey, when I found myself laboring simultaneously on cover stories for Mother Jones and Soldier of Fortune, the latter using the pen name "Eric Blair," George Orwells's original, non-working name.)

ANYHOW, the contrast between pre-9/11 and post-9/11 was insane: someone did an informal head count and found there were between 700 and 1,100 reporters of one kind or another either inside Afghanistan or marooned en route in Dushanbe, Termez, Islamabad, Peshawar, East Outer Crapistan, awaiting a visa, funds, whatever. There were American network crews with so much money one actually had a HOUSE built for them in the Afghan border town of Khoja Bahuddin, (none of the houses already there were sufficiently grand) and ran regular truck convoys all the way from Dushanbe, in Tajikistan, bearing necessities like cases of bottled mineral water and wine, hundredweights of frozen Australian prime rib, and videos of the latest episodes of their favorite t.v. shows. But what was truly incredible was how completely ignorant almost all of them were, especially, it seemed, the Americans. None of them, it turned out, had thought to study or read anything about Afghanistan before they arrived; and so one beheld the budding anchorman insisting, live and on the air, that Jalalabad had somehow relocated itself between Kabul and Kandahar; the hale-fellow-well-met news producer who thought the Hazaras were some kind of religious cult akin to the Medieval Assassins of Syria instead of the third largest tribal group in the country; and announcers so terrified of war that they insisted on wearing I.B.A.and Kevlar while they were on the air, even though the nearest fighting was over 60 miles away, and whispered conspiratorially into their microphones as if Osama and company were skulking nearby, hunting for hostages?

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