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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Robert Young Pelton, author of "The World's Most Dangerous Places," says the U.S. military has killed "thousands and thousands" of people in Afghanistan, al-Qaida is a myth and the WTC was brought down by a "Mickey Mouse" outfit.
Apr 23, 2002 | Back in December of last year, television viewers watched CNN in disbelief as John Walker Lindh was seen squirming on a cot in Afghanistan claiming to be an American member of the Taliban. It was one of those moments when the madness -- not to mention the weirdness -- of war gets fully depicted on a single human face.
The person interviewing Walker Lindh was Robert Young Pelton, a sort of anti-travel writer who, over the course of several books and magazine articles, has demonstrated a strong affinity for war zones and rebel causes. For Pelton, this coup of an interview was another interesting case of being in the right place at the right time. In addition to talking with Walker Lindh in the aftermath of the Qala Jangi fortress uprising, Pelton had, "through intermediaries," arranged to spend time with legendary Northern Alliance general Abdul Rashid Dostum just as U.S. activities in Afghanistan were gaining momentum.
Dostum and his troops were working in conjunction with a Green Beret unit to liberate Mazar-e-Sharif when Pelton arrived on the scene. His story of that endeavor ran in National Geographic Adventure magazine and provided a firsthand glimpse of the war and the soldiers fighting it. In fact, Pelton had the kind of access that seems to have eluded many other reporters covering the conflict; his up-close and personal portrayal of a Special Forces unit in both moments of reflection and acts of bravery harks back to the days when journalists were actually among the fighting troops, not relegated to the briefing room at base camp.
Accessibility continues to be a bone of contention between the press and the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Pelton thinks the real story of the war is either being told too late, after the public has moved on to other topics, or is never even properly explored by mainstream media outlets that allow foreign governments to promulgate a more Western-friendly side of the story.
Pelton's blunt appraisals find their way into his travel books too; they focus on skulls and crossbones rather than sandy beaches. He's the author of "The World's Most Dangerous Places," a compendium of key information about how to get into -- and, more important, how to get out of -- various war zones, drug dens and atrocity-ridden enclaves the world over. The book is devoted to far-flung disaster areas like Sierra Leone and Somalia. Not surprisingly, Afghanistan gets a chapter. Pelton has been going there since 1995 to cover both the Taliban regime and the late Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud's efforts to topple it.
Pelton was getting ready to head back to Afghanistan to work on a documentary about the fortress uprising in Mazar-e Sharif when this interview was conducted.
Regarding your piece in National Geographic, you seemed to have access that members of the mainstream press didn't have, and I'm wondering how you went about achieving that.
Well, I'm not a journalist first of all, so that's probably why I have better access. There were about 200 journalists that had been waiting for six weeks in Termiz and Tashkent when I went over. I was quite intrigued by the activities in Mazar-e Sharif because I knew that most of the journalists had gone to the Panjshir Valley, which was a popular way to get into Afghanistan. But there wasn't much going on there. So there were about 2,000 journalists, according to my friends, sitting in the Panjshir area north of Kabul twiddling their thumbs, and I knew there was something going on in the north.
Just based on people that you talked with? Or just an inkling?
There were some preliminary news reports out of Iran and the Afghan press, plus I knew that Dostum had gone back in April so I was just intrigued why I wasn't hearing anything from there. And so I started calling [Western Afghan warlord] Ismael Khan's friends and Dostum's friends in the States and then once I set my trip up I actually called the president of CNN news and then I also called National Geographic and asked if they'd be interested in anything.
It felt like nobody was really covering the war; they were all talking about what they had for breakfast and what it's like to hear a bullet fly by and all this kind of crap. But nobody was really involved in the actual war. And obviously it was ongoing. So surprisingly, they both said yes. So I brought in a cameraman and myself and my assistant, and it took me four hours to cross the Friendship Bridge [leading from Uzbekistan into Afghanistan], and it was fairly easy to cross, even though the actual bridge was closed. The day I got there was the day of the fortress uprising. There were some journalists that came across on a day trip and they just stayed, which pissed off the Uzbeks something fierce.
That's the thing. You hear a lot about the press talking about how they have such limited access, but the military actually says that they can go wherever they want to go.
Well you'll hear this from the military. Every time you ask the military, "OK, I want to be put on a plane and I want to go to the front lines and I need to be back by 5 o'clock," they just laugh, because it's not their responsibility to chauffeur people around and to entertain them and feed them and protect them. But it's also a different country -- it's Afghanistan -- so if you want to go to the front lines in Afghanistan you have to talk to Afghans, and nobody seemed to talk to Afghans. I talked to Afghans. If I want to go into a country, whether it's Algeria or the Philippines or whatever, I don't ask the government's permission.
