That's the part that the media has to keep up on -- what are we getting for our money? I mean, have we kicked out the bad guys? Shouldn't we be attacking Pakistan, isn't that where all the bad guys come from? I mean there's this amazing disconnect between common sense and government rhetoric. Most of the people who were killed in Afghanistan were Pakistanis, not Afghans.

But they're saying that having American troops running around on the Pakistani side of the border is not going to happen.

But the media needs to wake up and say, "Hey, wait a second. We're supporting a military dictator who took power in a coup, who's one of the main sponsors of terrorism, who paid for the camps over there, who's educating and entertaining and training thousands of militants to go fight inside Afghanistan against us." It's like, whoa, wait a second, why is he our best friend?

What happens is that the media gets host-friendly. So when the military sends you over to write stories about things, they want you to also make a note that Pakistan is our loyal ally and that they're vigorously prosecuting the war on terrorism.

But when you look at Daniel Pearl, he wasn't kidnapped by Afghans. He wasn't murdered by Afghans. He was murdered by people with strong and lengthy links to the Pakistani [intelligence agency, the] ISI.

At first the media complains because they're not getting enough information, they're not being allowed to cover the war. Then when they get to know everything, after the 120-day window, nobody cares anymore. Because once they start spelling it out and saying, "Wait a second, these guys are all from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Why aren't we fighting a war in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Egypt? Why are they our allies?" And then those are the tough questions that never really get asked, because the public doesn't really care at that point.

Surely these big-time reporters have these questions and are asking them.

That's not true. You ask Barbara Walters. Why was Barbara Walters in Saudi Arabia? Did she get up one day, buy a ticket and take a camera in with her? No. She was invited by the government as part of a P.R. campaign to convince the American public that the Saudis who flew the planes into the buildings had nothing to do with the country of Saudi Arabia. That's an overt P.R. campaign. Why do you think the military invites journalists into a combat area? Because they know there's going to be a nice clean operation and it'll look good when we blow stuff up and they'll write about how we're winning the war.

What are you going back to Afghanistan for?

I'm going to be working on a documentary about the uprising at Qala Jangi. So we're going to be interviewing people who were there and using footage that was shot, that strangely enough has never been pulled together into one documentary.

I assume you'll be using the footage of [CIA agent] Mike Spann interviewing Walker.

The footage starts out much earlier than that. It starts out with the surrender of the Taliban and then the actual fighting inside the fort and then the initial uprising and so on. So when you ask about the government, even the government hasn't collected all that information together. And you'd think that with one of their people murdered there ... and they still have never contacted people to get that tape or find out what happened.

So they're still dragging their feet?

They're not dragging their feet, they work for the government. People who work for the government choose deliberately to work for the government and the government is its own little world. I mean, if Mike Spann was a friend of mine and he was murdered there, I would probably get more together in the first couple days than the entire government would. They just don't have the resources or the energy or the ability to do things.

Do you think Afghanistan has a chance at a legitimate government?

Yeah, if they start writing checks to Afghans. The problem is they're writing all these checks to Americans. They just wrote a check for $6.5 million to a university in, I think, Nebraska or something to create textbooks for Afghanistan. Well, Christ, for that kind of money they could set up an entire printing outfit and fly people over there to set up a state-of-the-art document processing system.

Is that part of being beholden to America in terms of security?

No, that's just the way wars work. You don't fight wars because you're a nice guy; you fight wars to make money.

And Hamid Karzai thinks: "I'll give some back to America"?

He has no choice. He works for America. He doesn't have any power base inside Afghanistan. Nobody elected Karzai. He was selected by the Americans because he's an English speaker and because he's a nonmilitant person. But he doesn't have a military authority to run Afghanistan. It's as simple as that. He just popped into position and they brought a bunch of people over that supported the king, who hadn't been in Afghanistan in years if not decades, and they magically made him in charge of the government. A lot of the aid is going to be directed toward American companies that then go back into Afghanistan to make money doing what they're doing.

Do you see people over there doing good jobs on the ground?

There's a guy, Dodge Billingsley, who's a cameraman who just goes wherever the hell he wants and he was the only guy to cover the combat in the initial stages of Anaconda and he was also inside the fortress, shooting the uprising, but he's not paid by anybody, he's just his own guy.

You'll find that almost all the footage was shot by small independents, not by any major network ... the message to journalists is: Don't ever expect a big dumb corporation to just send you somewhere because you have a hunch. Those days are over.

So get there yourself?

There's a sliding scale of limitations. You can get there yourself, but you won't have a satellite. And just something as mundane as not having a satellite phone to call people back will limit your ability to make an impact. When I was in Chechnya with the rebels during a siege, there was nobody there, just me and the guy I brought in. But nobody cared, because there weren't enough journalists there.

It's not a story until the press corps gets there.

Exactly. That's the way it works. When the uprising happened at Qala Jangi, there was stunning enough footage that people said: "Whoa, what the hell's going on there?" And it became a story, because I think it was the first sort of combat footage other than the little bit of stuff that was in the Kabul area. And then once everybody flocked there, then they sort of made it a news story. They sent Christiane Amanpour to Kabul to basically sit and do all those silly stories they do all the time about demining and zoos, and there were enough people there that they had feeds every night from ... I mean, shit, they had Ashleigh Banfield there, I think, for a while. So it became sort of the big story.

Do you essentially pay for all your own trips?

Well, I have a TV series that runs on the Travel Channel, and I write a book. I would never expect ... even if I called CNN up right now and said, "Hey I want to go here," they'd say, "Well, OK, let me think about it." You never get any kind of autonomy even though you know what's going on. Because news is not necessarily driven by news. It's driven by what people want to watch. I said: "I want to go to the Pankisi Gorge [in Georgia]." And they said: "No, I think that's too much war for people to figure out." Because they can only handle one conflict at a time. You see how much footage comes out of the southern Philippines: nothing. Or Yemen, it's zero.

There's obviously stuff going on there. Special Forces troops are there. But let's say you wanted to go there tomorrow with a camera. Would you be able to go and hook up with those guys?

Yeah, but technically they're not allowed to talk to me. I mean, I'm allowed to talk to them. And some of them have tried to tell journalists not to photograph them, which is kind of laughable. But the bottom line is, nobody's stopping you from hanging out with the rebels. And there's nobody stopping you from going out with the Philippine military or whatever.

Where are you headed after Afghanistan?

I'm going to have to go back to Chechnya and then Colombia, and I might go to Yemen, because I find that fascinating.

Recent Stories