Responsibilities of a Journalist

It sounds like there's a special responsibility on the shoulders of a journalist like yourself in this clash of cultures. (I'm not implying there's a "clash of civilizations" in the way that Huntington suggests.)

You were "parachuted down," if I can use that in quotes, to become bureau chief of South Asia in the late nineties, before 9/11. You visited Afghanistan before 9/11, and so you're witnessing a number of changes. [Meanwhile,] in your country of origin, the United States, newspapers that are reporting [on these issues] have changed their view of Islam and adopted a whole set of policies.

It strikes me that you have a special responsibility, which I'm sure you realize in all its possibilities, to tell the story of Islamic people, of women, of communities, of villages, of religious ceremonies, in such a way to open up our understanding of what's going on in the Islamic world, because [these new] policies may be closing down some of these insights as [the media] tries to create a black and white world and an adversary. It's a long question, but you see where I'm going.

I do. And I do, and I did, take that very seriously. You do try hard. I've been in violent anti-American demonstrations, where I was surrounded by people stomping on straw dummies of President Bush, and my job was to interview them and find out how they feel. And I do.

I've had many interviews with Islamic clerics, and others, who are very, very anti-American and who think that we're all decadent infidels (obviously, the most extreme were the Taliban) and my job was to listen politely and to take in their point of view and to represent that back to my readers.

I always tried very hard to, not only as I said before, find out what's good and redeeming about all the places that I lived and worked, but also to try to find a balance between the good and the bad. There were a lot of things about Islam that were very appealing to me: its spirituality, its asceticism, its emphasis on charity, the fact that you go into a mosque, it's very quiet, it's very contemplative, it's very serene. My first exposure to Hinduism was like going to a three-ring circus. I didn't think there was anything spiritual about it at all until I'd been in India for some time and had some very moving experiences with Hinduism. But there's elephants, and monkeys, and incense, and flowers, and beggars all over the place, and you think, "What is this?"

There's a lot about Islam that's very appealing. It wants you to get down to the essence of things and care about the values that matter. So, I tried to reflect that in what I wrote, as well as the terrible stuff -- the bombings, and the radicalism, and the terrible manipulation of average people by politically motivated Islamic leaders. I've said this before.

If there's going to be a clash of civilization, it's going to be within Islam, it's going to be within countries like Pakistan which are trying to modernize on the one hand, but are also very, very weighted by the pull of tradition and by the pull of radical Islam, because the appeal of radical Islam to poor, alienated people who have no chance for an education, or for a decent job, or for any sort of place in the bureaucracy -- what do they have? What do they have beside the promise of paradise, and how do you get to paradise? I understand that appeal now. I've heard it enough times from enough people who had nothing else, and I've tried to convey that too.

A key insight here is, on the one hand, the universal appeal of Islam, but on the other hand, the way different cultural and national settings have shaped the religion in a distinctive way. That seems to be very different, those two elements, from some of the black and white interpretations that come out when you're focused on this fanatical group of terrorists who are a real threat to the United States.

I've tried to bring out all aspects. I had a friend [who was] a professor in Pakistan, and we used to meet often and talk. The last time we met in Pakistan, or maybe it was the second to last time we met, there was terrible conflict. This was at the height of the Iraq occupation and [there was] terrible controversy about it, and demonstrations, and a lot of very ugly feelings being expressed. [In the U.S. there was] the intimidation of immigrants, and a friend of mine from Pakistan who was an editor of a newspaper had just been arrested in Washington. It was just ridiculous stuff that was going on. And my friend and I looked at each other and said, "There may come a time that we won't even be able to speak to each other anymore. Maybe it will be suspect for us to be even having tea." We both lamented that.

We both felt that [it would be difficult] to maintain civilized and diplomatic and intellectual discourse if they don't let people in anymore, if people keep getting turned down for visas. He was having trouble with his visa and had been to the United States a dozen times, and all of a sudden the rules were changing and everything was suspicious.

It's a very difficult time now to have normal relations. Things aren't normal anymore, and I think it's important to try to keep that up, even in bad times, to try and maintain things like academic exchanges. Some of those have been cut off. It's very sad.

You've been in so many exciting places in this recent phase of your career. I should mention that you were the Kabul bureau chief in Afghanistan, you've obviously been in Pakistan and in India, and you also were in Iraq after the initiation of the war and then during the period afterward. Do you have some way of conveying to us one experience that stands out from all of this and captures this phase of your career? I'm curious if there's some event, some reporting that you did, that stands out in your own mind.

Boy, that's a tough one. There are several. One was this: I was in the middle of an extraordinary Hindu festival in the south of India in the winter of 2000, and there were millions and millions and millions of people in this one river, and it was probably the most uplifting experience I'd ever had. It was like being in the middle of a mass reverie. It was like Woodstock. It was like going to heaven. There was no food, there were no bathrooms, everybody was just happy. It was just this incredibly spiritual mass experience.

Right in the middle of covering that, we found out there'd been a horrific earthquake in the north of India, and we all, all of us, all the journalists, had to rush from this harmonious mass experience up to this incredibly destructive and tragic natural catastrophe. It really made me think a lot about God, and about faith, and about fate, and about all those things. It was quite a shock. It was quite a shock to go from one to the other, and I think that week, the first half of which was spent covering a festival, the second half of which was spent on incredibly horrific loss of life in the same country, among the same group of people, of that same faith, was quite a learning experience for me.

The other thing I remember being particularly dramatic was coming into Afghanistan after the Taliban fell. When 9/11 happened, I happened to be in South Africa in a game reserve, observing white rhinoceroses. I was on my first day of vacation after a reporting trip to South Africa and I rushed back to Johannesburg and then up to Pakistan, and then spent a month trying to get into Afghanistan. There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of journalists and we were all trying to get into Afghanistan. We didn't know what we were going to find. We really didn't know what we were going to find. We were just camped on the border, basically, for weeks and weeks and weeks, and finally, they just gave up and let us in, by which I mean the Pakistani border authorities finally said "Okay, you want to go get killed? Just go. Just leave us alone."

So we all rushed through the border and it was late at night, it was very dark, we were hearing all these reports on the radio. There was fighting ahead, we didn't know whether the Taliban were still in control or not, we didn't know whether the coalition forces were in control, and we all rushed over the border, and I was in an old school bus which had been rented by some journalists and we were heading in the darkness into what, we didn't know. We saw all these shapes in the darkness, men with turbans, and they're milling around, and you could see they all have Kalashnikovs, and they have rocket launchers and SAM missiles, and it was very dark and very scary. And the bus comes to a halt and we're surrounded by all these men, and I've got my translator next to me, and a bunch of these guys force their way onto the bus, and these enormous tribesmen, very wooly-looking guys with these big, big Russian assault rifles, murmuring and jabbering in Pashto. And the leader of the group gets up and he's standing in the front of the bus like this, with this big, enormous gun and a scowl on his face, this big beard, this big turban, and he says something, and my translator breaks out into a big smile. I said, "What did he say?" And he said, "Welcome to Afghanistan!" So, this was not the Taliban. This was the other side. And from there, we more or less got in okay. But it's a moment I will never forget.

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