By Michael Schaffer
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan–On the grass in front of a veranda in Islamabad’s
diplomatic quarter, a hundred or so journalists sit cross-legged, like supplicants in a medieval fiefdom. Behind them, 32 television cameras from five different continents stand waiting, their operators sweating in their T-shirts and cutoff jeans. The temperature is pushing 90 degrees in this shadeless garden, but nobody’s going anywhere: They’re all waiting for the best regular entertainment this sleepy capital has seen in years.
Welcome to the Taliban follies. With the arrest in Afghanistan this week of yet another journalist, Frenchman Michel Peyrard, the large swath of the country under the fundamentalist regime’s control remains off limits to even the most intrepid Western reporters. That leaves the daily press briefing here every afternoon, where journalists sit in the sun and watch Kabul’s representative hold forth from a cushioned chair on the covered veranda of a dilapidated house whose front-porch lightbulb hangs by its wires and whose rooftop antenna is lashed to a 20-foot bamboo pole.
It doesn’t take long to pick up on the routine. A little after 2, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the ambassador, emerges onto the veranda accompanied by translator Shohail Shaheen. (Mullah Zaeef actually speaks English, though he prefers to speak through Shaheen, who speaks just a little bit more.) After the bearded ambassador delivers his speech, Shaheen reads the crowd a translation. It’s invariably a condemnation of the United States: He announces, for instance, that insulted Afghans have set boxes of America’s "hypocritical" food aid on fire.
Uncle Sam duly flayed, they take questions. Is Osama bin Laden still forbidden by the regime from communicating with the outside world? The ambassador speaks a few lines, which are quickly translated by Shaheen: "I don’t know."
Does the regime worry about losing the embattled northern city of Mazar-e Sharif? "It is as normal as it was before."
What does Kabul think of the Pakistani government’s assertion that the Taliban’s days are numbered? "Ask Pakistan," Shaheen translates.
And so it goes. A cacophony of cellular phone rings–which, in turn, set off a discordant chorus from the flock of birds sitting in a neighbor’s tree–intermittently drown out the answers, prompting the crowd to speak up. "We are not hearing you, Your Excellency!" shouts one local reporter. Zaeef answers again, but before Shaheen can translate, a Pashto-speaking Pakistani journalist has launched into yet another question. "Wait for the translation!"
demands an Italian.
But the translated answer to a question about whether the Taliban would support Osama bin Laden’s call for more terrorist attacks on America, alas, doesn’t explain much. "When America is shedding the blood of the Afghans, it is not beneficial to America," Shaheen says, obliquely.
The Afghan press briefing wasn’t always such a zoo. During last spring’s crisis over the regime’s destruction of a pair of antique Buddhist icons, Zaeef
met reporters over tea in an indoor room in the embassy building. Later, immediately after the terrorist attacks on America, the event moved to an upstairs porch–the tin-roofed perch from which four turban-clad embassy staffers, one leaning his bare foot on the ledge, now watch the proceedings below. But as the international press corps descended on the Pakistani capital to cover the war next door, the chaotic scene moved outdoors.
For the most part, Shaheen and Zaeef–who is actually one of the more sophisticated representatives of a regime known for making semiliterate village mullahs into cabinet ministers–are not winning their regime
any PR points. At one briefing, Shaheen translated his ambassador as saying there were "20 to 25" civilian deaths from the first day of bombing, prompting a Pakistani reporter, who understood the original quote, to seethe that Zaeef
“only said 20.” And though the high stakes of the moment give their bumbling a distinctly unfunny dimension, notes Pakistani scholar Rifaat Hussain, at least the embassy has an excuse. Far from home and mainly cut off from their bosses, they don’t have any choice but to wing it. "Frankly," Hussain says, "these
guys don’t know anything."
