the land mines


Remember those halcyon days when the airwaves were full of Hollywood wives, eternally grumpy RAWAs, whiny women journos, and Hampton hacks fulminating about women’s rights, shaking with indignation over a place they had never been, rejecting goofy fatwas, and demonizing the dreaded burqa? God help any male reporter who dared to travel to Afghanistan to do a balanced piece on the two-decade war, the absolute poverty, the deadly drought, the land mines, the natural disasters, or just cover the general state of both Afghan men and women. The Taliban and “denial of women’s rights” were being Talibitch-slapped…big time. It’s too late to mention that the rough-hewn, xenophobic Taliban actually ended most of the factional fighting, stopped crime, ended rape, snuffed out drugs, and put Afghanistan on the map again. Yeah, they went a little crazy up north, but generally things were, dare we say it, almost normal during their ill-formed reign. DP readers know that the Taliban tried to issue tourist visas… about the same time that they blew up the statues of the Buddhas, their only tourist attraction (so, they have lousy timing). Thirty bucks and you, too, could watch the world’s largest Renaissance Faire… without the renaissance and without the “fair”, of course. The world will miss those slack-jawed, backwoods jokers… but for how long, we wonder? What the pass-the-Chardonnay and burn-the-burqa crowd have overlooked is that the seeds of the Taliban are still there. Both Afghan men and women have been screwed equally and continuously since the late ´70s and Afghanistan is again slipping back into that quasi-chaotic state of warlords, crime, and attacks against women. Tali-bummer, dude… where’s the canapés? The good news? Thanks to all the negative press coverage and the great Crusade, Afghanistan hasn’t seen this many tourists for the last two decades- Say what? Tourists? The tourist boom began in October of 2001. The “boom” part was courtesy of America B-52s and Special Forces on the ground sent in to help Afghan commanders fight the Taliban. The “tourist” part began a few weeks later. Thousands of neophyte journos charged off to make their name in the War on Terror. Suddenly this bizarre travel guide called DP shot up to the top 10 on Amazon’s bestseller list. There was a massive run on Domke safari vests, Pakistani-made pakools, and Thuraya satphones, and bang, they were off. Like the climactic moment at Burning Man in Nevada, there were over 2,000 journos waiting for the pyrotechnics to begin. Most of them were stuck in the Panjshir valley waiting for the war to start. Even in the south, dashing Frenchmen, corpulent pommies, and enterprising women had no qualms about donning the dreaded burqa to get into Talib-held Kabul. It would appear that the burqa was now the favourite apparel of indignant journos. After all, it protects from dust and sun and keeps prying Tali-border guards from fondling your packages.