On any given evening, the lobby of the Quetta Serena hotel is filled with an assortment of comic book characters who after a month have now grown familiar and familial. The scene: a spacious lobby with clusters of easy chairs and tables and lounging areas, neither unduly ornate nor seedy; clumps of dark bearded men dressed in long salwar kameez sit together, with perhaps one Pakistani or Afghan dressed in Western style joining them; occasionally, a Western journalist is visible amidst the heap, or more likely has their interpreter or fixer serving as stand in.
Several of these tables are engaged in ongoing negotiations on the hottest in Quetta, and in Islamabad and Peshawar,the two other cities central to the saturation media coverage of this war - getting into Afghanistan.
The Taliban has banned foreign journalists from the country, a move which serves only as a temptation to most reporters who want to cover what is happening inside Afghanistan without having to rely on either Taliban or US spin. A few have made it in, but no one has done so with unmitigated success. The BBC's John Simpson donned a burqa and went in for several hours disguised as a woman, but that was hardly enough time to do real reporting. Sunday Express reporter Yvonne Ridley made it in for several days successfully and was less than half an hour from the safety of the Pakistani border when she, inexplicably to some minds, actually exclaimed "Flaming Nora!" in English when her donkey reared. The combination of this statement made in a group of Pashtuns and the dropping of her camera led Ridley to enjoy 10 days' detention in Taliban custody and the potential of far more serious consequences. Two French reporters currently in Taliban jails have been charged with spying, and have reportedly been paraded and stoned before locals in Jalalabad.
All of which makes the negotiations for safe passage into Afghanistan - and, critically, out again - not unentertaining. In Quetta, there are plenty of package holiday offers, and I and other reporters have seriously considered a few. Consider the following; a group of Balochistan tribal elders, who unarguably rule the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area with their own law, will escort me in for an overnight stay in a border village. Because of their tribal status, they will be able to guarantee passage through the Pakistan checkpoints in the three-hour drive between Quetta and the border village. The following day we will head to Kandahar, or to a small village just south of the city if we cannot make it into Kandahar because of the heavy bombing and possible presence of the Taliban police. The plan is for me to wear a burqa, the tent-like garment that by Taliban edict enshrouds Afghan women, stain my hands and feet with a skin darkening substance, and wear the necessary dusty black plastic sandals. The price: $2,000. I tell them that price is way too high - keeping in mind both the average annual income of $400 and the cardiac health of my Irish Times editors. We argue in a friendly bantering manner more akin to carpet-shopping than to human smuggling. To shift the discussion a bit, I move the topic of the precise locations of Osama bin Laden's terror training camps in the Kandahar area, information gleaned from US intelligence sources. The information is accurate, but I am mentioning it really to test the depth of their knowledge of the Kandahar area. They look befuddled, search their maps, and return to the topic of money, assuring me that a Japanese television crew is willing to pay $2,000. I wish them the best of luck travelling with the Japanese.
Another man, well versed in the security infrastructure, will take me into Afghanistan in the company of an elderly bearded Pashtun man, two other burqa-clad women and himself. He is a Hazara, an ethnicity disliked by the ruling Pashtun Taliban, but I can overlook that for the moment. We will spend the night near Kandahar and return the following day. The price is right, and the man is smart, eager, brave and protective, the combination one seeks in an endeavour like this. We will leave at 5 a.m. When we turn to the details of the return trip, it emerges that we will be leaving the women behind. There will be three of us returning: myself, the Hazara and the bearded Pashtun. I argue that this is unacceptable, not because I am worried about him, but because I know, after many trips to the border, that an Afghan woman would not be travelling alone in the company of two men. (Ridley, was with two men; it does not work.) It is a red flag at a checkpoint. Our negotiations conclude.
The constraints, then, of reporting from Pakistan are many, and the frustrations with the arbitrary rules of the military dictatorships acute; I have developed, for instance, a near-homicidal response to being offered another cup of tea and commanded to "sit down". The bright spot of the frequent power cuts has been the respite they bring about in enforced tea-drinking. A Reuters reporter was beaten up and his driver's glasses broken after they tried to leave the hotel without permission. But these difficulties do not compare to those experienced by correspondents, including RT╔'s Margaret Ward and The Lara Marlowe of The Irish Times, reporting from the territory controlled by the Northern Alliance or United Front in northern Afghanistan. They are sleeping in terrible conditions and waiting in vain for weeks for some progress in the military campaign. The Newsweek correspondent has had dysentery and giardia (an intestinal disease). The Los Angeles Times reporter has been robbed.
And, as all the journalists here know, a desperately cold winter is only weeks away.