Minutes after President Joe Biden began addressing the nation Monday afternoon about the Taliban’s lightning-speed reconquest of Afghanistan, the publishers of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post issued their own statement to him. “For the past twenty years, brave Afghan colleagues have worked tirelessly to help The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal share news and information from the region with the global public,” the group said. “Now, those colleagues and their families are trapped in Kabul, their lives in peril.” The publishers asked the president for “Facilitated and protected access to the U.S.-controlled airport”; “Safe passage through a protected access gate to the airport”; and “Facilitated air movement out of the country.” They told him, “As employers, we are looking for support for our colleagues and as journalists we’re looking for an unequivocal signal that the government will stand behind the free press.”
The joint statement was a sign of just how tense and uncertain the situation has become for media on the ground in Kabul. That same anxiety clouded my off-the-record conversations with editors at major U.S. news organizations, who weren’t willing to say anything publicly that could potentially jeopardize the safety of their staffs.
Journalists are accustomed to running into conflict zones, but Afghanistan is being treated as no ordinary conflict zone. Long gone are the days when someone like the late Robert Fisk could sit down with Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan. Social media has given radical groups a way to communicate with the world directly. That access has stripped journalists of many of the unspoken protections they once enjoyed, a point drilled horrifically home through the killings of reporters by ISIS.
The Taliban rode into the capital talking about a peaceful transition of power, but no one knows what to expect. Hence the questions news organizations are now grappling with: Is it safe to keep reporting? Can the Taliban—which has a spokesman who gives measured interviews and maintains contact with members of the media—be trusted not to turn on the foreign press corps? Are Western journalists, especially female ones, in danger?
The main issue is Afghan journalists, untold numbers of whom have staffed bureaux throughout America’s two-decades-long war effort. In May, as the planned U.S. withdrawal was sinking in, the Taliban warned that local journalists reporting “one-sided news in support of Afghanistan’s intelligence” would “face the consequences.” “I’m trying to find a way to leave. I’ve probably got like a big target on my back,” an anonymous Afghan journalist told Politico, while NPR spoke with an Afghan photographer for Agence France-Presse who was struggling to leave the country with his family. Sonali Dhawan, a research associate with the Committee to Protect Journalists, tweeted ominously, “Taliban invaded the homes of at least two female journalists in Kabul today. One managed to escape, one is unreachable.” (She updated hours later that the “second journalist is ok but shaken.”)
Maria Salazar, director of CPJ’s emergencies department, told me that the situation right now for Western journalists versus Afghan journalists is “night and day.” Hundreds of requests for assistance have been pouring in, 50 within the last hour at the time that we spoke late Monday afternoon. Several of the organization’s “high-priority” cases had reported receiving threats from the Taliban essentially saying, “Your time is up.” Said Salazar, “A week ago we were talking about safe houses. Now we’re talking about how to get people out.” I asked her if CPJ is confident it will be able to help all of the journalists currently seeking potentially life-or-death assistance. “We’re doing everything we can to help people stay safe,” she said. “I’m hopeful we’ll be able to find a way to help them, but without help from the U.S. and NATO governments that can support the evacuation, and support these journalists outside of their country, there’s very little we can do.”
Some of America’s top foreign correspondents are on the ground. Richard Engel, who, alongside members of his NBC News team, was kidnapped in Syria in 2012, beamed into the Today show on Monday morning with a segment that showed him riding through the streets of Kabul as the capital fell. He’d just left the NBC News bureau and was en route to what he described as a safer location. “Already we’ve seen some gunmen who look like Taliban on the streets,” he said, “and all of the government checkpoints, all the police, all the soldiers—they’re gone.”
The most captivating mainstream footage has come from CNN’s Clarissa Ward, who is having what can only be described as her Christiane Amanpour moment. On Sunday, she was doing a live shot from a discrete location when Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter asked her if she and her team were safe. “We’re definitely being exceptionally cautious and trying to ride this thing out in a calm manner and reach out to all the people that we need to reach out to, to guarantee our safety,” Ward said. “And if it becomes apparent that we need to get out of here, we will certainly be doing that and looking out for all the Afghan people who are working with us and other journalists who don’t have the luxury of just getting in an armored vehicle and booking it to the airport and evacuating on a military flight.”
The next morning, conservatively covered from head to toe, Ward was out on the streets, calmly interviewing a large posse of Taliban fighters, as if she were a political reporter at an Oklahoma Trump rally. In one striking moment, which Ted Cruz and other conservatives seized on in order to criticize CNN, Ward remarked: “They’re just chanting death to America, but they seem friendly at the same time. It’s utterly bizarre.” CNN’s P.R. team responded to Cruz: “Rather than running off to Cancun in tough times, @clarissaward is risking her life to tell the world what’s happening. That’s called bravery. Instead of RTing a conspiracy theorist’s misleading soundbite, perhaps your time would be better spent helping Americans in harm’s way.”
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