Abubakar

The Manila Times

1999

The pumpboat was chugging peacefully up the Moro Gulf when the Huey gunship swooped in low and from behind. The pilot kept his chopper steady on our left side, some thirty feet over the water, while his crew gave us the once over. We tried to act nonchalant while the helicopter gunner leaned far over the side of the chopper, his hands gripping his .30 caliber M60 machine gun, his eyes searching our boat.

Not to worry, I told myself, we’re not carrying any contraband. Then it hit me – WE were the contraband.

We were breaking a military blockade of the main MILF camp of Abubakar Assidique, in the mountains of Maguindanao. The military had blocked off all the main roads leading to the rebel camp, particularly the Narciso Ramos Highway. No supplies or reinforcements could get in. No media either.

So I called up Sylvia Calderon, my old friend from my days as the deskman of the defunct Sarimanok News Network. In those days, Sylvia was ABS-CBN’s one man team in Central Mindanao, and while she had an incredible grasp of the politics and culture in the region, she sometimes needed a little help in the editorial and production side. I had helped her along several times, especially in dealing with the almighty, omniscient gods [AKA producers] in Manila.

So when I revisited Mindanao in 1999 for the Manila Times, she was the first person I called up.

Oh, did I mention I had left TV to return to print? We’ll go back to that later.

So there I was with Sylvia, chugging slowly up the Gulf in a pumpboat provided by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front while a helicopter gunner stood out on the chopper’s skids and held his machine gun with his finger on the trigger. I tried to keep my head down, thinking that I would look unusual and suspicious in this part of Mindanao. In trying to look nonchalant, we must have looked all the more suspicious. A noisy helicopter was flying over our heads, and the door gunner was peering into our boat. Yet, we tried to look unperturbed, as if we were yachting in Boracay.

After what seemed like forever, the thwack of the chopper’s rotor blades changed as the pilot increased pitch and leaned on his cyclic. The chopper nosed down and sped forward. Then it banked to the left and flew off in search of other boats to inspect.

I breathed out a sigh of relief as the distinct sound of the Huey receded. Sylvia said it was a good thing I was now working for print. If I was with a full TV crew, the gunner could have easily mistaken our tripod for an RPG, and blown us out of the water. After a few years working for TV, I honestly felt naked – at least you can point a videocamera at an offending helicopter and hope it goes away. All I had was a cheap still camera and a notebook and pen. Unless you’re James Bond, there’s not much a ballpen can do by way of self-defense.

Half an hour later, we landed in a pier in Malabang, Lanao del Sur. A locally assembled "hummer" clone, said to be the personal vehicle of MILF vice chairman Al Haj Murad, was waiting to bring us up a rough road into the MILF’s main camp. Sylvia’s contacts had paid off again.

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It was 1999, and the military and the MILF had again crossed swords in Central Mindanao. It was one of those many skirmishes that would be the run-up to the all-out war against the MILF a year later.

But this February appeared different. The two sides have been posturing for so long that a major clash seemed inevitable.

I arrived alone in Cotabato, with a Times presscard in my pocket, a cheap still camera in my backpack. I was back in print, having been invited by my former colleague Malou Mangahas to join as chief of reporters. It was my second time with the Times, but I felt like I was in very good company. Malou was Editor in Chief, and the editors were all familiar faces from the Malacanang brat pack and our earlier days in print: Chit, Booma, Manny, and Glenda.

I had just paid a visit to the ABS-CBN bureau in Cotabato, when word filtered down that suspected MILF rebels had taken several hostages in Midsayap, North Cotabato. Naturally, I hitched a ride with the TV guys.

Midsayap was in a state of panic when we arrived. Even the carabaos seemed in a hurry, pulling carts laden with belongings. The rebels had reportedly seized a schoolhouse in the outskirts of Midsayap, and everyone seemed in a rush to get as far away from the area as possible.

After a drive down a lonely stretch of highway, we came upon a crowd of civilians and soldiers. The civilians were distraught, some of them being relatives or parents of the hostages.

The soldiers and militiamen milled about, unsure of what to do. The schoolhouse containing the rebels and hostages were several hundred meters down the road.

After several cursory interviews, I was desperate to get closer to where things were really developing. A line of soldiers started walking down the road, and I slipped away and followed behind. At this point, I knew that I had no idea what I was doing.

A few meters down, a shot rang out, and we dropped to our knees. I looked back and noticed that the local ABS-CBN cameraman had followed me. The soldiers disappeared into the bush. I was uncertain what to do next, when I noticed the Simbas.

In the early nineties, the Philippine government entered into a $41 million dollar contract with the British company GKN for a new family of armored personnel carriers for the Armed Forces of the Philippines. The result was the Simba, a 4-wheeled APC designed by the British but assembled in the old American Subic Naval Base. We purchased 150 Simbas, and made it the backbone of the ground counterinsurgency effort. It was a controversial contract in that the Philippines was the only country in the world to buy the Simba; not even the British would use it.

With a load roar from their Perkins 210T turbocharged engines, two Simbas were maneuvering around a hundred meters down the road. The rear hatch of one Simba opened, and soldiers poured out and deployed into a banana grove on the right side of the road. Aside from having a crew of three, a Simba can carry up to ten fully armed soldiers. I remember one soldier struggling with his pack in panic after its strap got caught in the Simba’s hatch. Realizing that the schoolhouse must be close, I picked up my pace.

Just then, the two Simbas started firing. It was my first time to hear shots fired in anger in a conflict, so I dropped to one knee and hunkered down, unsure of what to do next. One Simba swiveled its turret, pointed its long-barreled M2 browning machine gun to the right, and poured out a continuous stream of .50 caliber bullets. I couldn’t see what he was shooting at, but a .50 caliber bullet is a pretty hefty piece of metal. I mean, it’s heavy enough that I can send you to the hospital just by throwing one at you, how much more by sending it your way at almost 3,000 feet per second. The half-inch thick slug can pulverize a concrete wall or easily slice a hardwood tree in half. I took out my cheap camera and started taking some stills.

I crossed the road and hurried to where the soldiers had deployed. Just then, a spark flew off the side of a Simba, and a red flare rose into the sky. Simbas have sloping armor around 8mm thick, enough to deflect most rifle and machine gun fire, although a fifty-caliber bullet would pass through like it was melted cheese. Unsure if the spark and flare were a sign of return fire, I plunged into the banana grove hoping to link up with the soldiers.

I almost stepped on one of them. The soldiers were spread out, lying on their bellies, their rifles pointed to the right. I dropped down beside them and took stock of my situation. It was almost nightfall, I was in the middle of nowhere, and I had no idea who was shooting at whom, and from where. Fortunately, the soldiers seemed as friendly and confused as I was. The lieutenant in charge asked me what in the world I was doing there, and I told him I had just gotten off the plane from Manila. If it weren’t so muddy, you probably would have heard his jaw hit the ground. Manila, you say? Don’t you have better things to do?

Not really, I countered. I needed the exercise, or something like that. Having warmed up somewhat, we started bantering, with the Simba’s gunfire providing counterpoint.

The lieutenant asked if I worked for TV. Then, I noticed that the ABS-CBN cameraman had followed me into the grove. Nah I work for the Manila Times. The Times? He asked. The newspaper along Pioneer Street?

Now that got my attention. This guy knew my paper, and even knew where it was located. The Times doesn’t have its own building. Instead, it was banished to a hole in the basement of Robinson’s Hypermart, a grungy warehouse-like affair next to a major highway. You mean you read my paper? I asked hopefully. Nah. I just know someone who lives near there. What a letdown.

Still, it was nice to suddenly realize that people know your newspaper exists.
Then it started to rain. Hard. I tried to struggle into a raincoat, which was virtually impossible with my backpack still strapped to my back. It didn’t help that I was lying flat on the ground, and trying to stay lower. Since I had just arrived in Manila and had not expected to end up in a warzone immediately, I was wearing a white shirt. With the Simba still pouring out gunfire, I had no intention of rising to my knees and risk getting shot.

I rolled over on top of my backpack and tried to put on the raincoat. The rain spattered on my face, and you could almost see the steam rise from the ground. I rolled around trying to get the raincoat on. Eventually, I ended up with the muddy raincoat over me AND my backpack, giving me the appearance of a beached whale.

To my side, I noticed the ABS-CBN cameraman was busy taking footage of the soldiers in their fighting positions. I noticed how he centered on a soldier with an M60 light machine gun. The soldier was lying in the mud, like everyone else, gripping his M60. The difference was, that he was pretending he was firing at an unseen enemy - for the benefit of the camera. He was jiggling his machine gun, to make it look like it was firing. At the same time, he was making silly puttering sounds, just like a kid would when "firing" his machine gun during a game of cops and robbers. The cameraman was carefully filming the scene. Days later, I would see the footage, and how it was carefully crafted to look like a real firefight. The shot was cropped so that you could see the look of intensity on the soldiers face, as his machine gun "recoiled" against his shoulder with every "burst" of fire. Cropped out of the frame was the muzzle end of the machine gun. After all, the lack of any muzzle blast would destroy the action-packed scene. This was before Erap’s all out war in Mindanao, when combat footage would become a common thing.

After a few minutes, the rain stopped, and so did the firing. It was beginning to get dark, so the cameraman and I agreed it was time to move back and file a story. We said our goodbyes to the soldiers and started walking towards the car.

Back in Cotabato, I rushed to the nearest photography shop to have my film developed. After that unusual experience, I guess I was expecting to see photos that conveyed action, terror, uncertainty, and maybe fright. Maybe even a muzzle blast or two from the Simbas. So you can imagine my disappointment when I got the prints. All you could see was a road framed by banana trees. There, at the end of the road, small as gnats, were the Simbas.

Since I carried a cheap point-and-shoot camera with a don’t-worry-even-if-you’re-stupid wide-angle lens, the Simbas appeared so far away that you could barely make them out. The photo shop clerk didn’t help when he asked which banana tree I was trying to photograph. So much for combat photography.

Terribly disappointed, I phoned in a few details to the news desk in Manila. At least I made it to the city edition. I also went through several internet cafes, looking for one with a scanner with which to send my photos. I finally found one that had a hand scanner, and we gingerly scanned each photo and emailed them to Manila. The hostage crisis ended that night, with the rebels freeing their hostages and disappearing into the jungle.

The next day, I linked up with Sylvia, who was still part of the ABS-CBN Cotabato bureau, but preferred to operate on her own. Sylvia is a class on her own. A Tausug born in Jolo, she moved over to Cotabato at an early age and grew her roots there. And what roots. She knew everyone you had to know in Central Mindanao, and even people you shouldn’t know.

Probably more than any journalist, she was also trusted by the top leadership of the MILF. Once in a while, she gets invited to personal gatherings by the late MILF chairman Salamat Hashim. On a more regular basis, she chats and drinks coffee with Murad.

Normally, access to the MILF main camp of Abubakar was easy. You just dialed a Cotabato-registered number, and Al Haj Murad, the MILF chief, would lift his phone and answer. That is, if he’s not busy surfing the internet. Unless you catch him on a particularly bad day, it’s almost impossible not to get permission to visit Abubakar.

At first, Sylvia and I tried the regular route to Abubakar, through the main highway from Cotabato passing through Parang town and up to Camp Pendatun. But as a result of the hostage taking, the military had sealed off Abubakar, and blocked the highway leading to the camp. Then, clashes started erupting between the forward units of the military and the rebel units guarding the entrance of Abubakar in Matanog town. Civilians were leaving Matanog in droves, and there were reports of heavy shelling near the town hall. Everyone was on a war-footing. We were in a convoy of ARMM governor Zacaria Candao with Libyan Ambassador Abdul Aziz Azzarouk. Still, we were stopped by a military checkpoint several kilometers from Matanog and shooed back to Cotabato.

Not to be deterred, Sylvia decided to take the more difficult route. She called up Murad, and told him plainly that we wanted to cover his side of the story, and maybe share a few cups of coffee as well. Unfortunately, the military had closed the only land route in. No problem, Murad said. I’ll have you picked up.

So the next day, following Murad’s instructions, Sylvia and I met up with a contact in the outskirts of Cotabato, boarded a pumpboat and headed north. That was when the chopper buzzed us.

I didn’t know where we were going, and it was only when we disembarked at a pier when someone told me we were in north in Malabang, Lanao del Sur. A group of men met us there, and led us to a small eatery, where we ate some food for the trip ahead. I didn’t know where Malabang was on a map, but the men said that we had already skipped through the military roadblocks.

Pinoys seem to have that knack of making ripoffs, whether they are storylines from movies or designs for cars. Years ago, a small automobile outfit made a local version of the Mitsubishi Pajero, then the "classiest" car around. They labeled their creation the "Parejo," meaning "the same."

We were in rebel territory. But this was still part of the Philippines, no matter what they said. So in keeping with territorial traditions, they made us ride on another ripoff. It was a green "Hammer."

Now that sounds familiar, you might say. In 1985, the United States Army replaced the General Purpose [GP] 4X4 quarter ton truck [otherwise known as the Jeep – GP, G-P, Jeep… get the phonetic evolution?] with the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle or HMMWV. If you think that’s a mouthful, remember that this is the military, which makes a living creating acronyms to test the limits of the English language. And in keeping with military tradition, the grunts shortened it all to the Humvee. It’s basically that wide-bodied squat monster that you normally see in those old gulf war footage. It also costs five million pesos a pop.

So pinoys who had had enough of ripping off the Wrangler Jeep now began ripping off the civilian version of the Humvee, the Hummer. Factor in ethnic and tribal accents, and local manufacturers started painting the label "Hammer" on the rear of these ripoffs.

We boarded Murad’s Hammer for the long bumpy ride into Abubakar. Even though the rebels insisted that we ride in front [as guests of honor], I insisted on riding on the truck bed at the back. I didn’t say it then, because I don’t think they would have appreciated the thought. But if we are stopped by an ambush, you have less chances of getting away if you are stuck inside a cramped vehicle. Night fell as we travelled up the lonely highway, with nothing but the occasional bug hitting you in the face.

It was already dark when we entered Abubakar and pulled up in front of Murad’s house in the sub-camp of Camp Sarmiento. Murad himself welcomed us inside, and told us to get some rest in a large room adjoining his house. We would have a busy day tomorrow.

Sylvia and I laid out our gear in the room, which had large, shutterless windows. Our light came from a gas lamp. Murad’s men served us some dinner, which was fish, rice, and some monggo beans. After that, they left us alone, with a reminder that everyone here gets up very early in the morning.

The fact that they let Sylvia and I share the room spoke volumes of how much they trusted Sylvia. This was Abubakar, their version of the Holy Land, where a more conservative form of Islam was being practiced. The more traditional would have balked at the idea of Sylvia and I sharing the same room.

They gave us sleeping mats and thin blankets. Luckily, I had brought a space blanket, a thin, foil-like sheet that folds into the size of a deck of cards. The space blanket keeps you warm by reflecting body heat back at the person. It came in very handy as the night got deeper, and the cool wind turned into a blisteringly cold wind. It was also very noisy, and crackled like popcorn with every movement.

The next morning brought breakfast and a quick chat with Murad, who appeared quite busy. The vice chair asked what specifically we wanted to see, and we replied, quite naively, that we wanted to visit his front lines. A wide, knowing grin creased his face. If that’s what you want, that’s what the look seemed to say. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

He introduced us to Jon Abubakar, who appeared to be his right hand man, or the camp commandant, or both. I don’t recall anymore. Whatever, Jon was to be our guide. It was a good thing Sylvia and I packed light, because we brought everything we had on our backs as we alternately road and walked to the frontline.

Years later, Sylvia would tell me that our little road trip was not part of the MILF plan. Jon would later tell Sylvia that he was merely testing the two of us to see how far we were willing to go. We could have just been given the regular tour of the inside of the camp. But seeing that we were willing to go to the front, he decided to take us along.

The first signs of war appeared in the form of craters left by 105 millimeter howitzers from the army. They were probably courtesy of the army guys in camp pendatun, whom we had visited just a day earlier. The colonel in charge of the artillery battalion had been friendly enough, especially when he found out that Sylvia worked for ABS-CBN. I told him I worked for the Manila Times, and you could see from his reaction that he didn’t know if the Times was a newspaper, a tabloid, or a brand of timepieces. Still, he was kind enough to offer us some souvenir ashtrays made from the brass casings of spent artillery shells. Sylvia liked hers, but I had to say no because I knew I would have trouble with airport security.

A 105 millimeter artillery shell makes small shallow holes when they explode on hard, dry, compacted earth. Explosions on softer, moist earth produce more spectacular visual results, with a neat shower of flying earth. While the results on hard earth may seem unimpressive, consider what this means – little explosive force is absorbed by the hard earth, and most of it is this directed upward and outward, along with the shrapnel. We came across a hut that had been shredded by an artillery shell that exploded nearby. The wood and bamboo were torn and broken, as hot strips of metal sliced through porous, soft wood. Even the trees had been shredded.

Be careful, and just follow me, Jon said. We’re here already at the firing line. And keep you head down.

The sun had begun to bear down on us mercilessly. It was already close to midday. But this was not the place to complain about the heat.

After a while, we came upon a network of trenches dug in the earth. Some parts of the trench were reinforced with wood saplings. Assalamu Alaikum, we greeted the rebels we encountered. Some of them appeared quite young, not even in their twenties. Many did not look old enough to vote. But they all seemed to have that hard edge that comes with living in the front.

Finally, we came to the frontmost trench. Sylvia and I hunkered down and swapped stories with the rebels in the trench, while some of their colleagues lay against the side, ready with their rifles and RPGs. I made the mistake of rising a little, and was promptly chastised by Jon. Don’t stand up, if you want to keep your head. The "enemy" trench is just a few meters up front.
The enemy, as Jon referred to them, were elements of Charlie company, Philippine Army. They were dug in several yards in front of us, and were waiting for some unfortunately forgetful soul to raise his head carelessly. On my side of the battlefield, rebel soldiers were also waiting for something to shoot at. Still, I rose a little, raised my camera, and snapped a photo of rebel soldiers, weapons pointed outwards, waiting for movement from their enemies.

The soldiers and the rebels had been firing at each other all morning, Jon recounted. We were lucky that both sides had appeared to take a break. Otherwise, they may lob another couple of artillery shells in our direction.

More than gunfire, the thought of artillery frightened me. Unless you’re incredibly unlucky, you’re basically safe from gunfire so long as you’re hunkered down in a trench. But artillery. That can dig you out of any hole. A direct hit can tear you into pieces so small that your rescuers won’t find enough to fill a condom. And the noise and concussion. Veterans have been driven mad by artillery.

LIFE IN THE GUERILLA FOXHOLES
Ed Lingao
The Manila Times, February 1, 1999

FROM a rebel trench, Matanog – Raise your head a bit above the trench and you could see the positions of Charlie company, 27th Infantry Battalion. Raise your head a little too high, and you could lose your head completely.

"Baba ka lang, baka may sniper," warns Jon Abubakar, a cadre of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. "Nandito na tayo sa firing line."

For the past week, MILF rebels and government troopers waged war from the trenches that now scar Matanog, trading everything from small-arms fire to 60mm mortars to 105mm howitzer shells.

Just the day before, the Army tried to dig out the rebels from this trench with howitzers. Just meters from the trench were small craters made by the exploding [shells] The trench is actually a network of trenches dug into Matanog’s soft brown earth, that zigzags for several meters. At one part, there is a small bunker, almost a tunnel really, where you can crawl into during the shelling, its roof made of logs covered with dirt. During heavy shelling, you just crawl in, draw your legs to your chest, and pray the next shell falls somewhere else.

After taking my stills, I remembered that Sylvia may need some help. Sylvia was a one man team. She had an old sharp camcorder in her backpack, and she does her own shots and interviews. I guess that’s also why we work well together; I usually offer to film for her.

I took the camera and gave her a working script for a standup, or a piece-to-camera. In all her years working for TV, this was the part that Sylvia had very little experience with, primarily because it’s extremely difficult to shoot your own standup. A standup is basically those one or two lines that the reporter delivers to the camera, mouthing words that sound marvelously vague but seemingly authoritative.

It took Sylvia a few minutes and a couple of takes to get it right. A few interviews later, we were all done. Jon was on the radio with someone. After a while, we started to leave.

Jon was ecstatic, even more than we were. You are the first mediamen to come to our firing line, he said. We are happy that someone has come to the front to tell our story.

And Jon had more news. Apparently, both sides were now trying to iron out a truce. Then Senator Teofisto Guingona was been allowed through the blockade to talk to Murad and Salamat in Abubakar. It seemed that the truce was going to hold.

But more importantly, Guingona had finished his meeting with the two MILF officials, and was going to head down the mountain road in a convoy. If we wanted to get back to Cotabato City ASAP, he was our best bet.

Now that left me stumped. What were we going to do? Flag down the Senator’s convoy with a few dozen armed rebels? Jon muttered some more words in the radio, and brought us to a part of the highway that was still within rebel territory. Don’t worry, he said, Guingona’s convoy is coming down this way.

True enough, the convoy appeared, and slowed down when it saw us. We waved and flagged him down. Guingona rolled down his window and gaped at me in surprise. Apparently, I didn’t look part of the scenery, and had MANILA BOY written all over me. I grasped his hand and shook it, and introduced myself. Manila Times, I said. Ohhh what are you doing here? He asked. Same thing you are. Are you headed down to Cotabato? Oh yes, hop on if you like. That solved it.

We thanked Jon and his men profusely, and asked him to convey our thanks to Murad.

The senator was riding a pickup, so again, Sylvia and I jumped into the truck bed, where Guingona’s security detail were riding. We sped off with such violence that I barely had the chance to wave to our old friends. The road down from Abubakar weaves and turns like a snake, and is bordered by bluffs and hills that afford the rebels plenty of opportunity to ambush military units. Several times, we spotted rebels positioned high up above the highway, guarding against intrusions.

I sat on the lip of the truckbed, with my left elbow on the roof of the cab. It started to rain again. There’s something about Cotabato’s weather that makes it rain so much in the afternoon after a dry baking morning. The rain came in sheets that drenched us thoroughly. I didn’t mind. I was just happy to have had so many turns of good luck.

The terrain flattened out, and we slowed down as the abandoned Matanog muncipal hall appeared to our left. We stopped at the first military checkpoint. There were several mediamen assembled there, waiting for the first chance to get in, as well as waiting for word from Guingona. Imagine their surprise when they saw me on top of the senator’s pickup bed. An ABS-CBN cameraman asked me where I came from. I told him I came from inside Abubakar. How did I get in? Long story.

While the reporters converged around Guingona for a quick ambush interview, I hopped off the pickup and walked over to the side of the municipal hall. There lay the debris and rubble of several houses that had been flattened by the fighting. I snapped several photos before being called over. We were leaving.

Guingona asked me how far I planned to go with him. I told him I was going to Cotabato, and maybe fly back to Manila the next day. He smiled and said he was flying to Manila on a borrowed jet this same afternoon, and I could ride with him if I wanted. I couldn’t believe my luck. I had gotten a free ride in and out of the rebel camp, and now I was getting a free ride to Manila.
So there. One morning, I was hunkered down in a rebel foxhole, waiting for artillery to fall on my head, and before nightfall, I was in Manila, hailing a cab to the office and wondering which pizza delivery to call.

I made next day’s front page. With photos, to boot.

Landslide in Catanduanes

The Manila Times

1999

Captain Henry loves sunsets. That’s why he invited me to sit with him in the cockpit of his Philippine Air Force C-130 Hercules. Sunsets are glorious occasions, he said. Especially in the greenhouse-like cockpit of a Herky Bird.

After being burned and toasted a nice dark brown color in storm-ravaged Catanduanes, I would have jumped at the chance to ride the good captain’s Hercules even if it were past midnight. After all, he was flying back to Manila, and I was getting used to the idea of free rides home.

But the sunset really was glorious. A Herky Bird is a wondrous piece of machinery. First built in 1954 by Lockheed, a C-130 is a four engined turboprop cargo plane with a rear ramp that can carry two fully armed platoons, a V-150 armored personnel carrier and a Jeep, or a presidential limousine. For a lot of soldiers, it’s an angel of mercy.

But few people have ever been in a Herky’s cockpit. It’s like a greenhouse, with plexiglass panels all around, even at the pilot’s feet. There we were, flying just above the clouds, when the sun began to set.

The clouds turned crimson all around, and the whole cockpit was bathed in a beautiful red glow that had us gasping in wonder. It was so surreal, you could imagine someone singing the Hallelujah chorus at the back. There was silence all around, as the red ball creeped lower beyond the mountains. Since we were flying westwards, it was almost like we were chasing the sun as it began to hide behind the horizon. This had the effect of lengthening the sunset.

Captain Henry nudged me. Take a picture, take a picture. Do something. I muttered an apology for having run out of film, and silently cursed myself for not bringing more. God must love pilots.

I had arrived in Catanduanes a week ago in the tail end of typhoon Reming. I had been stuck in the Manila Times desk for months. Although I held the title Chief of Reporters, I was generally acting as the city editor. This meant I took charge of deploying reporters and guiding their coverages. In the late afternoons, I would brief the editors on the biggest stories of the day during the story conferences.

Typhoon Loleng roared into the country one late October, but not before pounding Catanduanes first. Catanduanes is the easternmost island of the Philippines, and while the rest of Luzon is protected from typhoons by the spine of the Sierra Madre Mountain Range, Catanduanes sits alone in the Pacific. People often refer to the island-province as the doormat of every typhoon that slices into the Philippines.

A wire report came in that Loleng had caused a landslide in Catanduanes that had buried and killed at least thirty people. This was the least of Catanduanes’ problems – power was out, and most public transport to and from the province had also been suspended. I jumped at the first chance to leave the office for the field.

I no longer remember how I got to Catanduanes. The coast guard had suspended all ferry boats to the island, and commercial flights were also on hold. I think I hopped aboard a military flight bringing Defense Secretary Orlando Mercado and the Defense Press Corps to Catanduanes to survey the devastation. So there I was in the capital Virac, with my trusty backpack that Esther had named Grungy, for reasons I will not go into. I had gotten in, but I hadn’t yet thought of how to get out.

Virac was so badly hit that it was hard to imagine how authorities could restore power in the next few months. Aside from the usual sight of houses blown down by the typhoon, electric poles were also lying in the middle of the road, their high tension wires dangling waist-high. This made it all the more difficult for cars to travel to the badly ravaged interior. Instead of sitting on their haunches and complaining, residents found another use for that now-useless high tension wire in the middle of the road, and started hanging their laundry on them.

At first I hitched along with Secretary Mercado. After all, he had the mobility and the resources to get around. We did a spin around the capital and the suburbs, enough for me to gather enough material to send an initial story.

Beside a riverbank, I saw an old lady doing her laundry. It was an incongruous sight. All around her were the ruins of her house and the trunks of trees rendered bald by Loleng’s winds. Yet she was so busy washing her laundry, as if it were the most important chore in the world. I took out my trusty cheap still camera, and snapped a photo. The next day, it was the banner photo of the Manila Times.

LOLENG’S FURY TURNS
BICOL INTO A WAR ZONE
By Ed Lingao
The Manila Times, Oct. 25, 1998

“It’s like a war zone. It’s as if a bomb has been dropped.”
This was how Defense Secretary Orlando Mercado described wide areas in Catanduanes island a day after typhoon Loleng carved a path of death and destruction through the Bicol region.

Most of the houses, according to Mercado, were without roofs. In fact, along many streets in Virac, the capital town, no houses were left standing.

Entire homes were blown or swept away, and coconut and hardwood trees were uprooted. From the air, roofless house and houseless roofs littered the ground like dirty laundry.

I also started writing out a shorter sidebar story for the Times. I hadn’t found a way to transmit my copy from Virac yet, but I knew I could send it back through Lyn Rillon, our Times photographer who rode with us in, and would ride back to Manila with Secretary Mercado. After all, the good secretary had no intention of spending the night here.

We were given some free time to explore the area before the team headed home, so I found a piece of driftwood on a shoreline littered with broken branches and tree trunks, and sat down with a pen and paper and started scribbling my copy.

CATANDUANES NOW A HOWLING WILDERNESS
Ed Lingao
The Manila Times, Oct. 25, 1998

VIRAC, Catanduanes – From the shade of a massive hardwood tree uprooted by Loleng, Ferdinand Garcia contemplated his future and searched for the remains of his past.

Garcia and his three children were rendered homeless by Loleng which swept to sea all traces of his shanty and his belongings in Barangay Guinobaatan, Catanduanes.

Garcia is jobless, making ends meet by occasionally harvesting abaca and copra from the mountains.

What makes matters more difficult is that Garcia has cancer. The apple-sized growth protruding from his stomach is a constant reminder that when things are down, it doesn’t always mean that there’s no other way but up.

With that finished, I handed my paper to Lyn, and hoped that the editors back in Manila could decipher my handwriting. I rode with Lyn, the other reporters, and Secretary Mercado back to the Virac airport, and watched their aircraft take off. There’s something about staying behind and watching your colleagues depart that leaves a heavy feeling of uncertainty in the pit of your stomach. It was a feeling I would feel with alarming regularity.

After the airplane left, I noticed a couple of Hueys warming up for takeoff. I strode over and found out that they were leaving for a mercy flight to San Miguel town, several miles inland. San Miguel was the scene of the landslide that killed more than thirty people. This was the place I had really come to see.

The pilot of one Huey agreed to take me with him. In the troop compartment were several other people, residents of San Miguel who had sought the military’s help in bringing assistance to their town. I slid in beside them and strapped in.

Just then, a television news team arrived. You know when a TV team arrives in the same way you know that a typhoon is here – there’s a lot of noise, some loud voices, and sane people keep their head down low and the foolhardy poke their noses out. It was a TV team from GMA, with Karen Davila and a cameraman. With her was a big hulking guy with grey curly hair. I didn’t know him personally yet, but it was Abner Mercado. A year later, we would all be working together for the same TV network.

But on this hot afternoon, Karen was trying to bargain a ride with the Huey pilot. The pilot could accommodate one more passenger, but of course, Karen insisted on coming with her cameraman. For an irrational moment, I felt that the pilot wanted to bump me off in favor of the TV crew. After all, he probably never heard of The Manila Times. Newspaper reporters are sometimes relegated to the bottom of the trough. The pilot kept looking at me as Karen threw all her convincing powers at him. We’re TV, I have to be with my cameraman, she said. Happily, Abner didn’t insist on riding as well. I just looked away, or tried to look busy. In the end, the pilot said, the hell with it, get in, and we’ll make it to San Miguel with the extra passenger. I don’t know who was more relieved, me or Karen,

I sat on the rightmost edge of the troop bench, and after making space for Karen and her cameraman, I strapped in again. We had bumped into each other a couple of times in the past, and were generally in nodding and smiling terms.

Nothing for me is as exciting and exhilarating as riding a Huey on take-off. You look down at the skids and wonder how all that power and noise can translate into lift. A Huey vibrates like crazy. One moment, its vibrating on the tarmac. The vibration changes frequency, and the next moment, it’s as if the aircraft had vibrated itself into the air. A moment later, the skid under your feet is in the air, and houses and trees are flashing by.

San Miguel is around fifteen kilometers northeast of Virac, so the whole flight didn’t last half an hour. However, we ran into a squall, and since I was sitting at the end of the bench, the rain lashed at my face with large, stinging raindrops. There must have been a crosswind as well, because I noticed that the chopper was flying forward with its nose offset to the left. Since I was strapped into the right side of the bench, and since Philippine Hueys have had their cargo doors removed, I felt like I was flying headway into the wind and rain. I have to admit I wondered if the pilot was flying me into the rain on purpose, or if there really was a crosswind. Then, I remembered that the gunner behind me was also getting wet as well.

Our destination was a barangay called Kilikilihan, which sat beside the Bato river in San Miguel town. The chopper landed, and we all hopped off. Karen and his cameraman started shooting, and I did my interviews. It turned out that an extended family had sought refuge inside a large house at the height of Loleng’s fury. But the hard rain had loosened the soil, and the hill behind the house collapsed and buried everyone in mud.

Villagers converged on the chopper to ask for help, since no vehicles could get through to Kilikilihan. A wounded man needed to be brought to the hospital in Virac. With that, I decided to skip the return flight of the chopper, and simply stay behind. Besides, we hadn’t been half an hour in the village before the pilot said it was time to go.

I told Karen I was staying behind, and she gave me the look that said ARE YOU SERIOUS? I told myself that Virac was just around ten to fifteen kilometers down the road, and there wasn’t any other road I could get lost in anyway.

With that, everyone, including the injured man, jumped in and the fully loaded chopper rose in a storm of grit and rain. Again, that feeling of getting left behind.

THE LONG ROAD TO SAN MIGUEL
By Ed Lingao
Nov. 1 1998

The Huey left in a storm of dust, and the village was again just one more place at the end of the world.

In the wake of typhoon Loleng, Barangay Kilikilihan was cut off from the rest of Catanduanes. The only way in to this village which sustained the most number of casualties from the storm was by helicopter. Dozens of landslides blocked the road to the poblacion, and not even motorcycles could make it over places where the road had altogether disappeared. The other alternative was to walk the 15-odd kilometers to the poblacion.

“Nagpaiwan ka?” an incredulous resident asked as the Huey disappeared down a bend in the swollen river. There always seemed to be something wrong with dropping into a disaster area for a few minutes, and then leaving to pretend that one already knew all about their sufferings and fears, their joys and their hopes. Besides, I thought, there could be another flight out later in the day. Or if things didn’t pan out, I could leg it out.

The village had all but disappeared from the map. Shattered posts marked the remains of houses. Roofs had disappeared. Mud was everywhere, baking slowly under the sun. A few hogs that survived were rooting in the mud. Their owner was lucky; he would have something to eat in the months to come.

The tragedy of Kilikilihan is not the tragedy of the landslides alone. While the village suffered the most casualties because of the landslides, it will suffer more in the next few months, as villagers try to find something to eat.

-------------------------------

TYPHOON-HIT VILLAGE
REGRETS DEFORESTATION
By Ed Lingao
The Manila Times Oct. 28 1998

A hard rain fell Sunday afternoon on the village of Kilikilihan in San Miguel, Catanduanes.

It was a heavy rain on a windless day, the kind that gave an unsettled feeling. You could see and feel the mud steaming up after a hot morning.

In this land which God seemed to have forgotten, even nature has gone awry. This small village at the banks of the Bato river sustained the highest number of casualties at the height of typhoon Loleng. Thirty-six people, mostly children, died here in one landslide that buried a house; 34 bodies were recovered, the other two were left inside to rot.

Kilikilihan was a village born to suffering. In World War II, Japanese soldiers would gather suspected guerillas at the banks of the Bato river and torture them by beating them in the armpits [kili-kili]. Thus the name Kilikilihan.

Over the years, the community grew prosperous, and villagers started cutting down trees to grow abaca, Catanduanes’ number one product. Soon, the hills around Kilikilihan were covered by abaca and coconut trees. Life was simple and sweet – “paradise”, as one villager described it.

But the hills would turn against them. Kilikilihan is bounded by steep hills on one side, and the Bato river on the other. On the day typhoon Loleng came, the river swelled, and the hills tumbled down.

--------------------------------------------------

“Ewan ho kung paano na ito,” said Cenon Dayawon. “Puro ubod ng niyog na lang ang kakainin namin.”

Food would have to be brought in by helicopter, or carried on someone’s back from the poblacion.

“Pasensya ka na sa handa namin,” says Jason Quirino as his mother prepares a meager lunch for us. The meal consisted of canned sardines we were able to buy from a store.

It was especially difficult for the women, the children, the elderly, and the injured. The strong could walk the 15 kilometers to the poblacion to get relief goods. The injured could barely walk.

Renato Tionela lost a toe when a wooden timber fell on his foot during the landslides. His foot is now swollen and infected. Jose Paune’s leg had swollen like a basketball after being hit by debris during the storm. By now it was clear that the next chopper should have these as passengers, and not me. After leaving instructions with barangay officials on how to talk to the pilot, I started down the long road to San Miguel.

“Mahirap talaga ngayon, walang madaanan,” said Bernie, a pastor of the Iglesia ni Cristo I met along the road. In Barangay Mabato, where Bernie is based, we came across a couple digging through the remains of their house.

“Ka Erning, nagsamba na ba kayo?” The couple, sweating, dirty, and knee deep in mud, was taken by surprise. “Samba tayo ng alas tres.”

A smile of remembrance cracked through the thin layer of mud that covered their faces. It was a Sunday.

The storm has passed, and life must go on.

They say the sun is at its hottest just after the fury of a typhoon. Some say it’s really psychological; people who were shivering in the rain just a day before suddenly have to adjust to the humid heat.

When I finally did decide to leg it back to Virac, the sun was already up and the steam was rising from the ground. I had someone point me in the right direction for Virac. I didn’t want to walk for fifteen kilometers, and then be told that Virac was the OTHER WAY up the road. Properly briefed on directions, I put on a floppy hat, dug out my sunglasses, shouldered Grungy, and started my long lonely hike. Along the road, I came across other fellow travelers, including Pastor Bennie, whom I mentioned in the story earlier. After a few hours walking down the rough rocky road, I could feel the sun roasting through the crown of my hat. Occasionally, I would come across a bamboo tube channeling water from a spring, and dip my hat in the cold water or simply put my head under the bamboo for a refreshing semi-shower.

I remember, on the last leg of my hike, bumping into a bunch of people riding a pickup truck. We were just a few kilometers from the capital, and the roads were already open. On their invitation, I hopped gratefully on board the pickup bed and rode the rest of the way to Virac.

I was still able to find a telegraph station that was still working, and filed my story before searching for a hotel of some sort in which to spend the night. The one I did find, like much of Virac, did not have any electricity. So a candle had to suffice in the hot lonely and dark room.

I stayed a few more days in Virac before deciding that I could come home to Manila. The seas were still too rough, and there were no commercial flights to Manila. Thankfully, I found Captain Henry Bulos’ C-130 sitting on the Virac runway with a plane-full of relief supplies and a long line of refugees begging to ride out of Virac. I buttonholed Bulos, who was amused to find a reporter in the middle of nowhere. First thing he asked was if I had a camera. Next thing he asked was if I liked sunsets.

I answered yes to both, and got a ride home. Although I forgot to tell him earlier that I didn’t have any more film.

*******

Just a short postscript. Five years later, checking in at the Manila International Airport for a flight to Iraq, I bumped into Capt. Henry again. He had resigned his commission in the Air Force, and was flying to Angola to work for TransAfrik, the “mercenary” air outfit that has been hiring PAF pilots. I hope Capt. Henry is still okay. And I hope they have good sunsets in Angola.

Sarobi, Afghanistan

November 2001

The man was waiting for us at the turn of the mountain road.
From a more clinical point of view, it was the perfect ambush position. The road was rocky and had never seen a drop of asphalt. To compound things, the turn and the incline had also forced us to slow down.
He was dressed in the ubiquitous shalwar chemise, the loose knee-length blouse and baggy trousers common in Afghanistan and Pakistan. An earth-colored turban wrapped around his head completed the image. All in all, he would have looked pretty harmless, if not for the full sized AK-47 in his hand - and the fact that he was flagging us down.
We weren't particularly worried at that point. It wasn't the first time that an armed Afghan flagged us down. On the road to Jalalabad, a group of armed Afghans also flagged us down and charged us a small toll fee. To make things official, they even gave us a handwritten receipt. Of course we couldn't read the Pashto [or was it Arabic?] on the scrap of paper they gave us. For all we knew, they just gave us grandmother's favorite recipe for boiled goat's hooves. But it worked with the pencil pushing auditors back home, so it suited us just fine.
There was something different about this man, though. He flagged us down, and over the protests of Dennis, Iltaf our Pakistani driver slowed. Don’t stop, Dennis said, don’t stop. But it was too late, and the van lost momentum and coasted to a stop. We glanced at each other nervously.
As an outgrowth of the former British Empire in India, Pakistan naturally follows that strange British propensity for driving on the "wrong" side of the road. After the Romans, the British may have built much of the world’s roads, transportation being a major factor in the reach of any empire. But in the course of just one century, Britain had lost much of its empire, and consequently, much of its clout in dictating which side of the road the world drives.
Iltaf, being Pakistani, and this being a Pakistani registered van, was driving from the right side of the vehicle, which meant that he was right in front of me. The gunman leaned in and quickly scanned the insides of the van. For a brief moment, our eyes met, and I was not sure what I saw. He did not look extraordinarily cruel or malicious, nor did he have the glazed look of someone swimming in a haze of opium, or the crazed look of bloodlust. In fact he just looked like any ordinary Afghan, except he had a gun. He then spoke rapidly to Iltaf in pashto. I couldn't follow their exchange, and even if Iltaf wanted to tell us what was being said, he probably couldn't as he spoke no English. Inside the van, we were exchanging worried looks. Then the man drew back and motioned Iltaf to drive the van up a side road, a path really, that led further up a rocky hill. Iltaf hesitated.
Just then, a smaller man ran down the hill waving his AK-47 and barking commands. Behind him was another armed Afghan. And beyond him, still another. The guns were now pointed at us. Putang ina, someone said.
I think there was a brief discussion on whether we should make a run for it. Some obviously wanted to just gun the engine and speed off. But it wouldn’t have been easy. It would take great effort for the van to gain momentum since we were in an incline on a rocky road. And it really is difficult to outrun automatic rifle fire, especially if the man wielding the rifle is just beside you, separated only by a thin sheet of aluminum and glass. I no longer remember the discussion clearly. But in hindsight, even assuming that we agreed quickly on what course of action to take, it would not matter. Iltaf, the man who controlled the wheel, the man who would decide our fate, also could not understand English.
At this point, Iltaf had no more choice. He put the van in gear, turned the steering wheel right, and gingerly proceeded up the side road while the armed men surrounded us. It was disconcerting, to say the least - we were out in the middle of nowhere, on a mountain road, accosted by armed and excitable men, and now they were making us take a detour. How remote can you get. Ten meters off the main road, the smaller man, apparently the guy in charge, banged on the van's side and made it stop. He strode up to my window, put his hand in, and peered inside at us and our stuff. He looked young, and his face was not seamed or wrinkled by the Afghan sun. It is difficult to tell age with Afghans. They either look very young or very old. If the first gunman had that neutral look, bossman seemed agitated and very aggressive. I took the chance and grasped his hand and spoke the customary Islamic greeting "assalamu alaykum," peace be with you. Traditionally, the other person is obliged to respond with the greeting alaikum assalam, and with you, peace. Sometimes, this disarms muslims and breaks the ice. On more than one occassion, it surprised the other person that a foreigner had bothered to learn the islamic greeting. But this guy apparently was in no mood for niceties. He just let go of my hand and barked more orders in pashto. At that point, we knew we were really in trouble.
One of the men grasped the handle of the van's door and pulled the sliding door open. Until that moment, we were still fooling ourselves with the false sense of security provided by the van. We were still cocooned, separated from the rest of Afghanistan by a thin shell of metal, rubber and plastic. When the gunman opened the huge sliding door, we felt very naked and exposed. Then he motioned us to step out. Naturally, we all hesitated. Then the small big boss started shouting, and we heard the snick of charging bolts being pulled back and rounds being chambered into the rifles. Small big boss was on my side, so I could see everything he was doing. I was pretty miffed that he snubbed my greeting, but I was ready to forgive him as soon as he lifted his AK-47 with his left hand, yelled, and cocked his gun with his right. The AK carries the bigger 7.62mm bullet, and makes a distinctively chilling sound when you cock it, and the rifle cartridge snaps into place inside the chamber.
I had a small videocamera on the seat beside me. Thinking and hoping they were just out to rob us, i got my thick black jacket and used it to cover the camera. With that, we all got down from the van, except for Iltaf.
At this point, Val had the presence of mind to press the record button of his huge camera. It was much later that we learned that Val had been recording. The images he captured were spooky in their own way. The first images were ghost-white as the camera iris struggled to adjust to the harsh afghan sunlight. Then, figures of men walking up a barren rocky hill. The uncertainty was thick in the air, you could almost feel it while watching the video, see it in the way the men walked with leaden legs towards what could be a very long day, or a very short life. In the video, Dennis is ahead in the distance with the boss. Patrick follows, with Jim ambling very slowly behind with his head down and his hands behind him, as if deep in thought. I enter the frame, walking ahead to Dennis and the boss.
The human eye sees a particular color because that is the only one reflected by the object. For example, an apple looks red because when light strikes the apple, the fruit absorbs all the other colors of the rainbow except red, which it reflects into your eyes. In Afghanistan, there’s a lot of khaki going around. The word khaki comes from the Persian and Urdu word "khak", or dust. It was developed by the British during its Indian and Afghan campaigns, as a suitable replacement for the screaming red colors its armies favored in other less brutal parts of the world where men have fooled each other into thinking that warfare was a gentlemanly sport like foxhunting. South and Central Asians, who had little use for such trappings, soon taught the British the need for a more practical sense of battlefield fashion.
It is always easy to look back at more dangerous times and see how we could have done things differently. Sometimes, after sufficient time and introspection, after running the incident over and over again in our minds like a looped reel, we may convince ourselves of feelings and thoughts, often heroic, that we may not really have had. Having said that, it is difficult to describe with all certainty everything that really went through our minds at that time. There was terror, certainly. And there was a numbing sense of helplessness. The rest, I attempt to recall with all honesty after many years, so please bear with me.
I remember looking around a dun-colored landscape, thinking there was not a single tree or shrub to hide behind, no place to escape. Not even a respectably sized boulder. Just the endless khaki-color of rocks and sand and sun. In the video, everything seems washed out, because Val didn’t have the time or chance to flick on the white balance. But even in our memories, the images already seemed washed out. There was nothing, no other color to reflect the harsh sunlight, just a monochrome of rocks and sand and dust whose starkness was just highlighted by the shadows of noon. And while the sun beat down on us from its apex, I seem to remember feeling a chill, the kind no amount of sunlight can drive away because it comes from within.
We were being led up a small rocky trail that turned left, away from Iltaf and the van, and out of sight of the road. I do remember thinking we had just been kidnapped, and wondered if this was what it was like for all the kidnapping victims of the Abu Sayyaf in Basilan that we have covered. But what really made it terrifying was the knowledge that we could not communicate with our kidnappers. The Abu Sayyaf, for all their arrogance, cruelty, and intransigence, could at least speak Filipino. But how do you beg for your life if you cannot even speak the language?
And I remember, after feeling that chill, worrying how brutally cold the afghan nights were, and how the midday sun could sear unprotected flesh, and for that I cursed myself for leaving my jacket to hide the camera. And lastly, and this I remember clearest of all – I worried that we were about to simply disappear from the face of the earth.
In hindsight, this may have been the most frightening moment in our professional lives, frightening not just because of the uncertainty it left us, but because of the uncertainty it would leave our families. This was Afghanistan. It would take several days before Manila would start wondering why we never showed up in Kabul. After that, I can’t imagine where Manila will look first. Anyone who tries to track us down would only find a paper trail until the Pakistani border, after which we would have virtually disappeared into the Afghan dust. The whole country was a wasteland of angry warlords, hungry refugees, and passive-aggressive bandits; it’s hard to imagine how anyone would be concerned with the fate of a group of third world journalists. I remember hoping that if the unimaginable happens, someone, anyone would be left to tell our story. It was a terribly morbid thought, but for centuries, people in this land tended to disappear without a trace, their bones bleaching and mixing with the rock.
I also remember thinking that if this was trouble, I didn't want to be passive about the whole thing. Dennis was ahead of the column with an armed bandit, followed by the boss, followed by Patrick and Jim. I came behind followed by Val. Up ahead I could see that Dennis and the bandit had stopped on a plateau and dropped to one knee. I strode ahead of Patrick and Jim to try to plead with the boss. That was when I noticed one bandit rifling through Dennis' camera bag, which was on the ground. He rummaged through it, found a nice shiny camera flash, turned it this way and that, and stuffed it in his pocket without a word. It was kinda funny in a twisted sense - the man pocketed the flash, but he didn’t bother taking the expensive camera hanging from Dennis' neck. Later, we would joke about how the bandits would try to make the flash work in the middle of the desert without a camera. Much later, the thought bordered on the hilarious - around the campfire, the bandits would try to figure out what the flash does. Someone presses the wrong button, and the flash goes off with a brilliant, well, flash. In a panic, everyone whips out his AK-47 and starts blasting away at the offending device.
Back on the hill, the boss was standing over Dennis and the other bandit. Dennis, for some strange reason, took out a soda from his pocket and graciously offered it to the boss. "Pepsi?" Dennis eagerly offered, before tossing in a surprise line that only he could pull off: "The choice of the new generation!"
I remember that because it was so hilariously ridiculous that I didn’t know if I should laugh or get worried that Dennis was losing it. Then I remembered that Dennis tended to get funnier the more nervous he got.
"Filipini, filipini... Journalist, journalist!" I pleaded with small boss. The man looked up at me as if I were a talking goldfish, barked a few words, and then started patting my pockets. We were being robbed at gunpoint! I pretended not to know what he was trying to do, and he patted my pocket more insistently and held his palm out. When I hesitated some more, he just reached into my right hip pocket while clutching his AK with his right hand. Getting the message, I turned out my hip pockets and gave him all the pesos and Pakistani rupees I had inside. After emptying my hip pockets, he demanded I empty my cargo pockets as well, and started patting them down. Resigned to the robbery, I gave him some trinkets from my cargo pockets. He gave me another pat down to make sure I was well fleeced.
While he got a handful of money and trinkets, small boss failed to get the biggest prize – my wallet with around six or seven hundred dollars inside. I usually keep my wallet in my back pocket like most Filipinos.
Then it occured to me - the shalwar chemise, the long flowing top and the incredibly baggy trousers which everyone here wore, only had hip pockets and no back pockets. People who have lived their entire lives without a back pocket would probably think other people would have no need for one. So while he gave me a final pat down, I kept my arms down at my side, with my hands bent back and fingers loosely shielding my back pocket. I was hoping that if it did occur to him to pat my ass as well, my hands would get in the way of a thorough search. When his hands patted me down one last time, I held my breath as his fingers searched around my hips and brushed against my hands. His hands were just inches away from my wallet when he gave up. It actually worked, and all he got from me were a few dollars, several hundred pesos, and a bunch of Pakistani rupees.
After fleecing me, he moved on to Patrick, and zeroed in on his vest pocket where he kept his wallet and passport. Again, the guy just reached in, fished out Patrick's wallet, and unburdened him of his cash. It wouldn't have been so bad if he also didn't insist on taking Patrick's passport as well. We all protested. In a place like this, a passport could be the next best protection for a foreigner, aside from a gun. The whole time, Val was recording the scene. Finally, the boss gave back Patrick's passport. All this time, the other bandits were robbing the rest of the group. I noticed that while the other bandits robbed us, at least one of them stood a distance away with his rifle at the ready. If we made any sudden move, or were foolish enough to grab a gun or make a run for it, we would still have to contend with at least one armed bandit who knew the weapon and the terrain.
Then, it was Val's turn. The boss fished out Val's palmtop, which was thick and tempting, though not as shiny as Dennis' flash. Val protested the loudest, saying the palmtop contained all his contacts, even his contacts in the Abu Sayyaf. Again we protested, but the boss ignored us. When we protested some more, he babbled back; when we protested louder, he started shouting. Then he raised his rifle, pulled back the bolt again, and let it snap forward. The warning was pretty clear to everyone. But Val wasn't about to be put off by a rifle. Somehow, and until now I still cannot figure out how this happened because the camera shut off at this point, Val was able to reach out and fish his palmtop out of the hands of the boss without him shooting us. The man was looking at Val's palmtop, probably trying to figure out what it does, when Val just took it back. The boss just seemed to shrug and leave the matter at that. Also, the bandits didn't take Val's huge camera. Later we decided that the camera was too big for the Afghans to lug around without a car, and even harder to operate. What would they do? Open a video production outfit to shoot afghan weddings? Still, it was amazing that Val came away from the experience with his camera and palmtop intact. I still can't figure out how Val did it. That man lives a charmed life.
Val pocketed his precious palmtop, mumbling something about stupid bandits and stupid drivers. With the boss and his men finished with their looting, we waited in suspense for what was coming next. A million thoughts played through our minds: Would they also rob us of our clothes and shoes, and leave us to alternately freeze and bake in the middle of nowhere? Or would they drag us off someplace and ask for ransom? Somehow, thoughts of that huge jar of petroleum jelly in the car came to mind. Or would they simply shoot us. Finally, the boss waved his fingers at us, as if trying to make us disappear. Uncertain what he meant, we stood rooted on the spot for a few moments, until someone finally started walking down to the van. If the walk up the hill seemed like eternity, the walk down seemed even longer. We kept looking back at them to gauge their intentions. We were so worried that they would start shooting us as soon as our backs were turned, that it was difficult to stop oneself from running down the hill. We tried to act nonchalant, even as curses flew all around.
In the driver’s seat, Iltaf could see us walking back. Perhaps in his excitement to get out of there, he started backing away even before we got to the van. For a moment, I remember worrying that after finally being freed by these bandits, we would still shrivel to death in the desert because our driver panicked and sped away even before we could get into the van. Thankfully, Iltaf realized his mistake immediately, and stopped to take us in. Or perhaps it was because we hadn’t paid him yet.
I remember distinctly, as we neared the red van, seeing a small sedan speed down the road where we had been stopped earlier. The car was also captured on Val's video. I'm not certain, but i think they were the Japanese journalists we met on the road earlier this morning. Fortunately for them, they got away unmolested because the bandit group was busy with us. Down at the van, Iltaf was still in the driver's seat, quaking, while an armed bandit stood to one side, guarding him. We climbed into the van, and Dennis started cursing the poor driver, who started jabbering back in Pashto. Naturally, we couldn’t understand a word he said, neither could he understand us. But since we were shouting at him, it was pretty clear what we were saying. For his part, he kept putting his hands to his chest and spreading them out, as if to say, what could I do. Poor fellow, it was hard to blame him. That time, we unanimously decided that we should have just ignored the armed bandit and sped up the road. Of course we had the wonderful benefit of hindsight. For all we knew, it was just another guy asking for toll fees, like what happened on the road to Jalalabad the day before. And if we tried to speed past him, what was to stop him from opening fire on our van with his automatic rifle? And how sure were we that he didn't have his armed friends waiting further down to road to take us out if we ran over their front man? If we had ignored the armed checkpoint in Jalalabad, they would probably have blown so many holes in the van that we would whistle at minimum speed. And that time, they only asked for a few pesos worth of toll fee, and even gave us a receipt. It is hard to make intelligent decisions when you don't have much information to work on. But on that day, at that time, we heaped all our fears, anger and frustration at the one guy in the van who couldn't understand us. Poor Iltaf probably worried that we were about to beat him up. Of course we weren't - he was the only one who knew the road to Kabul.
In the van, we took stock of our situation - most of our cash had been taken, but our important papers were intact. Our cash situation had changed from frightening to terrifying - i had five or six hundred dollars stashed away in my wallet, and it turned out that I had the biggest amount of money left in the ABSCBN group. If anyone else had any bigger amount, he certainly didn’t volunteer the information. How we were going to last in this place with that amount was anyone's guess. Also, we noticed that they took one of our small videocameras. The older videocamera that I hid under my jacket was still there. One of the bandits also took my pakul.
Once we got going again, we took turns cursing poor Iltaf. But after a while, we all lapsed into silence as the mountain road rode up steep canyons. On one side, a sheer drop plummeted to a raging river. On the other side, rocks and cliff faces. On either shoulder of the road, shattered hulks of cars, trucks, and tanks were left to rust; the accroutments of modern civilization left abandoned to join the ancient dust of afghanistan. As the twisted skeletons of past wars sped by the window, it occured to us that for all the terror we had just gone through, we were still so very lucky to be alive.

As always, our long and twisting journey through Central Asia began with the long and twisted journey of a typical office memo.
The Americans had just launched their offensive in Afghanistan. For years, that country fascinated and intrigued me. As early as 1998, when I was chief of reporters of the Manila Times, I had a short talk with Ghazali Jaafar, vice chairman of the rebel Moro Islamic Liberation Front. For years during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Filipino muslims traveled to Central Asia to join the mujahideen. Filipinos who learned to fight in the jungles of Mindanao traveled thousands of miles to fight and die in the desert wastelands of Central Asia. The numbers vary, from several hundreds to more than a thousand. Upon returning to the Philippines, the veterans of Afghanistan would form the core officers corps of the MILF.
Invariably, our discussion led to MILF veterans from Afghanistan, and to the subject of Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden had just been the target of US cruise missile strikes for his role in the bombings of the US Cole and the US embassies in Africa. It seemed ironic that after helping the mujahideen fight off Soviet gunships and missiles, US missiles were now raining on Bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.
Jaafar began talking about their experiences with the various mujahideen factions in Afghanistan during the war against the soviets, and I asked him if it was possible to set an interview with Osama Bin Laden through his contacts. I didn’t really think it feasible to go to Afghanistan for an interview with the man; a phone interview would have sufficed. But Jaafar laughed and asked if I was willing to travel to Afghanistan. The question lifted me off my seat. Was it possible, I asked? The border with Pakistan was a sieve. How else do all the foreign mujahideen get in? Do you think they just take the train? I was hooked. I asked our acting editor in chief Chit Estella if the company would be willing to fund a trip to Afghanistan, and she seemed intrigued by the idea. The idea would die a natural death when the Bin Laden story was overshadowed by more local concerns of the newspaper. But that early, I was already playing with the idea of walking across the Hindu Kush, or Indian Killer, as the mountain ranges dividing Pakistan and Afghanistan were called. Of course, there was a reason why they called the mountain range Indian Killer, and it didn't have anything to do with cowboys.
Three years later, the world would change with 9-11. Afghanistan was again in the headlines.
Afghanistan has often been described as the crossroads between Asia and Europe, and for that reason, it has been the persistent battleground of races, religions, and ambitions. Relics and bones of centuries of near-conquests litter the landscape for any historian or archeologist brave enough to explore, at the risk of adding his own bones to the landscape as well.
The country’s terrible history owes to its favored position, in the middle of great powers and their many proxies. Alexander the Great and his armies swept in from the west in his drive towards the riches of India in the East. The Mongol hordes came down from the north to lay waste to, well, the waste. Barbarians are not overly picky. During the so-called Great Game between Imperial Russia and Imperial Britain during the 19th century, the two great powers and their allies clashed on Afghan plains, whole armies swallowed up by the desert.
That proxy war would be repeated again in more contemporary times, when the Soviet Union swept down like the Mongols from the north and tried, and failed, to subdue the Afghans for a decade. The West waged its proxy war through Pakistan and the mujahideen, as we will see later. But even after the departure of the Great Powers with the end of the cold war, the proxy wars continued, this time with the minor leaguers like Pakistan, China, India, and Iraq.
The world turned the corner with 9-11. It was amazing really. Suddenly, everyone was immensely interested in a country that wasn’t even one, that didn’t even have a gross national product [how do you measure opium] or an economy to speak of. Networks and media outlets rushed to dust off their list of contacts in South and Central Asia, and dragged into the studio any analyst or expert that had the remotest connection with Afghanistan. Suddenly, everyone wanted to be an expert in Afghanistan.
I remembered the tantalizing half-offer years ago, and quietly wondered to myself if this was it. I went back to my MILF contacts in Cotabato, and interviewed rebels who claimed to have fought there during the jihad against the Soviets. Each one had vivid memories to tell. Most were telling their stories for the first time in public. All these years, no one had really cared for what they had gone through, at least until a character named Osama came along and put Afghanistan back on the political map.
It was very difficult, one would recall. You would either freeze to death, or fry under the sun. There was almost no middle ground. And that’s only talking about the weather. Fighting the Soviets was another thing altogether. There was nowhere to hide, just endless miles of sand and rock. No trees, no bushes with which to take cover in, no lakes and streams brimming with fish and wildlife to feed a guerilla army. No water to slake your thirst. It was hard to imagine why anyone was even fighting over a place like this.
There were no hiding places so we would bury ourselves in the sand beside a road, recalled another, and leap out and ambush a passing Soviet convoy. It was a good thing the common weapon in the region was the sturdy and reliable AK-47. You could bury it in sand, submerge it in mud, and still come out firing. Bury yourself with the temperamental M-16 in the sand, and you may as well bring a lapida or tombstone with you.
There are no figures. But some Filipino volunteers never made it back. Others came back with a completely different view of the world they lived in, and the country they came from.
When the US started bombing Afghanistan in October 2001, everyone was glued to the TV sets. The most advanced nation on earth was raining high-tech smart bombs on the most backward country in the world. The country was mostly rubble from two decades of bitter fighting that the US probably dropped more bombs on Afghanistan than there were buildings left to bomb.
At this point, I was torn. I desperately wanted to go. On the other hand, the network had a terrible record for sending news teams on assignments like this abroad. I had flown to West Timor, East Timor, and Cambodia with nary a cent of support from ABS-CBN. The network was more willing to spend money to cover celebrity scandals abroad.
As the war against terror heated up, I bumped into an organizer of overseas workers, who told me he had some Filipino friends in Pakistan who may be able to help me get into neighboring Afghanistan. It was an intirguing thought. Even before I could propose an official trip to Afghanistan, I had to make sure that it was actually possible to get in. But when i called his so-called friend, I got a pretty chilly reception. Apparently, they were not really friends after all. But I had gained momentum, and I quietly started calling Philippine diplomats in Pakistan inquiring about the possibilities of sliding into Afghanistan. Mostly, they proved discouraging, although our network of Filipino contacts in Pakistan grew. Finally, I gathered the courage to broach the idea of deploying a team to Afghanistan for The Correspondents through a memo. It took the bosses a long time to warm up to the idea. The network had never sent a news team on that kind of a coverage since the Vietnam war. The general thinking among the bosses was that we could just rely on CNN and the other foreign news services to feed us information and video. I tried to sell them the idea of doing the Afghan story from a Filipino perspective. This was a land that bred the new generation of Moro fighters. This was the land that allegedly bred the masterminds of the attack on the World Trade Center. The potential for stories outside the mainstream western media was astounding. We were lucky in that we got the support of our old friend, DJ Sta. Ana, who was also head of news operations of ABS-CBN. Since we offered to do the coverage for both news and public affairs, we hoped to get the news department to fund the whole affair. For this, we needed DJ’s backing to get the proposal past the initial cynicism of the big bosses. Now, DJ is really a reporter who unfortunately got snagged into the wilder and more violent world of news management. We belong to the same generation of reporters; in fact we have been good friends since college. To say that DJ was interested in the idea is an understatement. This was a guy who, while heading the news desk of GMA-7 the year before, snuck off to Mindanao for a weekend to cover the all-out war against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. In fact, I’m almost certain that DJ, at least for a fleeting moment, considered bumping us off the trip and taking our place.
The bosses at first expressed doubts that we could get into Afghanistan at all. After all, they had already sent their news reporter, Erwin Tulfo, to Pakistan to report on developments there. Then, they worried about our safety. This was of course Afghanistan, a country way way off the beaten track.
But we all knew that the biggest consideration of all was probably the expense. Sending a news team abroad always entails a great deal of huffing and puffing on the part of the bean counters in Finance. As icing on the cake, I cut corners and started weeding out all extraneous expenses from the budget. In fact I cut corners so much that the paper the budget was printed on would probably have looked more circular than rectangular. In the end, I proposed a minimalist budget of roughly 6,000 dollars for the entire trip, inclusive of airfare.
Six thousand dollars. While the figure may seem astronomical to some Filipinos, it is really laughably and idiotically small for big networks deploying their teams abroad, much less to wartorn areas. A small western news team can spend that much money in just one day. That amount alone would not be enough to buy protective gear and hire security consultants for typical western news teams, as we would later see in Afghanistan. In fact, half of our money was immediately spent on our plane tickets. We were left with roughly two to three thousand dollars, and we hadn’t even left Manila yet. It would be one of my first suicide budgets. It would not be my last.
To my surprise and delight, in mid october 2001, the green light came down. The team also grew. Aside from me and Val, there was also Patrick Paez and Jim Libiran. The bosses balked at sending such a "large contingent", but we argued that this was Afghanistan, and there was much safety in numbers. Besides, they didn't increase the budget anyway, so what were they complaining about?
The first problem, as in any trip, was getting the money. Having uneasily resolved that issue, the next problem was how to get there. The most logical route was through Pakistan, which hosted the mujahideen through the long Soviet occupation. Most journalists who penetrated Afghanistan during the long Soviet occupation did so through Pakistan, through the sieve they called a border along Pakistan's northwestern frontier. But with the war against the Taliban in full swing, another channel had opened up. The Northern Alliance had started using bases in Tajikistan ever since the Pakistan-sponsored Taliban took charge of their country. Masoud was also a Tajik. So most of the major news agencies flew into the capital Dushanbe to wangle a way into Afghanistan from the north. While this was now the preferred route to link up with the Alliance, this route was horribly expensive. You fly from the Philippines to Europe and then to Russia. There, you try to get a visa and a ticket to Tajikistan. Once you land in Dushanbe [assuming you get the proper paperwork done in a matter of weeks], there was still no guarantee that you could get into Afghanistan. There were horror stories of journalists getting stranded in Dushanbe for weeks with no story, and no way into Afghanistan. The only route was over the mountains in one of the few Northern Alliance helicopters. It was fine for the big networks, because they could afford to station newsteams for weeks at a time in a backwater city to diddle their thumbs. They could also afford to bribe officials to give them a helicopter ride over the border, as many did. Almost all the journalists who made it into Kabul in time for the fall of the Taliban had taken that northern route and ridden into the capital with the Northern Alliance.
Having resolved that, we landed in Islamabad Pakistan on the tail end of October, and were promptly picked up and assisted by the Philippine charges d'affaires Jose Pepe Cabrera. Pepe was more than helpful; his driver would take us around, he would treat us to lunch and dinner, and to cut down our expenses, he offered to adopt us in his apartment. We stayed several days on mattresses on the floor of his unit. But more than that, he linked us up with Filipinos in Islamabad and Peshawar who could help us cross the border with Afghanistan. Thank you, Pepe, for your kindness and generosity, and our apologies for our forgetfulness.
Islamabad is a low-slung, sprawling government city cut cleanly into nice symmetrical lines, with streets that have numbers and letters like a map grid instead of names. The pace is so laid back that there's hardly anyone outdoors at midmorning; most of the shops and offices seem to open just before lunch, and sometimes not even that. There were days when we wandered the streets looking for food to eat and finding all the shops still closed. Most of the people who live here are government functionaries and diplomats. Ordinary people crowd it out in the suburbs or nearby cities like Rawalpindi, which looks more like Divisoria on a bad day.
Islamabad is a relatively new city, created after the August 1947 partition of India and Pakistan along religious lines. Prior to the partition, this part of the world was simply known as India "and the wild frontier." When the British let go of India in 1947, they also agreed to carve out a new nation for muslims in the northwestern part of the subcontinent. The new nation's capital was established at bustling and chaotic Karachi to the east, and all muslim records were hauled there at the start of the partition.
That partition proved pretty bloody, as seven million muslims migrated to Pakistan, and close to ten million Hindus went east to India. Generations of pent up anger and frustration exploded throughout the region as mobs from both sides attacked trains loaded with migrants in one of the earlier flashes of religious extremism in the Indian subcontinent. Trains pulled into their stations with rivulets of blood spilling onto the tracks, and most conservative accounts put the number of dead from religious fighting at more than half a million. Mind you, these were not soldiers who were killing each other, these were ordinary people. Not even the great Mohandas Gandhi could stop the slaughter. India and Pakistan would go to war three times in the next five decades, but ironically, it would never be as bloody as this. The shadow of the past still hovers over these two countries; New Delhi and Islamabad continue to rattle their sabres at each other, but this time the swords are nuclear tipped. Pakistanis have a love affair with their nukes. Almost everywhere in Islamabad, you would see monuments to their nuclear missiles - long grey phallic symbols with fins at the base. Pakistanis beam with pride at being a nuclear power, and many analysts predict the next flashpoint for the next world war to be the Indian subcontinent. The Indian-Pakistani conflict would also spill over to Afghanistan.
Pakistan of course is an islamic country, with Islam as the state religion. The word Pakistan means "land of the pure" in Urdu and Persian. It is here in the madrasas of Islamabad, Quetta, and Peshawar, where a more radical and intolerant brand of Islam took root while their Afghan neighbor battled it out with the soviets across the border. When the soviets invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve of 1979, the Americans adopted a policy of containment of the soviet bear. The Americans poured vast amounts of aid to Pakistan, and used it as a proxy in the Afghan war against the Russians. American money was used by Pakistan to buy Chinese arms and ammunition, to be funneled to the Afghan mujahideen through the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service. This way, the Americans could have plausible deniability in a proxy war against the Soviets. It was a laughable charade, because everyone knew that the Americans were funding the Muj, although the Americans took great pains not to get caught with their hand in the Afghan jar. While the Soviets muddled through the quagmire of the Afghan conflict, the Reagan administration crowed that the Russians have finally found their own Vietnam. The ISI established guerilla training camps in Pakistani soil just across the rugged border with Afghanistan, and recruited thousands of Afghans from refugee camps in Pakistan. Muslims from all over the world heard the call for a new jihad against the godless communists, and crossed the porous border through Pakistan. Peshawar, the Pakistani border town, became the new wild west, harboring all sorts of spies from the ISI, the KGB, the CIA, and the occassional journalist and adventurer. The various Afghan guerilla factions also set up shop in Peshawar, each one guarded by heavily armed Afghans. Obviously, the idea of a gun ban was alien in this town. These guerilla headquarters were shadowed by KGB agents trying to figure out the guerillas' next moves; by ISI agents trying to decide which factions would best serve Pakistan's interests; and by CIA agents trying to find out where the American funding was going. Occassionally, the guerillas would blast it out with Russian or Afghan intel agents, or have it with each other.
But if handing the funding to the Pakistanis carte blanche shielded the Americans from a direct confrontation with the Soviets, it resulted in an even bigger problem. The Pakistanis chose which guerilla factions to support, and they invariably chose mujahideen groups that hated the Americans as much as they hated the Soviets. In the meantime, the faction of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the famed tiger of the Panjshir, did most of the heavy fighting with the Soviets, yet he hardly got any money. Massoud was the friendliest with the west; two days before 9-11, Al Qaeda would assassinate Massoud with a suicide bomber to remove the last thorn on the side of the extremists. On the other hand, the factions identified with the more extremist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar got the bulk of the money. Several reasons have been put forth to explain the actions of the ISI. Much of the Pakistani military and the ISI sympathized with the more extremist faction. Pakistan, after all, is a staunchly conservative Islamic country. On a more strategic perspective, the Pakistanis had more to gain by waving the extremist card at the Americans. By showing they held the extremists by the collar, the Pakistanis could squeeze more aid from the US.
But part of the blame appears to rest on history and the vagaries of American foreign policy. For decades, Pakistan had relied on the US for its war materiel and defense needs as part of the Central Asian Treaty Organization and the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization. India was, after all, cozying up to the Soviet Union. But during the second Indo-Pakistani war in 1965, sparked again by a crisis in Kashmir, the United States imposed an embargo on all ammunition and replacement deliveries to both Pakistan and India. At that time, Pakistan was heavily reliant on US military supplies and training. But the Americans were apparently more worried that the weapons and bullets they were providing to kill communists were instead being used to kill Indians and Pakistanis. In the end, neither country came out of the conflict with any noticeable gains, although both had significant losses. But it was the Pakistanis who felt the sting of America’s ficklemindedness the most.
After five weeks of fighting, Pakistan had already used up 80 percent of its US supplied ammunition. The US-made M60 medium tanks were being lost at an alarming rate. The Pakistani high command was having nightmares as the two nations ground down each other. Both sides eventually sued for peace. The Pakistanis were not to forget this moment that the US chose to abandon them at their greatest hour of need.
Pakistan fared far worse in 1971 during the third Indo-Pakistan war that ended up with the breakup of part of Pakistan into Bangladesh. This time, the Pakistanis were decisively routed. This time, the US sent aid, but to no avail. Close to a hundred thousand Pakistani troops were captured by the Indians, the biggest number of POWs since the second world war. Pakistan even issued a commemorative stamp at that time to drum up world support for the release of its POWs.
Pakistani army officers were to carry the resentment borne out of the 2nd Indo-Pakistani war with them for decades to come. After all, they had trained under the belief that the US would back and support them all the way.
In 1977, Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto appointed a little known general and a devout muslim, Zia Ul-Haq, as the army chief of staff, bypassing five other senior generals. Bhutto apparently thought of promoting a general who seemed "more interested only in offering prayers and playing golf" than in overthrowing him. A few months later, Zia overthrew Bhutto and declared martial law. Two years later, Zia had Bhutto hanged.
Zia was a character on his own. Archival photos of him show a broad-faced man with the deepest penetrating eyes and the stiff upper lip stance of someone who could only have been trained by the British Army. But underneath that secular exterior was a very conservative islamist.
Several factors come into play here that would later involve Afghanistan. During the disastrous 1965 Indo-Pakistani war, Zia was assistant quartermaster of the 101st division. Undoubtedly, he remembers very well the betrayal by his American patrons, who, just a year earlier, sponsored his studies at the Command and General Staff College.
More importantly, Zia’s strict religious convictions would shape the destiny of two nations. Whereas post partition Pakistan inherited a legal system that was patterned after the English Anglo-Saxon legal system, Zia imposed a strict pro military interpretation of Islamic Law. Secular policies were replaced with the introduction of sharia law. Most historians say this resulted in increasing religious influences on both the Pakistani civil service and the military.
The undercurrent of anti-US resentment and the growing Islamic identity would reveal itself even before the decade ended. In 1979, just as the US struggled with its Iran hostage crisis, Pakistani mobs burned the US embassy in Islamabad and killed one US marine. It turned out that someone had started the rumor that the Americans were behind a plot to raid Islam’s holiest shrine in Mecca. US officials were surprised by the ferocity of the assault, and the absolute, and some say, deliberate failure of Pakistani authorities to respond with any form of help. The embassy was, after all, in Islamabad, not on some far off mountain. Still, the embassy burned for a whole day, and it was only after nightfall that Pakistan sent troops and police to, well, replace the mobs. US diplomats had locked themselves in a windowless vault, wondering why no one seemed to know what was happening to them while rioters pounded on the doors and walls and swarmed all over the roof. Witnesses say that the whole time, Pakistani police were standing around outside, watching the riot unfold. After that incident, the Americans turned their Islamabad embassy into a virtual fortress.

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We landed in Islamabad in 2001 with no illusions that crossing the border into Afghanistan would be easy. In fact, it turned out to be virtually impossible. In our first morning in Islamabad, we marched up to the Taliban embassy hoping for a quick visa. There was a huge crowd of journalists lined up at the Taliban embassy in Islamabad, each one begging to be let in. The Taliban would just keep everyone at bay, collecting passports and visa fees, but granting no visas. By the time we filed our visa applications, there were already 800 other applications by fellow journalists ahead of us. We went back two or three times, each time hoping that the Taliban would finally grant visas. Each time, the growing crowd of journalists would swap optimistic stories of the Taliban organizing a press tour of sorts for those waiting in line. Of course it was all wishful thinking. The Taliban had always been wary, even hostile of media, given the fundamental differences between the two groups. The Taliban forbade photographs, believing it was akin to making graven images, something akin to idolatry. Moving pictures, or video, was a step closer to heresy. The Taliban leadership frowned on photography and videography so much that there are pitifully few recorded images of the Taliban. In fact, the only known photograph of Taliban leader Mullah Omar is a grainy shot taken surreptitiously by a western journalist who was undercover. Once in a while, the more moderate faction within the Taliban would get the upper hand, and call the rare press conference. But even these Taliban "liberals" would look extremely uncomfortable in front of the camera. Still, we hung around the embassy, hoping for a break in. At this time, the war in Afghanistan was already in full swing, and the Northern Alliance had knocked out Mazari Shariff in the north and begun laying siege to Kabul. Those journalists who did manage to hang out with the Northern Alliance entered Afghanistan from the north, through Tajikistan, a long, tortuous, and very expensive detour where major networks would throw money around to hire Soviet era helicopters to bump them up from Tajikistan to alliance bases in northern Afghanistan.
But while the situation seemed impossible to us, Manila saw things differently. We fed stories over the videophone almost everyday about rising tensions in the closed border as the Taliban government tottered on the brink. That was the most we could do. First of all, the Filipino community in Pakistan was tiny. Secondly, Val and Erwin Tulfo had made a trip to Pakistan just a month before [with roughly the same budget that the four of us were sharing now, the same budget we would use to jump into Afghanistan], and he had just about exhausted all the human interests stories that could be wrung out of the Philippine community here.
Yet Manila would occassionaly shoot rockets over our heads for sending them "useless" stories when the major story was Afghanistan, and not Pakistan. The office was apparently getting impatient that we were still stuck in Pakistan, which was quite unfair. These rockets resulted in some pretty colorful language from our side of the satelite phone, especially since the bosses, in a fit of CYA syndrome (CYA = cover your ass) before we left Manila, made us promise them that we would stay in safe sunny Pakistan and not do anything as dangerous as entering wild and wooly Afghanistan. If I recall, the approved budget was really for a trip to Pakistan, which was why they gave us the same budget as the one they gave Erwin. Of course, the unwritten expectation was that we would try to skip over the border, but these are things you don’t want to put on paper.
So after being sternly advised to stay in Pakistan, we bristled at the idea of Manila rushing us to get into Afghanistan ahead of the rest of the pack. Meanwhile, Western journalists who have been waiting for a chance to get through the border for months, simply cooled their heels at the Marriott poolside sipping government-licensed cocktails (locals are banned from drinking alcohol in Pakistan, and foreigners must fill-out a government form everytime they want to buy a drink in the government-licensed bars) while dipping into their expense accounts. Ahhh, the travails of a 3rd world journalist.
To be fair, we did a fair amount of "acclimatization" with the help of Pepe Cabrera and his trusty driver, Munawar, a Christian Pakistani. Munawar has been around Filipinos so long that he could turn to us in his cab and ask, "saan tayo?", To which we would reply without hesitation, "Kabul!" Munawar would just shake his head at the crazy Filipinos and roll his eyes. We learned what Pakistanis wear (the cool, billowing shalwar chemis), what they eat (kabab, kabab, kabab, and more kabab. Oh yeah, and some of that marvelous chicken tikka.) and more importantly, what they think of Bush’s war on terror. Clearly, there was a lot of resentment on the streets against the United States, and a lot of support for the Pakistan’s godchild, the Taliban. In thousands of mosques and madrasas from Lahore to Karachi, Imams thundered against the war of terror and exhorted Pakistanis to cross the border to help their brethren. There were reports of ten thousand Pakistanis who heeded that call and rushed to the Taliban’s side. Many of them would die in the hands of angry Afghans.
While we were in Islamabad, we also met up with Angie Ramos, a fellow Filipino working with the international wire agency Reuters. As expected, our conversations revolved around the biggest question on everyone’s mind – how does one get into Afghanistan? Angie suggested that we try a well known Pakistani journalist.
Hamid Mir is no ordinary scribe. He’s also known as the official biographer of Osama Bin Laden. Whether he was really authorized by Bin Laden to write his biography is unclear. What seems clear is that Mir has met and interviewed Bin Laden in Afghanistan several times, and appears to have Bin Laden’s confidence.
So we went through Islamabad’s gridwork of streets and finally located Mir’s house, a simple bungalow off one of the city’s major arteries. There was no doorbell, in fact there was no gate. So, we went halfway inside the garage, where a white sedan was parked, and called out to Mir. What followed was quite strange, even by our standards.
A stocky man peered outside the door, and gave us a once over.
"Where are you from?"
Oh, we said quite confidently, we are journalists, we are from the Philippines.
With that, Mir shot back:
"You are dangerous people. You have connections with Bin Laden."
Now, we didn’t exactly know how to react to the first. But the second sentence stumped us. Wasn’t he supposed to be the one with the clearest and direct connection with Bin Laden? If we say, yes we have connections with Bin Laden, would he embrace us like long lost comrades, or blow us away?
Noting our hesitation, he continued:
"You are Abu Sayyaf. You are terrorists. I do not like to meet you!"
Now that really had us rocking on our heels. At least this guy knows about the Philippines.
No, no, no, we pleaded, we are not Abu Sayyaf, we are journalists.
But he slammed the screen door in our faces.
We were stunned by the exchange, and, walking out of the garage, we wondered aloud if he was serious or joking. It was really hard to tell.
We had a short conference near our parked car, before we decided that we had nothing to lose by going back to Mir and asking him a second time. This time, he was more receptive, and he told us to come back later in the day since he was still quite busy. We did come back and had a brief chance to get Mir on tape. But we didn’t get our real objective, which was to get Mir to endorse us to the Taliban, or perhaps give us ideas on how to skip across the border into Afghanistan. On that aspect, he refused to help.
We tried several other avenues. One time, we visited an international relief group’s office, hoping to hitch a ride into Kabul. It was there where we met a man who offered us an alternative, and in hindsight, crazier way into Afghanistan.
I do not recall his name; all I remember is his New York accent. He was an Afghan who had somehow found his way to New York, where he worked as, what else, a cab driver. His many years in New York had given him an accent that was half Pashto half New York cab driver, which is to say that he ended every sentence with a "Ya know?" After 9-11, he was trying to get back into Afghanistan through Pakistan. And he said he was leaving the next day, and could bring us with him if we wanted.
His was a tempting, although frightening offer. We had never met the man before, yet were we to trust an Afghan who talks like a New Yorker?
His proposed route was also unusual. He planned to enter Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier, which is controlled by Pakistan’s unruly tribes, travel further north, and enter Afghanistan’s Badakshan province on foot. We had no idea what he was talking about, although we were entranced by the idea of sneaking into Afghanistan on foot while everyone else was trapped in the border. Fortunately, we later dropped him as a potential looney. It later turned out that the border area he was talking about was fraught with bandits and kidnappers, and the mountain passes he intended to cross were high and covered with snow. Badakshan province is a fingerlike projection of Afghanistan that punches into Pakistan’s northwest region. It’s climate, terrain, and tribes were not well known for their hospitality.

In the meantime, we also spent a little time getting more of the local culture. For that, we visited the nearby city of Rawalpindi, which is far more urbanized, congested, and chaotic than Islamabad. Think of Islamabad as the Malacanang complex, and Rawalpindi as Divisoria.
On Pepe Cabrera’s advice, we set out to buy some Pakistani clothes. The idea was that if you can’t speak the right language, at least wear appropriate clothes. We stood out in a crowd because of our western outfits. By buying the shalwar chemise, we hoped to, well, blend in a little more. Of course, we were still beardless, but that couldn’t be helped.
Now, it takes a great deal of courage for the unfamiliar to wear the shalwar chemise. It is basically a very loose affair, with a top that billows and reaches down to the knees, and an extremely baggy and loose pair of pants. And I mean baggy. Patrick took out the pants from the plastic and was surprised to see that the waistline was at least a meter across. The only reason the trousers stay up is the cotton cord that acts as a general purpose belt. Truly, this garment was one-size-fits-all.
It was also one-garment-worn-by-all. Everyone used it, from the wealthy businessman in his Benz, to the construction worker sweating it out with a load of bricks on his back. Needless to say, the garment could be really hot and constricting. Imagine Filipino construction workers wearing it while working under the heat of the sun. Yet culture dictated that it be worn at all times.

We were to get another lesson in culture, courtesy of a fellow Filipina we met in Pakistan. Aminah is married to a Pakistani, and bore a stunningly beautiful daughter.
We noted that there were a lot of Pakistanis who were wearing the burqa. Most people thought that the burqa was an Afghan, specifically, a Taliban icon. Yet the burqa was as common in Pakistan as the shalwar chemise.
Aminah told us that the burqa is really part of tradition, and not religion. Pakistan and the Taliban’s shared interest in the burqa may be the result of their shared Pashtun legacy.
"Women who had to follow the tradition of their forefathers, feel they are bound to follow that [practice], the wearing of the burqa," Aminah said.
While Amalia was thankfully not covered by a burqa, she was more comfortable with the idea of a burqa or the less traditional purdah or head veil, than going out in public without a head covering.
"The people, the men especially..." Amalia giggled, "you have to do purdah, or they stare at you... like you are some..." and then she broke out again in a fit of embarassed giggles.