Global Policy Forum

By Jessica Hodgson

The US military and the Northern Alliance may have colluded to keep journalists away from areas in Afghanistan where special forces were operating, a top freelance photographer has claimed.

Vaughan Smith, the director of Frontline Television and the cameraman who accompanied BBC correspondent David Loyn into Afghanistan last year, said he believes journalists were kept in an area of the Panshir Valley - ostensibly waiting for helicopters to fly them out - as a deliberate strategy.

"Only two journalists - to my knowledge - got through to the western part of the valley [where special forces were believed to be operating] as the others were delayed for some weeks waiting for helicopter lifts," he said.

"Journalists who had been working in this area before said they had had no problems getting through. "The Northern Alliance was normally only too keen to help journalists in and out for a fee," he said, although he admitted he had no "direct evidence" the Americans and the Northern Alliance had a "deliberate agreement". The lack of access was one of a series of problems that made Afghanistan a "hidden war" for broadcast journalists, Smith said.

"This was a hidden war that we didn't see," he told an audience at the 2002 Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference.

"I think we did a terrible job in Afghanistan and I think there are some lessons which need to be learned," he said, adding that the coverage was "misleading" and, in the case of the US networks, "almost McCarthyist in approach".

In addition to problems caused by the terrain, weather and political instability, Smith said journalists were all too willing to present images of Afghans posing for the media as if they were objective reportage.

"One of the most common things I heard was that journalists were getting Afghans to fire guns and filming them. Many Afghans were saying they do far more firing for journalists than they did in combat," he said.

Smith's claims were backed up by the BBC's diplomatic correspondent, Bridget Kendall, who said that at times the coverage had descended into "farce".

"Often people were being employed to do live reports just so they could say 'that person was in Afghanistan', when in fact quite a lot of the reports were coming in either on a laptop or from people reading Reuters copy down the phone," she added.

Smith and Kendall were talking at a session analysing the way broadcasters covered the conflict in Afghanistan.

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