Journalists’ murder

PARTS of Afghanistan are becoming increasingly dangerous for journalists following the fall of the Taliban, with large swathes in the south of the country falling into the hands of maurauding local warlords. One tragic reflection of this trend is the brutal killing of four journalists on the road linking Jalalabad to Kabul. The three men and a woman — a photographer and a cameraman working for a news agency and two war correspondents for leading European newspapers — were ambushed by armed gunmen on Monday and shot dead. Whether the motive was robbery or xenophobia is still unclear. A week earlier, three foreign journalists travelling with a group of Northern Alliance soldiers were waylaid and killed in northern Afghanistan, allegedly by members of the retreating Taliban militia. In the south, meanwhile, there have been reports of widespread looting on the Kabul-Jalalabad road which has become a happy hunting ground for all kinds of armed desperadoes. In recent days, at least two groups of journalists, travelling to Kabul to report on the post-Taliban situation in the city, have been ambushed and robbed. They were lucky to escape with their lives. In the past, a number of journalists have been captured by the Taliban inside Afghanistan and accused of spying. However, all of them were eventually released.

While war reporting has always been a perilous profession, the current anarchic post-Taliban situation in Afghanistan has made the job of journalists fraught with even greater risks. Making matters worse is the global demand for pictures and stories from battle zones and the growing competition between rival media groups for coverage. The result is that journalists are forced to take greater risks in what is an increasingly competitive field. Given this backdrop, it is incumbent on editors to prevent correspondents from taking undue risks while pursuing stories from war zones. There is another lesson one can draw from tragedies such as Monday’s killings. The vacuum created by the Taliban’s withdrawal from southern Afghanistan is likely to be filled by lawless and undisciplined warlords. If a political settlement is not urgently thrashed out, the bandits will have Afghanistan all for themselves.

Curbing vehicle theft

KARACHI must surely come close to qualifying as the world’s car theft capital, if recent statistics are anything to go by. On Monday, according to figures from the police and the Citizen-Police Liaison Committee (CPLC), 56 vehicles — 28 cars and 28 motorcycles — were stolen. Earlier it was reported, using CPLC figures, that compared to last year around 16 per cent more vehicles were stolen this October. Unfortunately, instead of taking any substantial steps to tackle this very serious matter, the police seem more concerned in trying to disprove the magnitude of the problem. During the course of this year, a couple of measures were taken that included setting aside a police station for dealing exclusively with car thefts and establishing a specialized motorcycle-based anti-car lifting force. Going by these and other recent figures, it would be fair to say that both measures came to nought.

Such ad-hoc and half-hearted measures seldom work. The Sindh government should coordinate with its provincial counterparts because everyone knows that most stolen vehicles make it to the other provinces. Moreover, the scale on which all this happens would necessarily mean that corrupt officials in Sindh and other provinces — both in law-enforcement and in the provincial bureaucracies — are letting it happen, even encouraging it. Catching low-level operatives is hardly going to have any major impact. However, what could make a difference to the situation is to take the fight right to the brains behind the car-theft mafia. Given its intelligence network and internal mechanisms for monitoring its employees, and given that reports naming certain people in this racket have appeared in the media in the past, this is not something the government cannot do. What is important is that it have the will and the determination to take the real players in this huge racket head on.