LONDON: Tayseer Allouni knew exactly what to do when the first bombs started dropping on Kabul last Sunday night. As Kabul correspondent for al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arabic news station and the only television network with a presence in the city, he would have to be the eyes of the world.

He turned the bureau’s news camera on the night sky to record the tracer fire now arcing impotently towards the incoming missiles. The pictures were uploaded, via al-Jazeera’s 24-hour satellite link, to the channel’s headquarters in Qatar, 1,200 miles away. From there they were picked up by broadcasters across the world.

Here, the BBC’s news producers saw the pictures and immediately called the three correspondents they had managed to station in northern Afghanistan with the opposition Northern Alliance on their satellite phones.

The BBC’s journalists on the ground knew nothing of the attacks. They had no way of knowing - Kabul is miles away across a country with no modern communications network.

The correspondents, including John Simpson, had to be told by London that the attack had started so that, a few minutes later, they could repeat the news back to the viewers in Britain.

”It was all window-dressing,” one BBC producer said last week. ”The reporters in Afghanistan didn’t have a clue what was going on.”

Richard Sambrook, head of news for the BBC, put it more delicately. “Of course, we told our correspondents what we knew in London,” he said, “But you don’t just look to someone like John Simpson for a report on what happened where they are 10 minutes ago. You want analysis.”

If ever there was a symbol of the challenges the media are facing in covering the conflict, it is the distance the echo from those falling bombs had to travel before it could be reported. There is a vast hunger for information and the mass media with which to deliver it.

And yet this is a war without a frontline upon which to station reporters. Unlike the Gulf War, when Peter Arnett of CNN was stationed in Baghdad, and the Kosovo crisis, when Simpson was in Belgrade, the Western media have no independent sources inside the battle zone.

“This will be a particularly difficult war for us to cover,” says the BBC’s defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan, now in Pakistan. “Most of the action will be invisible and there are no independent reporters able to challenge the official version of events.”

There is, simply, an aching information vacuum at the centre of this war on terrorism; one which both sides in the conflict are trying to fill. The result is an increasingly difficult relationship between the United States and British governments on one side and Western journalists, who are not used to being brought to heel, on the other. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.