IF YOU PAID ANY attention at all to the coverage of the war in Afghanistan this summer, you surely heard Terry Pedwell’s voice, read his copy, or saw his photographs.
His summer of 2006 was different than his first two times with the Canadian military in the war-torn Asian country. Now that Canada is waging war and not simply there to build schools and the like, it’s far more dangerous for our fighting men and women there, says the Broadcast News/CP reporter.
But what’s life like for a broadcast reporter there? In a place fraught with the type of danger we can’t really conceive of here on Main Street Canada, how does one perform as a journalist? That’s what tweaked our curiosity when we heard Pedwell’s authoritative reports on Toronto’s 680News, for example.
Pedwell (pictured below) recently chatted with Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien on his most recent trip to Afghanistan about his reporter’s life there, what he thinks of the people he encountered, the mission and its potential for success.
Greg O’Brien: How long were you there? When were you there?
Terry Pedwell: This last time, I was there July-August, basically two months.
GOB: You’ve been there before, right?
TP: Yes. This is the third time.
GOB: Who were you stationed with?
TP: I was based with the Canadian contingent at the Kandahar Air Field.
GOB: How did your time there compare with the times you had been there before?
TP: Well, the first time I was there, from end of 2003 to the beginning of 2004, was about four months. And it was wintertime. I did a bit of extensive traveling throughout Afghanistan at that time.
The second time I was there was the summer before this past one. I was in Kandahar and Kabul, back and forth throughout the area. And again, a lot of extensive travel through central Afghanistan.
I was basically embedded with the Canadian military both times, as well. This time, the same kind of thing. Embedded with them, but there was far less travel outside of the Kandahar region.
GOB: Why was that? 
TP: Because of the security, but also because there isn’t much going on outside of Kandahar in terms of Canadian involvement in Afghanistan other than us funding some aid projects that are being carried out in and around Kabul.
GOB: So who oversees outside of Kandahar, then?
TP: It depends on where you are. In Helmand Province, it’s mostly the British. In Kabul, it’s a mix of countries, mostly the Americans. In Tarin Kowt, just north of Kandahar, it’s Dutch, which we flew in there. Most of them, anyway. And just various other countries. There’s about 32 countries in all that have soldiers in there.
GOB: How many other reporters are there with you?
TP: It depends. At any given time, there are between eight and ten reporters or camera crews at Kandahar Air Field… Global’s there, CBC, CTV, Globe and Mail, CanWest’s print reporter.
GOB: What is it like being a reporter there? I mean, it’s nothing I can even imagine.
TP: In some ways, as a reporter, in terms of the craft, it’s far less constricting because you don’t have an editor there. You don’t have people assigning you things. You’re basically covering what’s going on day-to-day, and coming up with your own story ideas to go out and develop things. So it’s quite a bit different. You have a lot more freedom journalistically to do stories.
On the other hand, when I’m in Ottawa, I’m largely a broadcast reporter, while I also do some print work for Canadian Press. You’re mostly assigned stories – even though we do come up with our own story ideas – and it’s basically events-driven. In Afghanistan, it is events-driven, but in other ways, it’s not. Journalistically, you have more freedom to do the stories, but you also have to do a lot more. You have to cover all aspects of print, broadcast, online, and now webcasting. And the photography as well.
GOB: In terms of doing the actual job, technically, how do you file? Is it difficult to do it from there? Or is it all set up for you?
TP: In the past, we’ve had to rely on anything from phoning in something and getting somebody to transcribe it over a cell phone or satellite phone to having a satellite transmitter that we use. Now, in Kandahar, it’s set up better than I’ve ever seen it anywhere else in the sense that we have satellite transmission. We have our own backup system for it. We have cell phones in abundance. Satellite phones. And there’s a high speed Internet that the military has set up, as well, though high speed there is Afghan-style high speed compared to Canadian high speed.
So it’s very easy to file when you’re at the air field. When you’re outside of the air field, a lot of times cell phones don’t work. And even sometimes satellite phones don’t work. So you really have to rely on portable satellite equipment.
GOB: Okay. Now, how often did you go outside the air field?
TP: You try to go out as often as you can. When I was in Kabul – and even last year in Kandahar – it was very easy, and… was much safer than it is now in Kandahar to be able to go out with the military on daily patrols or overnight patrols, even three or four days at a time. It was easy to go out with non-governmental organizations, as well, to cover what they were doing in terms of reconstruction and aid projects.
But now, in Kandahar, it’s much more dangerous to go with the military because they’re a rolling target.
It becomes sometimes a lot safer to go out with your fixer. A fixer, of course, is basically a translator, sometimes driver, who can ferry you around to wherever you want to go. You get in the back of a ferry, discreet car, one that many other people would use – usually a Toyota 4X4 is the vehicle of choice there. But sometimes small cars, and most of them, again, are Toyotas.
And you just drive at 100 miles an hour to where you want to go, do what you’ve got to do, and then drive 100 miles an hour to get back.
GOB: In those situations, it would just be you and your fixer? You don’t travel with guards or anything like that?
TP: No. If you travel with guards, you become a target again, because the guards will stand around the car or stand nearby you, and then people look at you more and become suspicious. When we go outside the wire, a lot of times with a fixer, we’ll go out dressed in local clothes. You try not to wear sunglasses or baseball caps or anything like that.
GOB: Anything that would tip people off, I suppose.
TP: Exactly. And we drive fast enough they don’t notice you in the backseat of the car. Or, even if you are worried in particular areas about being noticed, then you slouch down in the back, and it looks like just the driver is in the car.
GOB: It sounds a little frightening to me.
TP: It can be. I don’t know. I don’t see that as frightening as going out with the military, because they are such a rolling target right now. I mean, it’s clandestine, but it’s not all that frightening, and you get to see a whole lot more.
(When) you go with the military, and if you’re in an (armoured) vehicle, you feel safer because there’s so much armament underneath those vehicles that if there is an explosion, you might be slightly injured or even, you know, badly injured. But at least the likelihood of you being killed is pretty slim. If you go out in a G-wagon, it’s a lightly armored vehicle, and that’s a pretty tense situation. You’re open to the elements, even though you’re in an enclosed vehicle.
You know, there’s nothing stopping a bullet or an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) from puncturing the armour.
GOB: Did it surprise you that it’s gotten more dangerous?
TP: In some ways, it did surprise me in the intensity of how dangerous it’s gotten. I knew it was going to be more dangerous when they went down there – especially in the summer months, because insurgents were promising that it would become more intense. It had been escalating before the Canadians got down there. But the intensity of it now is to the point where it’s so dangerous that it’s tough to be there on a day to day basis.
Even at the Kandahar Air Field, there were 37 rocket attacks since February – most of them occurring in the summertime. So, we always joked, "who’s going to win the rocket lottery tonight?" Because they’d launch a rocket indiscriminately from a distance outside the air field, and it would land just about anywhere.
You really never knew when it was going to land. But you always kept an ear out and you’d listen for that distant thud, and then the whistling sound overhead, and everybody just drops to the ground.
Then all the alarms and bells and whistles go off, and you get shelter and wait for the next one.
GOB: But often not on target, I guess?
TP: Well, there wouldn’t be a target. It used to be they’d have rocket launchers on the back of trucks. But now they literally park old Soviet or Chinese 107 or 108 rockets up against rocks, hook them up to batteries which are hooked up to timers or even cell phones. And they just fire them off. They don’t come out of a tube or anything. They just explode at that point, and they can go anywhere from dropping right where they launched to, a mile and a half away.
GOB: So what’s the thinking on the ground of the soldiers? What’s their morale like?
TP: The morale’s pretty good day-to-day. I mean, they’re all unbelievably professional and highly skilled and highly committed soldiers. They know what they’re there for, and they know the dangers, more than anybody else. Obviously, on days when they lose soldiers or things don’t go well, you can tell, you know, just by the looks on their faces that they can be down just like anybody else. But they get right back on the horse, so to speak, and get out there. And it’s just one day to the next. You can from a down day when things go bad to an up day the next day where they, you know, they kick back, so to speak.
GOB: When it comes to war and covering it, what do you find is the most difficult part to properly express in words? Whether it’s in writing or on the air?
TP: For me personally, the most difficult part is dealing with the emotion. I can’t even remember how many ramp ceremonies I attended, where soldiers were saying goodbye to their friends – and having to do the reporter’s job of talking to those soldiers afterwards. Or even after an incident, even before the ramp ceremonies, to try to get a sense of the lives of those soldiers. It’s very, very difficult, going through that – those emotional steps of dealing with that. You get caught up in the whole emotion of what people are going through, and it’s very difficult to take pictures of soldiers. You know, these tough, gritty guys who’ve been trained to kill people, breaking down and crying.
That’s probably the toughest part for me.
GOB: How are you looked at while you’re there as – working as a reporter, by the soldiers themselves, and perhaps by those in command?
TP: The soldiers on the ground are pretty much average guys. And sometimes they get sucked into the vortex of the military propaganda, where they’re told that reporters are out to get them.
Some of them truly believe that. Others are more open-minded. And when there are fresh, new soldiers getting on the ground, it’s always a learning curve for them and for you, too. It’s a learning curve for the reporter to get to know the soldiers, but it’s also a very strong learning curve for the soldiers to get to know the reporters and realize that they’re not out to get them. That we’re there to tell their stories.
I try to explain to them that if something does happen to them, I don’t want them to be a number. I want to be able to express to them that I’m there to tell their story. To tell, first of all, why they were there, but also tell a bit of their life story. You know: "What was this person like?" Because they’re not numbers. They’re people fighting on behalf of their country. So you get across the point that you’re there not make them famous, but let Canadians know that they’re human.
GOB: How free are you to report on what you see?
TP: It depends on the commanders. Some commanders will try to insist that they look at your copy before it goes to editors and things like that. And that just is not on. I’ve had arguments in the past with some commanders over that. But by and large, you have freedom to write just about anything you want to write, short of anything that might impede or break operational security.
GOB: So then, nothing technical, I guess.
TP: Yeah. No tactical details. I mean, you can get into broad strokes about operations that happen or have happened or that are underway. But when you get into details like locations and timings and things like that – you can get kicked out. You’re under the pressure of not only them getting angry at you, but you’re under their rules (like) any of the military. You can be court martialed for breaking those rules, under military law. So it’s very strict.
GOB: Now you’ve been there several times. All I know of the war is what I read or see on TV, or hear on the radio. Much of the talk is about the ability to win the hearts and minds, and turning this around, and making (Afghanistan) into a democratic country. So I’m curious what your opinion is on whether or not we can win the hearts and minds in the war.
TP: I was really surprised in my first tour over there at how well the Canadians were winning hearts and minds in and around the capital, Kabul. But that was a different circumstance, where they were doing patrols and they weren’t out killing people every day.
In Kandahar, it’s a totally different experience and right now, there’s no way for them to wins hearts and minds over when they’re killing people. In particular, such as incidents in the past few days where they’ve killed civilians through air strikes, that does not win the hearts and minds of people. That, in fact, wins over the hearts and minds of people to the Taliban. It’s an impossible task to wins hearts and minds in Kandahar while you’re still conducting a war.
As far as winning the war goes… in terms of professionalism and equipment and tactics and the training that Canadians are doing with Afghan national forces and Afghan police, eventually, you know, they could win the war.
But the problem is if the people aren’t supporting that victory, then all is lost. So they eventually have to find some balance between trying to fight off the Taliban and insurgents in the area and trying their best to actually get those infrastructure and development and aid projects up and running in the region. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time.
GOB: You talked about the soldiers being regular guys. What’s your thoughts on the "regular Afghanis" and what they think of it all?
TP: It’s difficult to gauge that from one person to the next. There are more educated people there who just want it to be over with, and they want to get on with their lives. The poorest of the poor there mostly are farmers, and they’re caught up in this battle of wills, but also a battle of intelligence between the Taliban and the Coalition forces and NATO forces that are there.
You can ask – if you’re with the soldiers, your average Afghan: “Who do you support? The Taliban or the military? The international military?” And they’ll say, “Well, of course, the international military.”
And then you approach those same people when you’re with the Taliban, and they’ll say, “We support the Taliban.” It just seems to me that these are average people who are very, very impoverished, who just want to get on with building their lives and making better lives for their children — just like anybody in Canada.
But they obviously can’t do that when there’s a war going on around them.
GOB: Would you go back again, or will you go back again?
TP: At this point, because of some personal circumstances at home, I have to say no, that I won’t be going back. But I mean, I’d initially said that I wasn’t going back this summer, and there I was. I guess I can never say never. But at this point, I’ve done three tours, so to speak, and I think that’s it for now.
GOB: It’s go to be more nerve-wracking, because back in the old days, the journalists were mostly of left alone but this day and age, they’re often targeted. Right?
TP: Definitely so. We get threats all the time. You get them through interpreters and e-mails and whatnot from Taliban officials who don’t like the way you reported on what they might have said to you and things like that. So it’s a bit unnerving. But you just sort of take it in stride and realize that insurgents over there, especially the Taliban, their bark is worse than their bite in a lot of circumstances. But it’s always unnerving.
