It is a parasitic thing writing about war. It is also a heavily censored thing.

Carte blanche was granted to write what I liked about a circumcision party, nothing was too much, the knife incision, the screams of the minimised babe and all, but writing about babies that were dying simply from lack of salt, water and sugar in over-crowded refugee camps was not allowed. The message came back that it would give the wrong sort of impression to the folks back home. The circumcision party and its diminutive amounts of spare flesh were the acceptable side of the ‘war against terrorism’, homeless families and dying babies were not.

Oh, such an opportunity to trumpet about truth being the first casualty of war, but it is also an oversimplification. It is balanced reporting that is lost in the mêlée of tough politicos with smooth hair-dos, winging their way around the world, shoring up shaky alliances, and the queues of foreign journalists trying to nudge their way in with the turncoat warriors who might be able to give them the big story, a ride up front into the next town to be liberated from beards and burqas.

The invitation to a circumcision came after your standard late autumn morning in Wana in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan; a standard morning meaning the local Pathani lads taking pot shots at an area military commander who had been checking out the lay of the land in his helicopter. We the viewers had repaired to a chai shop for a restorative small glass of what tastes like liquid fudge. That was when the invitation came in the form of an excited Pathan, moving at speed, his beard flying, his blue eyes flashing and his AK47 slung across his big old chest. Some say the Pathans are one of the ten lost tribes of Israel so the invitation to this wild-eyed warrior’s baby son’s circumcision party was just about understandable. That half hour of jolly japes with those woolly tribals, who people most of northern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan, had to be spun out to 3,000 words of copy. The sheaves of stuff that was being written about the dispossessed, disenfranchised and dying Afghans in the refugee camps was spiked, because it was felt that the wideness of the eyes of the suffering children might undermine belief in the bombing campaign that was producing an unpalatable number of civilian casualties.

The first American fatality of this war was all over the front pages. The first Aghan fatalities were lost along the way. It is unlikely that there will be any kind of memorial to them.

(originally published in Wexas Traveller)