TIME: Reporters'
Notebook
Monday, March 25, 2002
By MICHAEL WARE; CATHY
BOOTH THOMAS; JAMES CARNEY
MICHAEL WARE has been in Afghanistan for TIME since
December. Based in Kandahar, he has been at the
Shah-i-Kot front for the past two weeks.
"If I'm traveling into the Taliban heartland, I
normally join a vehicle full of soldiers, about eight
or nine men armed with rocket-propelled grenade
launchers and heavy machine guns to deter any
unwanted attention. The trick I've adopted lately is
wearing an Afghan costume and speaking a little
Pashtu. It's allowed me to sneak in and out of the
front lines with Afghan troops. But it has its
downside. Soldiers think I'm Afghan and treat me like
an Afghan. I've been manhandled and roughed up, and
then I've had to reveal my identity.
"As it is, I spend much of my time hanging out with
Afghans, watching Indian movies with the local
mujahedin in Kandahar, eating what they eat, sleeping
where they sleep, now dressing as they do. In
Kandahar, I live in the Noor Jahan hotel, room number
two. It's the one where a lot of local commanders,
their bodyguards and other dubious characters come
looking for Mick. Michael is too difficult for them
to remember. A month ago, when I was quite ill with a
stomach flu, they were constantly there, believing
that it was good manners to visit with a sick friend.
I was continually excusing myself to throw up. They
prescribed hash and opium, saying they would cure
anything. I politely declined."
CATHY BOOTH THOMAS, our Dallas bureau chief, has
chased after the Pope, Fidel Castro, Hollywood celebs
and Enron. Last week she was after the hottest
consumer-electronics company in the world.
"I'd just been through accounting arcana to cover the
Enron and Andersen stories, so I thought Samsung was
a blessing in disguise. Then I started running into
terms like DRAMS and SRAMS, TFT/LCD and DLP, CDMA and
TDMA, GSM and GPRS. So in two days I had to be up to
snuff on enough of the lingo to find out why Samsung
was so hot in chips, TV monitors, computer monitors
and cell phones. Now I know what a DLP TV is. (Hint:
it's thin, looks good on a tabletop and makes
Saturday-sports fanatics ecstatic.) Samsung
Telecommunications America opened the doors to its
rather unglamorous headquarters in Richardson, Texas,
and showed off the phones that will be debuting this
week at the Cellular Telecommunications &
Internet Association trade fair in Orlando, Florida.
(Note to my editor: I'd like the Q105 with the
one-button Web-access feature that delivers info at
546 KBPS, as fast as dial up at home.)"
JAMES CARNEY, half of our White House team, was with
the Vice President on his highly scrutinized
diplomatic mission last week.
"Traveling with Dick Cheney through the Middle East
was like being in the eye of a hurricane: chaos
loomed in the distance, but overhead the skies were
clear. At least the Vice President and his aides kept
insisting they were. Day after day, Cheney doggedly
maintained that the explosion of Israeli-Palestinian
violence wasn't interfering with the goal of his
mission: persuading Arab allies that the next target
in the war on terror should be Iraq. But like the
rumble of far-off thunder, the evidence suggested
otherwise. Everywhere he went--Jordan, Egypt, Yemen,
Oman, Saudi Arabia--Cheney encountered blunt
opposition to the idea of ousting Saddam Hussein by
force. Before they would consider joining such a
campaign, Arab leaders demanded, the U.S. would have
to use its influence to restart the peace process,
preferably by leaning on Israel's Ariel Sharon. After
Cheney got an earful from so many presidents, kings
and sultans, it's no wonder he spent the day Friday
among less obstreperous friends aboard a U.S.
aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. 'This is the
highlight of my trip,' he told the cheering crew. No
doubt he was telling the truth."