Watch the New Yorker correspondent, author of "In the Hiding Zone" in the July 18th issue (not online!), talk about her clandestine visit to Waziristan onCSPAN's clip of the day for August 4th.
A New Yorker press release summarizes her published story like this:
"In "In the Hiding Zone," Eliza Griswold reports from Waziristan, the lawless tribal borderland on the northwestern edge of Pakistan whose people are sometimes suspected of harboring Osama bin Laden. Griswold, who was detained earlier this year in Waziristan by Pakistani authorities, travels with Khalid Wazir, who, at the age of thirty, is "the de-facto prince of a forbidden kingdom, a putative expert on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, and gatekeeper to a region traditionally closed to outsiders." Khalid tells Griswold that he was recently asked by an international news organization if bin Laden was in fact hiding in Waziristan.
"How was I supposed to know?" he says. "If he's there, why don't they catch him? I have nothing to do with it.... I am the chief. I know there are terrorists in Waziristan? George Bush was elected President by the state of Florida. His brother is governor of Florida. George Bush knew there were terrorists training in Florida?" Griswold notes that "of all the Pashtun tribes, the Wazirs are known as the most conservative and irascible," although "the revival of radical Islam in Waziristan is relatively recent," a product, in part, of the effort to push the Soviet Army out of Afghanistan. "More recently," Griswold reports, "the region has become a haven for Al Qaeda members. As Islamic fighters fled the mountains of Afghanistan, Waziristan became a virtual jihadi highway."
Khalid sees himself locked in a battle for influence with the radical mullahs in the area. His own plan for combatting the influence of radical Islam includes not military action ("Kill one terrorist, make ten," he says) but a comprehensive public-works program that has yet to develop. "The mullah gives a man one meal," he says, "we will give him two." The United States already had crop-substitution programs running in the area before September 11th, although Westerners are not allowed in Waziristan.
"There have been social programs in the region since the nineteen-seventies in the tribal areas," Husain Haqqani, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says. "I don't think there are any empirical data to suggest that after your house has been intrusively searched you say, 'Oh, those are the good guys! They put the water fountain in my village.' " With the Waziris angry at both the Pakistani Army and America, the situation isn't getting any easier. "We certainly believe there are remnants of Al Qaeda or those closely allied with it up there," one State Department official tells Griswold. "There will need to be a continuing effort.... It's U.S. policy to try as much as we can to assist these people. But you can't just walk in with a bunch of Americans and say, " 'Hi! We're trying to help.' "
