President George Bush's speeches and military build-up may have been intended to wear down the resolve of the Afghan Taliban. But the first nerves to break were among the thousands of journalists who reached central Asia before the US Rangers.
Afghanistan's borders are closed, its mountains extremely difficult to cross. Afghan air space is also officially closed, but the United Front, the opposition alliance which has fought the Taliban since 1996, undertakes sporadic helicopter flights to the Panjshir Valley and the town of Khoja Bahuddin on the Tajik border. Also in its northern enclave the Front flies one fixed-wing aircraft to and from Faizabad.
A combination of bad weather and gazumping by the big US and British networks have left most would-be travellers stranded in Dushanbe. The United Front, it seems, would rather have CNN, ITN, the BBC and Sky News videotaping their staged "milita ry exercises" on a front line that has not moved in two years than bring in humanitarian relief workers anxious to get to work before winter sets in.
"The journalists are flooding in to cover a story about starving Afghans," says Paul Harvey of the relief group Concern. "And the people who are trying to help the starving Afghans can't get in because the journalists are clogging all the planes."
Concern's new director for Afghanistan, Dominic Mac Sorley, and the head of their Faizabad office, Phil Miller, were supposed to be on a fixed-wing flight to Faizabad with me yesterday. We waited from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. only to be told it was too late for the plane to fly; we should come back at 8 a.m. today.
Concern has been feeding 170,000 Afghans monthly since it set up its operation following the 1998 earthquake. The Irish group needs to deliver 10,000 tonnes of supplies a week before the snow starts at the beginning of November.
But while we waited unsuccessfully for the United Front's aircraft, CNN, Sky, NBC and APTN completed arrangements for their "special helicopter" to the Panjshir valley, carrying 12 people and 2,400 kg of equipment. An angry journalist suggested it was not fair for the networks to jump the queue when others had waited more than a week. A woman snapped back: "CNN were first in Afghanistan."
The Panjshir ranks second only to Taliban territory as a desirable destination for journalists. But since the British reporter, Yvonne Ridley, was caught by the Taliban sneaking into Kabul in a full-length burqa veil, that technique has been abandoned.
Le Figaro reporter, a former Foreign Legion officer named Adrien Jeaulmes, travelled eight days on foot over the Hindu Kush with a donkey carrying his supplies to reach the Panjshir. Afghan employees of the World Food Programme have walked for a day over the mountains from Pakistan, leading donkeys loaded with relief supplies.
In Dushanbe, press panic has reached heights worthy of Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop. On Friday, I arrived outside the Tajik foreign ministry to find journalists scrambling to sign a list which already had more than 200 names on it. No-one could tell me what the list was for. Inside the ministry, journalists paid bribes of up to $250 just to speed up their accreditation.
The Tajiks have started allowing convoys to the Afghan border. It can take 14 hours, and drivers charge up to $1,000. The last 40 km of the road is mud; the last 20 must be driven in darkness without headlights along a riverbank, sometimes under fire from the Taliban. A British journalist whose car broke down was detained at the border by Russian military intelligence for two hours. When he was released, he broke his taxi's windshield in fury.
In northern Afghanistan and Tajikistan, journalists are contracting salmonella, dysentery fever, parasites and fleas.
But by all accounts, the "television city" that mushroomed in the dirty border village of Khoja Bahuddin is the worst. Newcomers are lucky if they can find a tent to sleep in. Those who have returned to Dushanbe, shaken and exhausted, say journalists have resorted to stealing food and using plastic bags as toilets.