During the Afghan war, Western journalists failed to critically probe either US military policy or the complexities of the Taliban legacy in Afghanistan. The reporting suffered, and many important questions have yet to be asked.
Barely had a group of international journalists reached Kandahar when Western reporters started receiving messages from their companies back home that the Pentagon was refusing to guarantee their security. They were told that the sooner they leave Kandahar, the better, because it was too risky for them to stay and work in the Taliban headquarters.
That same night American warplanes blitzed the city. The Taliban wasted no time in the morning to take journalists to the site of the bombing. Two bungalows in the Shahr-i-Nau locality had been bombed and survivors said over a dozen civilians were killed. One of the houses accommodated the offices of a mobile medical team, the other a family that had shifted there because it felt the area was safe from US bombing. The pictures of civilian destruction hit television screens and print media all over the world that day. This was just the kind of coverage the US wanted to avoid and understandably there was no bombing in Kandahar over the next three days due to the presence of international reporters in the city.
This was the second trip organised by the Taliban to show journalists the civilian casualties from US airstrikes. From 1 October to 2 November, the 26 television, radio and print reporters from several countries and media companies were shown city localities and villages hit by US bombs and missiles. They were also taken to the Mirwais Hospital, the city's main but hopelessly ill-equipped and under-staffed medical centre to meet those injured in the bombing. Among the injured was 62-year-old Sultan Bibi, one of the few survivors of the bombing that had targeted the two bungalows in Shahr-i-Nau. Saying that she had no money to buy medicines, the old, frail lady wept while narrating the loss of her two daughters and a daughter-in-law in the bombing. Lying in another ward was a heavily bandaged eight year-old boy who was said to have lost all his family members in another bombing raid in Kandahar.