Afghan Diary

Susan Ormiston

The campaign trail and the daily frisk

Last Updated: Monday, August 17, 2009 | 2:33 PM ET

By Susan Ormiston CBC News

It is truly a different world from the polished, crafted, television-ready political campaigns in Canada to what takes place in Afghanistan.

What with hyper-security, unexpected moments and, sometimes, pure chaos, you never know what your day will be like.

Just getting to a rally for President Hamid Karzai is an event.

Hamid Karzai and the trappings of office. (CBC)

First, there's the full-Monty security. Our drivers dropped us at 7:45 a.m. at a heavily armed checkpoint about 500 metres down the hill from the staging area.

At the checkpoint, we dropped all our electronic gear in a neat line to be searched by guards and sniffed by dogs.

Then the men were separated from the women and told to stand in one long horizontal line, backs to the guards. It looked a little too much like a firing line.

Guards frisked them from their ankles to their hair, then turned to the women. But there lay a problem.

No women guards had been hired for reporters that day — a day when the rally was all about women. In fact, 2,500 women were waiting to meet President Karzai.

Group grope

So we reporter gals were piled into an SUV, driven back down that hill, out the fortified gate and over to the nearby Kabul Polytechnic Institute.

There we joined dozens of women who were heading in to study and we were all herded through a curtained-off outdoor area to face six smiling women ready to, well, feel for weapons. Everywhere.

Once done, we piled back in our vehicle with a clearly uncomfortable male driver and headed back to the rally site.

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai seeking women's votes in Kabul in the final week of the campaign. In the foreground is Karzai's clapper, a woman who tries to get the crowd enthused.(CBC)

As our escort, Mohammed, led us by foot down to a large tented area I realized a bathroom break was in order. But where?

A fellow reporter who spoke Dari broke the news to Mohammed.

"She needs to go to the toilet." she said. He turned, ashen, eyebrows up as he no doubt thought how he was going to manage that. Leaving the rest of the women at the tent, he motioned to come with him to search for a washroom. We found one — for men, not surprisingly.

With a shrug of his shoulders, he motioned me in and I tried to indicate with gestures that he was to stand guard at the door.

Which he did. When I emerged, and before I could join my crew in the tent, I had to go through the grope again. Just in case I'd stashed my weapons at the urinal, I guess.

Grab the fire extinguisher

By now it was around 8:30 a.m., the hour the rally was supposed to start.

Wrong. A political rally, even in the city, can easily eat up five hours of your day with the security, the obligatory wait and then the tedious speeches, until finally the main event. That would be Karzai at about 10:30 in the morning.

You know he's arriving by the sound of military helicopters flying overhead. With the professional clapper poised to do his work, the president of Afghanistan strides in to meet his female supporters.

All goes predictably with the photographers debating with handlers how close they can get. Not very, it turns out.

There has been a legacy, of course, of reporter-assassins in this country.

A day before 9/11, Gen. Ahmed Shah Massoud, a national hero to some, was killed here by an assassin pretending to be a journalist. With that lesson hard learned, reporters can't be trusted.

The event wraps up about noon but not before a near disaster.

As the president glad hands his way down the rows of women, I see smoke at the top of the tent. A broadcast speaker suspended above the crowd has caught fire and flames are shooting out of it.

For a moment it feels as if the crowd will panic. And if there had been any draping around the top of the tent it would have been a quick inferno.

But suddenly two men race in carrying heavy extinguishers and douse the flames as Karzai slips out the back, into his fortified convoy, and on to the next stop.