The Story of a Fixer

In these days of the disappearing newspaper, we hear a lot about the invisible costs of newsgathering. Sometimes the invisible cost is a life. Ian Olds's haunting documentary Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi, which airs on HBO August 17, reveals how the story of a war gets told: the brokering of deals so that an interview can take place; the bridging of vast distances in language, culture and geography between Western reporter and native source. In this process, a fixer is more than a facilitator. He is the conduit, a vital link in the chain that ultimately connects an audience--in this case, the largely American readers of this magazine--to fighters on the front lines of a war being waged in their name.

The Nation's Christian Parenti is the Western reporter in the film. Parenti hired Ajmal Naqshbandi in October 2004 when he first went to Kabul to write about the US occupation of Afghanistan. He stayed at Naqshbandi's guesthouse, along with "an anarchic mix of foreign reporters, contractors and other unidentified free agents," as he wrote in an award-winning piece about Naqshbandi published in Playboy. Naqshbandi helped him on all of the Afghanistan stories he wrote for The Nation in the wake of the US invasion: "Who Rules Afghanistan" (November 15, 2004); "Afghan Poppies Bloom" (January 24, 2005); "Afghanistan: The Other War" (March 27, 2006); and "Taliban Rising" (October 30, 2006).

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.