On October 7, 2001, US jets’ month-long bombing of Afghanistan prompted al-Qaida to send some of its Arab fighters for hiding in Tora Bora, a beige mountain range with sparse villages on the Afghan side of a corridor abutting Pakistan's ex-FATA. The US assault on Afghanistan, called “Operation Anaconda,” triggered the longest overt war in American history. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) strategists were guiding around 12,000 US troops focused on FATA. On the Pakistan side, General Musharraf has aided the United States to launch the “al-Meezan-1” and its sequel “al-Meezan-2” operations in ex-FATA. Over seventy-four thousand Pakistani troops were gradually transported to set up over six hundred checkpoints for blocking al-Qaida's penetration. Against this backdrop, this chapter examines an economy of labor relations of news production at work during this US attack on Afghanistan. It reveals how the term “fixer” obscures hierarchies of power relations, trivializing the risks taken and violence endured by local laboring journalists on their very bodies and professional integrity.

With the start of the war, foreign media personnel began to leave Peshawar. Some left for Afghanistan, a few stayed behind, and the remaining journalists moved to the federal capital of Pakistan, Islamabad, a smooth two-hour drive to the east of Peshawar. As terrorism's center of gravity expanded from Afghanistan to Pakistan, district reporters emerged as a prime source of critically necessary information. The Bureau reporters, in the shifting territory of the conflict, got limited work; most of them served as information facilitators, an intermediary source between foreign journalists and district reporters. Elite global wire services—that is, Agency France Presse (AFP), Reuters, and Associated Press (AP)—and top global news sources—that is, CNBC, the New York Times (NYT), NHK, Al Jazeera and CNN—had their offices established in Islamabad, some of them worked there since the 1980s’ Afghan war. As the district reporters accessed these media outlets mostly through bureau reporters, the emerging division of labor promoted competition, enabling the global media outlets to obtain news from ex-FATA's inaccessible caves and corners called the “information black hole.”