“我必须去前线”：CNN首席国际记者谈阿富汗经历
Clarissa Ward of CNN Looks Back on the Afghanistan War
KATIE ROBERTSON
2021年9月8日
Clarissa Ward had four days to catch up on sleep and see her two sons, ages 1 and 3, at her parents’ home in France. Then she was off again, back to work, making her way through Qatar to Pakistan, where she reported from the Afghanistan border.
克拉丽莎·沃德(Clarissa Ward)有四天时间可以在她父母位于法国的家里补充睡眠，看看她一岁和三岁的两个儿子。然后她又要离家去工作，途径卡塔尔前往巴基斯坦，从阿富汗边境发回报道。
Ms. Ward, CNN’s chief international correspondent, was a center-stage broadcast reporter as she delivered her accounts, often with gunfire ringing in the background, on what it was like in Kabul in the often chaotic final days of America’s longest war. Along with her crew, she subsisted on eggs, cookies and Clif Bars while covering the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban’s sudden return to power. At times, she couldn’t help showing emotion on the air.
作为CNN的首席国际记者，沃德在电视广播中有重要位置。在美国最长战争常常混乱不堪的最后几天里，人们在她的喀布尔报道中常能听见背景里的枪声。报道美国撤军、塔利班突然重掌政权的新闻期间，她和她的制作组靠吃鸡蛋、饼干和克里夫能量棒维生。有时，她在节目中无法抑制自己感情的显露。
“I can’t go and sit with an Afghan woman crying her heart out that her daughters are going to have to grow up in Taliban-led Afghanistan and be just unmoved by it,” Ms. Ward, 41, said in a video interview from France last week. “And I don’t think it makes me a lesser reporter that I am moved by it.”
“我不可能去和一名阿富汗女子坐在一起，看着她因为女儿们将不得不在塔利班领导的阿富汗长大而痛哭，自己却无动于衷，”现年41岁的沃德上周在法国接受视频采访时说。“我不觉得我被感动意味着我是一名不称职的记者。”
Her job has included assignments in other conflict zones, including in Baghdad and Aleppo, Syria, often putting her in danger — and at a great distance from her privileged youth.
她的报道任务将她带入其他冲突地区，包括巴格达和叙利亚的阿勒颇，这些任务常常使她处于危险之中，与她享有特权的年轻时期相差甚远。
As she recounts in her 2020 memoir, “On All Fronts,” she was born in London to an American mother, an interior designer, and a British father, an investment banker. She had 11 different nannies by age 8. Home, for a time, was a series of townhouses on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which her mother renovated and flipped. Then it was onto the elite British boarding schools Godstowe and Wycombe Abbey.
她在2020年出版的回忆录《四面八方》(On All Fronts)中写道，她出生在伦敦，母亲是美国人，从事室内设计，父亲是一名英国投资银行家。到她八岁时，家里已经换过11个保姆。有段时间，她的家曾是曼哈顿上东区一栋接一栋的联排别墅，因为她母亲买下一栋后会将其翻新卖掉再买一栋。再后来她去了英国精英寄宿学校格德斯多女校和威雅公学。
The idea of pursuing a career in journalism occurred to her on Sept. 11, 2001, when she was in her senior year at Yale, where her major was comparative literature. The attacks made her realize there was a world radically different from everything she knew, a world that seemed poorly understood in the United States and Europe.
2001年9月11日，从事新闻工作的想法出现在了她的脑海里，她当时在耶鲁读大四，主修比较文学。恐怖袭击让她意识到了一个与她所知道的完全不同的世界，一个美国和欧洲似乎不太了解的世界。
“It sounds presumptuous, but I knew I had to go to the front lines, to hear the stories of people who lived there and tell them to the people back home,” she wrote in her book.
“虽然这听上去有点冒失，但我知道我必须去前线，去听听生活在那里的人的故事，把故事讲给家乡的人听，”她在书中写道。
After an internship at CNN, she studied Arabic and got on-camera experience in Beirut, Lebanon and Baghdad as a reporter for Fox News. She left for ABC, where she worked out of Moscow and Beijing, and was hired away in 2011 by David Rhodes, then the president of CBS News. She posed as a tourist to slip into war-torn Syria, shooting video herself and sneaking the footage out of the country on memory cards stitched into her underwear. Her coverage earned a Peabody Award.
在CNN实习后，她学习了阿拉伯语，并作为Fox新闻的记者在贝鲁特、黎巴嫩和巴格达获得了在镜头前报道的经验。之后她去了ABC，在莫斯科和北京工作。2011年，她被时任CBS新闻部门主管的戴维·罗兹(David Rhodes)挖到了CBS。她曾假扮游客悄悄进入战火纷飞的叙利亚，自己当摄影师，然后把存储视频的内存卡缝在内衣里，偷偷带出了叙利亚。她的报道获得了一项皮博迪奖(Peabody Award)。
“It’s an art and a skill, and it requires a lot of experience to make the judgments that you need to make to do this coverage safely, frankly, because you just need to be able to read a difficult situation,” said Mr. Rhodes, who is now a group director of the British media company Sky.
“这是一种艺术和技术，需要大量的经验，为安全、直率地作这个报道做出你所需的判断，因为你需要有看清困难情况的能力，”现为英国传媒公司天空(Sky)集团董事的罗兹说。
“There are single-digit numbers of people globally that are really good at this,” he added. “She is one of those people.”
“全球真正擅长这项工作的人不到十个，”罗兹补充说。“她是其中之一。”
Ms. Ward joined CNN in 2015 and returned to Syria, again undercover, making her one of the few Western journalists behind rebel lines. In 2018, she was promoted to chief international correspondent, replacing Christiane Amanpour, who had moved on to an anchor role at CNN and PBS. Ms. Ward was soon reporting from Afghanistan’s Taliban-controlled Balkh province. For her latest reporting tour, Ms. Ward arrived in the country on Aug. 2, with a plan to stay two weeks.
2015年，沃德加入了CNN并重返叙利亚，这次也是秘密去的，这让她成为进入反对派控制区的少数几名西方记者之一。2018年，沃德接替克里斯蒂安·阿曼普(Christiane Amanpour)被提升为首席国际记者，后者已在CNN和PBS担任主播。不久后，沃德就从塔利班控制的阿富汗巴尔赫省发来了报道。为了最近的这次报道任务，沃德于8月2日抵达阿富汗，她原打算在那里停留两周。
“I never would have guessed that those two weeks would have turned into three weeks, and we would be there for the fall of Kabul, and the fall of Kabul would take place in a matter of hours, with hardly a shot fired on a sort of quiet Sunday afternoon,” she said in the interview.
“我永远都不可能猜到那两周会变成三周，喀布尔会在我们仍在那里时被攻占，而攻占会是几小时的事情，就发生在一个安静的周日下午，几乎未发一枪一弹，”她在上周那次采访中说。
At the start of the month, she was at the front lines with U.S.-allied Afghan troops in Kandahar. Three days later, the Taliban took the city.
8月初她还在坎大哈的前线，与作为美国盟军的阿富汗部队在一起。三天后，塔利班就占领了这座城市。
“I reached out to one of the soldiers on WhatsApp, saying, ‘What happened to you?’” she said. “He just wrote: ‘We left.’ I think that was the beginning of me really understanding that the reason this was unraveling so quickly, in no small part, was because Afghan security forces were just not interested any longer in fighting this fight.”
“我用WhatsApp与一名士兵联系，问‘你们怎么样了？’”沃德说。“他只回复了一句：‘我们撤了。’我觉得我从那时开始真正明白，阿富汗政府之所以如此迅速地崩溃，在很大程度上是因为阿富汗安全部队对这场战斗已不再感兴趣。”
By Aug. 14, Ms. Ward and her crew had moved on to a fortified compound in Kabul. They were hoping for a break in the action when Taliban troops arrived.
8月14日那天，沃德和她的制作组已转移到喀布尔的一个有加固工事的园区。他们希望在塔利班军队到来前能有个喘息之机。
“By breakfast time, we knew they were at the gates,” she said. “In the afternoon, they started to make their way into the city.”
“吃早饭的时候，我们就知道他们已经到了城门口，”她说。“下午，他们开始进城。”
On Aug. 16, dressed in a full-length black abaya, she reported from a street filled with Taliban revelers outside the U.S. Embassy. “They’re just chanting ‘Death to America,’” she said, facing the CNN camera, “but they seem friendly at the same time. It’s utterly bizarre.”
8月16日那天，她穿着全身长的黑色阿巴亚罩袍，从美国大使馆外的一条街上作报道，街上到处都是塔利班狂欢者。“他们都在喊‘美国去死吧’，”她面对着CNN的摄像机说，“但同时他们似乎也很友好。这真是奇怪透了。”
Another report, broadcast live as she stood among Taliban members in Kabul, underlined a particular challenge she had dealt with before in Afghanistan: “They just told me to stand to the side because I’m a woman,” she told viewers.
另一篇报道是她站在喀布尔的一群塔利班成员中直播的，凸显了她以前在阿富汗遇到过的一个特殊挑战：“他们只是叫我站得离他们远点，因为我是女人，”她对观众说。
As the days wore on, she interviewed women too fearful to leave their houses and others frantically trying to find a way out of the country. From outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport on Aug. 18, Ms. Ward reported that Taliban fighters had beat people trying to escape with truncheons and fired on crowds.
随着日子的渐进，她采访了一些已经害怕得不敢出家门的女性，以及一些拼命想办法离开这个国家的人。8月18日，沃德在喀布尔的哈米德卡尔扎伊国际机场(Hamid Karzai International Airport)外报道说，塔利班武装分子用警棍殴打试图逃离的人，还向人群开了枪。
Her recent reports from Afghanistan brought her new attention: Her Instagram follower count shot up to 250,000, from 60,000, in a week. With the increased visibility came the scrutiny of critics on social media and elsewhere, who found fault with her Aug. 20 report expressing skepticism that the United States could pull off the planned mass evacuation.
她最近从阿富汗发出的报道给她带来了新的关注：她在Instagram上的粉丝数在一周内从6万飙升至25万。随着可见度提高而来的，是社交媒体上和其他地方的批评者的审视，他们在她8月20日对美国能否完成计划的大规模撤离表示怀疑的报道中找到了差错。
“I’m sitting here for 12 hours in the airport, eight hours on the airfield and I haven’t seen a single U.S. plane take off,” she said on the air that day. “How on earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 people in the next two weeks? It just, it can’t happen.”
“我已在机场里坐了12个小时，在飞机跑道附近坐了八个小时，我一直没看到一架美国飞机起飞，”她在那天的电视广播中说。“你究竟要怎样在未来两周里撤离5万人呀？这简直是不可能的事情。”
Days later, President Biden said the United States had helped evacuate more than 70,000 people from Aug. 14 to Aug. 24. The New York Times reported last week that more than 123,000 people had been airlifted out of the country since July.
几天后，拜登总统说，美国已在8月14日到8月24日的时间里，帮助撤离了7万多人。《纽约时报》上周报道，自7月以来，已有逾12.3万人被空运出境。
Ms. Ward defended the Aug. 20 dispatch, saying it should be interpreted in the context of “live, in-the-moment reporting.”
沃德为8月20日的报道进行了辩护，称应该在“现场的、即时的报道”的背景下来解读。
“We had been at the airport since 7 a.m. local,” she said. “From 7 to 10 a.m., we saw three U.S. planes take off with evacuees, but then they abruptly stopped for approximately 10 hours.” At the time, she added, she didn’t see how the United States could complete the evacuation in the time it had set for itself.
“我们从当地时间早上7点就在机场，”她说。“从早上7点到10点，我们看到三架载着撤离人员的美国飞机起飞，但那之后飞机突然停飞了大约10个小时。”她还说，当时她看不出来美国怎么能够在自己设定的时间内完成撤离。
CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, praised her reporting, citing not only her Afghanistan coverage, but her dispatches this year on the poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a military coup in Myanmar and the impact of the pandemic on India.
CNN总裁杰夫·扎克(Jeff Zucker)赞扬了沃德的报道，不仅是她的阿富汗报道，还提了她今年对俄罗斯反对派领袖阿列克谢·纳瓦尔尼(Alexei Navalny)中毒事件、缅甸的军事政变，以及疫情对印度影响的报道。
“I’d be hard pressed to say Clarissa wasn’t the most important hire I’ve made,” he said. “She’s willing to go where most others won’t go.”
“很难否认克拉丽莎是我招来的最重要员工，”扎克说。“她愿意去大多数人都不愿去的地方。”
Ms. Ward left Kabul on Aug. 20, along with her crew and Afghans who had worked for CNN, on a flight to Qatar. Prevented from going straight to her London home because of pandemic restrictions, she was reunited in France with her children and husband, Philipp von Bernstorff, a German count and businessman whom she met at a Moscow dinner party in 2007.
8月20日，沃德和她的制作组以及曾为CNN工作的阿富汗人一起离开了喀布尔，飞往卡塔尔。由于疫情限制，她无法直接回到伦敦的家中，于是她去法国与孩子和丈夫菲利普·冯·贝恩斯托夫(Philipp von Bernstorff)团聚，她是2017年在莫斯科的一个晚餐会上与这名从商的德国伯爵认识的。
She said she views herself as a reporter who tries to provide viewers with an understanding of what is happening in conflict zones, while also capturing the experiences and reactions of those directly affected.
她说，她把自己看作是一名试图让观众了解冲突地区正在发生的事情，同时也捕捉到那些直接受影响者的经历和反应的记者。
“It’s not my job to say whether it has been handled well or not,” she said of the troop withdrawal. “It’s my job to give a voice to those people and say this is how they feel.”
“这件事处理得好还是不好，不由我来说，”她在谈到撤军时说。“我的工作是给那些人提供表达的机会，让他们说出他们的感受。”
She said she would continue covering Afghanistan. The Taliban, for now, are “talking the talk” in terms of not violating women’s rights, she said.
她说她将继续报道阿富汗。目前而言，在不侵犯妇女权利的问题上，塔利班“只是说说而已”，她说。
“Our jobs as journalists is to stick around for long enough to find out if they are walking the walk,” she said. “If we do start to see retaliation, reprisal killings, walking back of women’s rights or women’s education, we need to be telling that story. And I feel very, very strongly about that.”
“作为记者，我们的工作就是在那停留足够长的时间，看看他们是否言行一致，”沃德说。“如果我们确实开始看到报复，看到报复性杀人，看到在女性权利或女性教育问题上的倒退，我们就需要报道这个故事。这是我非常、非常强烈坚持的观点。”
