“Get ready, we are on the way,” the American journalist said to his Pakistani counterpart in Peshawar before hanging up the phone. Aimal Khan, a research participant in this study, received this call a few hours after the 9/11 attacks. American journalists were sure that the United States had planned to seek revenge on the Afghan Taliban for providing shelter to Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader whom the United States held responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Two weeks before the actual war, over four hundred international journalists thronged Pakistan, an estimate collected from a survey of hotels in Peshawar, Islamabad and Quetta. Peshawar city offered a view of a makeshift strategic base for the global media from where the bulk of the visiting journalists not just contextualized the imminent war in Afghanistan, but they also hired local reporters to work for them as “fixers.” Fixer” became a natural ‘logistical” position for local reporters to occupy. They jumped into the role offered to them to become a local helping “hand” to facilitate the visitors. This media circus started in the second week of September and continued until October 7, 2001, when the United States and its NATO allies launched an attack on Afghanistan.

With a focus on the pre-attack phase, I examine in this chapter how the local Pashtun reporter understood the term “fixer” and adapted to the challenges of this role. The “fixers” interviewed in this chapter mostly worked with global news networks belonging to Western countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Germany. A few worked for Qatar-, Japan-and Turkey-based channels. Because of the book's focus on the local journalists’ field experiences, this chapter neither examines the nature of foreign journalists’ identities or global media organizational divisions, differences and competitions, nor systematically probes into the coverage of these identities, networks or associations. I aim to critically focus on local journalists’ newly carved identity/role of “fixer.”

In this chapter I argue that the term “fixer” represents a particular class of knowledge workers, who are being de-skilled and de-professionalized—deprived of trade recognition including credit/awards/compensation for their editorial contributions.