Street Hustlers, Militants, and Vanguard’s Mission

Last Thursday, I was going to tell you about how the neighborhood around Vanguard’s Hollywood production office is the unofficial transgender street hustler capital of Los Angeles County, but instead I wrote about the narco war in Mexico, and its possible spill over into the US—or not. But the next afternoon, just to show you that I wasn’t exaggerating about the street hustlers, I came back to the Vanguard office from an offsite meeting and my colleagues Benita Sills and Lauren Cerre informed me that, while I was away, an SUV had pulled into my parking spot so that a street hustler could perform an sexual act on a customer.

And this allows me to repeat that, in Vanguard, we like to think one part of our mission is to give you a heads up as to what might be coming in the future. We’re not fortune tellers, but if we can point to stuff that’s out there that you might otherwise not hear much about, when something does happen, it’s not such a shock because, ideally, it’s more understandable.

So instead of writing about street hustlers today, I’ll encourage you to watch a story that Adam Yamaguchi, Tracey Chang, and I shot three years ago this month in Pakistan.



We shot this story during a trip across Pakistan, in which we drove through the Khyber Pass in the militant-infested Tribal Areas along the country’s western border with Afghanistan—the place where all the fighting has been going on this past week in the Pakistani Army’s offensive against militants. Now, the instability has spread, and foreigners can’t even get up the Khyber Pass, even with a Pakistani soldier in their car, as we had.

But while we gave you a heads up on that situation, that’s not what I want to point out. While we were on our trip, a bomb went off a few hundred yards from us and killed seven people in the city of Peshawar, a few miles outside the Tribal Areas. Three years ago, such a bombing in Peshawar was rare. Now bombings have become common, not just in areas near the Tribal Areas, but across Pakistan. And that’s what I wanted to point out.

If you notice, the story I’ve put up, "Pakistani India Envy," wasn’t shot in or near the dangerous Tribal Areas, but all the way across Pakistan, in the bustling city of Lahore, in the Punjab, near Pakistan’s border with India. If you don’t watch the piece, the point is that there are militants like the ones hiding in the Tribal Areas (backed by the tribal people there), but there are also militants throughout Pakistan because the government used to back those who were deemed useful in Pakistan’s decades-long struggle against its much larger and stronger neighbor, India. But now that the militants in the Tribal Areas want to terrorize the rest of Pakistan, they’re able to turn to these other militant networks, which were only supposed to fight against India, on Indian soil.

Which means that now they’re a problem for Pakistan. It’s somewhat similar to the lesson that the US learned with its first involvement with Afghanistan, in the 1980s. At the time it gave hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry to some members of the anti-Soviet resistance in Pakistan, which included a broad collection of groups and individuals, some of which later founded militant organizations like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The lesson seems to be that militants pose the danger of staying militant, even when the assignment you gave them has ended. And, if that analysis proves to be correct, we told you so three years ago.