Last week I spoke on a panel at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre on “Art, War and Another Afghanistan” alongside photographer Barat Ali Batoor, human rights lawyer and activist Diana Sayed, Afghan football player and recently arrived from Kabul, Fatima Yousufi (who was featured in a recent New York Times story), and Hazara musician Taqi Khan. Afghanistan…
Showing all posts tagged Taliban
The Nation interview on Afghan resources and peace prospects
US magazine The Nation recently published my investigation into the Afghan mining industry. I was interviewed about the story, and the ongoing peace talks between the US and Taliban, on the popular Nation podcast, Start Making Sense:
Our kind of arms dealer
One side of a sordid story: One of the world’s most notorious arms dealers, suspected of supplying weapons to the Taliban and Al Qaeda and of pouring huge arms shipments into Africa’s civil wars with his own private air fleet, was arrested by Thai authorities in a hotel here Thursday. His capture was prompted by…
Our good friends in Afghanistan
“We” never deal with terrorists, of course: Britain planned to build a Taliban training camp for 2,000 fighters in southern Afghanistan, as part of a top-secret deal to make them swap sides, intelligence sources in Kabul have revealed. The plans were discovered on a memory stick seized by Afghan secret police in December.
The Taliban on the march
A compelling essay in this week’s New York Times magazine about the jihadi threat inside Pakistan. Writer Nicholas Schmidle skillfully teases out the seemingly endless factions within the movement and the numerous reasons why Washington’s backing of President Pervez Musharraf has been a disaster for the region and the world.