War Journos

Support Ashley Gilbertson's project, "Bedrooms of the Fallen"

2011-01-25T08:47:00.000-08:00

Check out the latest chapter in Ashley Gilbertson's amazing "Bedrooms of the Fallen" project and become a supporter:

These bedrooms once belonged to men and women who died fighting in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They were blown up by IEDs, RPGs, hand grenades and suicide bombers. They were shot down in ambushes and by snipers. They died in helicopters, in humvees, and in tanks. It all took place thousands of miles away from home and the countries they fought to defend.

The purpose of this project is to honor these fallen – not simply as soldiers, marines, airmen and seamen, but as sons, daughters, sisters and brothers – and to remind us that before they fought, they lived, and they slept, just like us, at home.

Check it out -- and donate! -- at the Kickstart page.

NYTimes: Afghan War Just a Slice of U.S. Coverage

2010-12-20T11:44:00.000-08:00

Michael Holmes of CNN in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in April.

A CNN executive said some Americans had “war fatigue.”

Published: December 19, 2010

By BRIAN STELTER

As the Obama administration conducted an Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy review this month, the news media did too, and the coverage came peppered with question marks.

The same week that ABC News scheduled a series of segments titled “Afghanistan: Can We Win?,” Katie Couric of the “CBS Evening News” devoted six minutes to a special report, “Can This War Be Won?”

A recent headline atop New York magazine repeated a question asked by dozens of opinion writers this year — and last year, and the year before — “Why Are We in Afghanistan?”

The questions reflect the complex nature of the Afghan war, and of the news coverage.

The grueling war there, where a day rarely goes by without an allied casualty, is like a faint heartbeat, accounting for just 4 percent of the nation’s news coverage in major outlets through early December, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an arm of the Pew Research Center.

That is down slightly from last year, when the war accounted for 5 percent.

“It’s never passed the threshold to be a big story week in, week out for Americans,” said Mark Jurkowitz, the associate director of the project.

One senior foreign correspondent for television, when told of the 4 percent coverage figure, said he was impressed — given the relatively small contingent of foreign journalists in Afghanistan.

“There are like seven of us there,” remarked the correspondent, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to call into question his network’s commitment to the war. Those who are there have done courageous work, exposing corruption and documenting military progress in rooting out insurgents.

The low levels of coverage reflect the limitations on news-gathering budgets and, some say, low levels of interest in the war among the public. About a quarter of Americans follow news about Afghanistan closely, according to recent surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

“Inside the United States, you’ve got audiences that are beginning to suffer from war fatigue,” said Tony Maddox, who oversees international coverage for CNN.

Mr. Maddox said CNN had “worked very hard” to make the war resonate with viewers, sometimes through human interest stories. “It’s always the eternal challenge in terms of international coverage: making the important interesting,” he said.

As President Obama signaled last year that he would wind down the war in Iraq and refocus attention on Afghanistan, television networks largely withdrew from Baghdad, and moved staff to the Afghan capital, Kabul, though not on an equivalent basis. Newspapers and wire services also bulked up in Kabul.

American networks each generally have one correspondent in Kabul at all times, sometimes working on a freelance basis. The office space in Kabul is a home base for occasional visits by anchors, like Lester Holt of NBC, who spent Thanksgiving there, and George Stephanopoulos of ABC, who interviewed Gen. David H. Petraeus there two weeks ago.

Of the cable news networks, Greta Van Susteren of Fox News and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC also spent time in the country this year.

But there is no doubt that cutbacks by media companies have affected the way that the war is transmitted to American living rooms. ABC News cut roughly 25 percent of its work force last spring, and last summer, CBS News laid off most of its camera crews based in London, the jumping-off point for international coverage.

“There’s a general drive to do everything with less,” said another television correspondent, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he did not have permission to comment publicly.

At the same time, there are pockets of noteworthy coverage, including by national newspapers, the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” and the AfPak Channel, a Web site from Foreign Policy magazine and the New America Foundation. In July, The New York Times and several other news organizations published portions of the military and intelligence reports about the war made public by WikiLeaks, garnering widespread attention.

On the ground, the war remains a dangerous assignment for journalists. In January, Rupert Hamer of the British newspaper The Sunday Mirror was killed while traveling with the military near Nawa. In June, James P. Hunter, a staff sergeant and a writer, was killed in Kandahar. The Committee to Protect Journalists said he was the first Army journalist killed in action in Afghanistan since the war started nine years ago. And Joao Silva, a photographer for The Times, sustained critical injuries in a late October bomb blast in southern Afghanistan.

This year, American economic concerns, the midterm elections and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico each earned more than twice as much news media attention as the war, according to the Pew assessment, which comes from a weekly study of the nation’s major newspapers, radio and television newscasts, and major news Web sites.

The study started in 2007. In that year, Afghanistan — which was a relatively low-grade conflict at the time, with many fewer allied causalities — accounted for only 1 percent of the nation’s news coverage. The same held true in 2008. The coverage picked up markedly at the end of 2009, when Mr. Obama conducted a lengthy review of Afghanistan strategy, but still added up to only 5 percent for the year.

Four or 5 percent “may be the baseline, at least for now, no matter what the strategic stakes are, or even as U.S. involvement ratchets up,” Mr. Jurkowitz said.

This year, Mr. Jurkowitz estimated, roughly half of the coverage of Afghanistan actually emanated from the war zone. That suggests that “without a major Washington policy debate or strategy review ongoing, that Afghanistan remains a story that gets modest coverage,” he said.

Modest, with question marks. When the CNN host Eliot Spitzer asked on Thursday night, “Why are we even there,” his guests had few answers.

The skepticism was noticeable this month when ABC conducted another of its checkups on the war. The Emmy-winning series was titled “Where Things Stand” when it was started in 2004 for Iraq, but this month, for Afghanistan, it was renamed “Can We Win?”

Tom Nagorski, the foreign managing editor for ABC News, said it was not a political statement or change in tone; rather, it reflected the fact that Mr. Obama’s strategic review was under way. “It’s a chance to bring some great, old-fashioned, terrific reporting to bear,” he said.

Privately, some television executives say the Afghanistan coverage is an outgrowth of the self-evaluations made by news organizations in the wake of the Iraq war, when many were faulted for not broadcasting sufficient skepticism.

At the same time, there are antiwar voices who say the news media has been “compliant” with regard to Afghanistan — the word that Joe Scarborough used on Friday on his MSNBC program, “Morning Joe.”

He asked Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, “For years, we have had journalists wringing their hands and editorialists lashing out at the profession for not asking the tough questions leading up to Iraq. Ten years from now, won’t we be saying the same thing about Afghanistan?”

Mr. Haass said he feared that Mr. Scarborough was right. “I think history’s going to be brutal on the questions that haven’t been asked.” Or, alternatively, the answers that haven’t been heard.

Anderson Cooper interviews Paul Refsdal for "Taliban" special

2010-11-24T08:02:00.000-08:00

From CNN PR:

CNN’s ‘Taliban’ Exposes Lives

and Motives of Fighters

Documentary Debuts Saturday, Dec. 11 at 8:00pm ET & PT on CNN/U.S.

CNN's Taliban takes you behind enemy lines, and face-to-face with the men our troops are fighting. The Taliban are a violent enemy that have killed hundreds of American troops in Afghanistan since 2001. Despite a nearly ten-year war with the Taliban, most Americans know little about how they fight and live – until now.

In Taliban, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper debriefs Norwegian journalist Paul Refsdal about his unprecedented filming behind enemy lines in Afghanistan. No Western journalist has ever spent as much time with the Taliban, with as unrestricted access, as Refsdal.

CNN’s Taliban reveals the enemy at war – preparing weapons, planning attacks, and interacting with their families and fellow fighters. Refsdal risked his life to capture these never-before-seen images, and ended up being kidnapped. His harrowing escape is also documented in the film.

Cooper presses Refsdal about why he put his life in jeopardy to film the Taliban. Refsdal said, “The problem has been with the – the people [journalists] who meet the Taliban, they stay for one hour, and they ask the Taliban to...go around arranging some kind of training...And you have one commander with his face covered...to see the real Taliban, you have to stay for a while...”

The one-hour documentary, Taliban, debuts Saturday, Dec. 11 at 8:00p.m. ET and PT on CNN. It will air on CNN International in late December.

A multimedia report including historical timelines of the Taliban and the country of Afghanistan, video excerpts from the documentary, and an interview with journalist and Guerilla Reporter author Paul Refsdal can be found at www.cnn.com/taliban after Wednesday, Dec. 8.

Taliban was produced and filmed in Afghanistan by Paul Refsdal, produced for CNN by Jennifer Hyde and Ken Shiffman, and edited by Cliff Hackel. Bud Bultman is managing editor for this production. Scott Matthews is the director of CNN’s Special Investigations and Documentaries unit.

* * * * *

Anderson Cooper also has an Afghanistan report on 60 Minutes this week:

(CBS) Sunday, Nov. 28, 2010

GOOD COP, BAD COP - The Afghan National Police force is more important to the security of the country than the army, but despite improvements, there are still drug abuse and corruption problems within its ranks. CNN's Anderson Cooper reports. Keith Sharman is the producer.

Embedded journalism: A distorted view of war (The Indepedent)

2010-11-22T16:29:00.000-08:00

An excellent article, well worth the read:

'Embedding' journalists is now the standard method for reporting conflicts. But, argues Patrick Cockburn, what makes a good story might not be the right story

Tuesday, 23 November 2010
The Independent

US reporters in Kuwait

Embedded journalism earned itself a bad name in Iraq and Afghanistan. The phrase came to evoke an image of the supposedly independent correspondent truckling to military mentors who spoon-feed him or her absurdly optimistic information about the course of the war. To many, the embedded journalist is a grisly throwback to First World War-style reporting, when appalling butchery in the trenches was presented as a series of judiciously planned advances by British generals.

Many allegations against the system of "embedding" journalists, mainly with the American or British military, are unfair. Accompanying armies in the field is usually the only way of finding out what they are doing or think they are doing. Nor is there an obvious alternative way for correspondents to operate today. Given that al-Qa'ida and the Taliban target foreign journalists as potential hostages, it is impossible to roam around Iraq or Afghanistan without extreme danger.

It was not always so. When I first started writing articles in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, it was probably safer to be a journalist than anything else. I used to joke that newly formed paramilitary groups appointed a press officer before they bought a gun. A few years later in Lebanon, militias gave journalists letters allowing us to pass safely through their checkpoints. The Lebanese are a newspaper-reading people and I used to hand out local newspapers as a friendly gesture to bored militiamen on guard duty. But it was also in Lebanon, from 1984, that Iranian-backed groups started to kidnap journalists as an effective way to pressurise governments and publicise the kidnappers' cause.

In these circumstances, over-reliance on "embedding" as the primary method of gathering information may have been inevitable, but it produces a skewed picture of events. Journalists cannot help reflecting to some degree the viewpoint of the soldiers they are accompanying. The very fact of being with an occupying army means that the journalist is confined to a small and atypical segment of the political-military battlefield.

"Embedding" also puts limitations on location and movement. Iraq and Afghanistan are essentially guerrilla wars, and the successful guerrilla commander will avoid fighting the enemy main force and instead attack where his opponent is weak or has no troops at all. This means that the correspondent embedded with the American or British military units is liable to miss or misinterpret crucial stages in the conflict.

Much of the British and American media reporting in Afghanistan since 2006 has been about skirmishing in Taliban strongholds such as Helmand and Kandahar provinces in the south of the country. Problems are often reduced to quasi-technical or tactical questions about coping with roadside bombs or lack of equipment. Until recently, there was little reporting or explanation of how the Taliban had been able to extend their rule right up to the outskirts of Kabul.

In late 2001, in the days just after the defeat of the Taliban, I was able to drive from Kabul to Kandahar without hearing a shot fired. By last year, I could not move without risk beyond the last police station in the south of the capital. A few miles down the road to Kandahar, Taliban motorcycle patrols were setting up temporary roadblocks and checking all who came through.

This year, it is worse. The Taliban are trying, with a fair measure of success, to counter the allied offensive in the south by spreading their rule in northern Afghanistan, taking control of much of Kunduz and Baghlan provinces and cutting Nato's supply routes to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Just before the war of 2001, I travelled though the Hindu Kush mountains from just north of Kabul through Badakhshan province in north-east Afghanistan to Tajikistan. The journey took four days but there were no Taliban, though they still held much of the rest of Afghanistan. I could not make the same journey today because even in Badakhshan, overwhelmingly Tajik and supposedly anti-Taliban, the insurgents are beginning to make inroads.

A danger of "embedding" is that it puts journalists in the wrong place at the wrong time. In November 2004, the US Marines stormed the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, which had been seized by insurgents, The troops were accompanied by almost all the Baghdad foreign press corps, at great risk to themselves. Their accounts and pictures of the battle were compelling and the outcome was an undoubted victory for the US.

But reports of American success were misleading because the insurgents had used the concentration of US forces around Fallujah to launch their own assault against the much larger city of Mosul in northern Iraq, which they briefly captured. The Iraqi army and police fled, 30 police stations were occupied, and $40m-worth of arms seized by the insurgents. Given that Mosul is Iraq's third-largest city, it was a stunning reversal for the US-led forces, but it was virtually unreported since there were no American troops there and hence no embedded journalists.

There is a more subtle disadvantage to "embedding": it leads reporters to see the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts primarily in military terms, while the most important developments are political or, if they are military, may have little to do with foreign forces. It has become an article of faith among many in the US that the American military finally won the war in Iraq in 2007-08 because it adopted a new set of tactics and sent 30,000 extra troop reinforcements known as "the surge". US troop casualties fell to nothing and Iraqi casualties dropped from their previous horrendous levels. This explanation was deeply satisfying to American national self-confidence and rescued the reputation of the US army. In the months before the 2008 presidential election, it became impossible for any American politicians to suggest that the "surge" had not succeeded without attracting accusations of lack of patriotism.

Yet the developments that ended the worst of the fighting in Iraq mostly had little to do with the US, which was only one player in a complex battle. The attacks on the US military came almost entirely from Sunni Arab insurgents , but by 2007, the Sunni were being heavily defeated by the predominantly Shia security forces and militias and could no longer afford to go on fighting the Americans as well. Al-Qa'ida had overplayed its hand by trying to take control of the whole Sunni community. The Sunni were being driven from Baghdad, which is now an overwhelmingly Shia city. Facing the annihilation of their community, the Sunni insurgents switched sides and allied themselves with the Americans. In this context it was possible for the US to send out penny packets of troops into Sunni areas which were desperate for defenders against Shia death squads and al-Qa'ida commanders demanding that they send their sons to fight.

But the same sort of tactics cannot be replicated in Afghanistan, where conditions were very different. Despite this, until a few months ago, it had become the accepted wisdom of American opinion pages and television talking heads that the US army had found an all-purpose formula for victory in its post-11 September wars. The author of victory, the present US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, became America's most popular, prestigious and unsackable military officer. The failure hitherto of "surge" tactics to work in southern Afghanistan has begun to undermine this faith in the new strategy, but American and British policy is still modelled on the "surge": foreign forces backed by Afghan troops will gain control on the ground; they will then hold it and prevent the Taliban coming back; and, then, finally, they will hand over power to Afghan soldiers, police and officials sent from Kabul.

It is unlikely ever to happen this way. As in Iraq, military actions on the ground in Afghanistan don't make much sense separate from political developments. The Afghan government is notoriously crooked and is regarded by most Afghans as a collection of racketeers. All the media reports of small unit actions whose ultimate purpose is to install the rule of Kabul in southern Afghanistan make little sense since the government is so feeble that it barely exists. In some 80 per cent of the country the state does not exist.

"The reality of the war in Afghanistan," one diplomat told me, "which embedded journalism never reveals, is that 60 per cent of the Afghan government soldiers sent to Helmand or Kandahar desert as soon as they can. They are mostly Tajiks terrified of being sent to the Pashtun south. They are taken from the training camps and put on buses and the doors are locked before they are told where they are being posted." But it is these same terrified soldiers, often not even speaking the language of local people, who are at the heart of Nato's plan for victory in Afghanistan.

It is worth asking how well the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been reported. Could the average newspaper reader and television viewer gain an approximate idea of what was happening in both countries over the past eight years?

War reporting is easy to do, but difficult to do well. Wars rouse such passions that editors and senior producers in home offices seldom retain healthy journalistic scepticism. They develop oversimplified ideas about what the story is, be it "hard-won victory" or "bloody stalemate". Viewers and readers expect drama from conflict and think they know what it looks like. The first pictures from the wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 were dominated by shots of great gouts of fire rising from missiles exploding in Baghdad and Kabul.

But this melodrama was deceptive, obscuring what had really happened. The most important fact about these two wars was that, in their first, conventional warfare stage, they barely took place at all. Taliban fighters faded away to their villages or moved across the border into Pakistan. In Iraq Saddam Hussein's most elite and pampered units dissolved and went home as soon as they could.

It was very difficult to tell all this to news desks at the time. News organisations get geared up for war and feel short-changed when told that not much is really happening. I had followed the retreating Taliban from Kabul to Kandahar in 2001 and saw little fighting along the road. In a substantial city such as Ghazni there were half a dozen Taliban dead, mostly killed in gunfights over ownership of government cars. In Iraq 18 months later, there were plenty of burnt-out Iraqi army tanks on the roads but, when I looked inside, most had been abandoned before they were destroyed by air strikes.

The US and British governments drew precisely the wrong lessons from the failure of the Taliban and the Iraqi army to fight. In both cases, President Bush and Tony Blair had been warned that they were entering a quagmire and instead they had apparently won easy victories. They arrogantly believed they were in control of events while in fact they were only powerful players, who ought to have been paying attention to how Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians and Pakistanis were reacting to their actions. Their blindness is easy to criticise in retrospect, but at the time, this sense of American omnipotence was shared by most of the US media.

In one respect I found Iraq easier to report than the Afghan war. In Britain the split was so deep over the war that from the beginning, there were plenty of sceptics willing to believe that they were being lied to by the government and that the venture was going badly. American correspondents had a more difficult time because their home offices were still nervous of being seen as unpatriotic well into 2005. Three years later, American correspondents on the ground were often appalled to see self-declared pundits on Iraq firmly claiming on their own television channels or in newspapers that the "surge" was a famous victory. Iraqis were still dying in their hundreds, but as soon as the US military ceased to suffer casualties, US television largely stopped reporting Iraq.

The Iraq war may have been a "last hurrah" for the US media because so much of it has slimmed down or gone out of business in the past few years. The British media have never put enough resources into reporting either war to cover them properly. The BBC was the only television company to maintain a permanently staffed office in Baghdad. Most newspapers covered it episodically. This was partly because reporting wars is always very expensive and is particularly costly in Iraq and Afghanistan because of the need to pay security companies. In some cases these realised that their job was to enable correspondents to get to the story with the least possible danger, but others behaved like prison guards in their determination to keep correspondents safe. I remember Robert Fisk and I receiving a text message from one distinguished and brave British correspondent in another part of Baghdad regretting that he could not meet us at our hotel because his head of security had decided that our proposed lunch was "not an operational necessity".

The dangers inevitable in covering Iraq had another effect. Much of the best reporting has been done by experienced reporters who knew Iraq before 2004. After that, it became very difficult for young correspondents to have any sort of "learning curve" because anybody hoping to "learn from their mistakes" in Iraq was not going to live very long. Halfway through the Iraq war, one bureau chief lamented to me, saying: "The only fairly safe place for me to send young reporters, who haven't been to Iraq before, is on 'embeds', but then they drink up everything the army tells them and report it as fact." The best reporting in any single publication during the height of the sectarian slaughter in Iraq in 2006-07 was in The New York Times, which got round this dilemma by simply hiring experienced and highly regarded correspondents from other newspapers. Even so, despite the risks, it was always possible to report Iraq and Afghanistan from outside the embrace of the military, as was shown by extraordinarily brave people such as Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and Nir Rosen, who risked their lives mixing with insurgents and militiamen.

I used to get a certain amount of undeserved applause at book festivals by being introduced as a writer "who has never been embedded", as if I had been abstaining from unnatural vice. "Embedding" obviously leads to bias, but many journalists are smart enough to rumble military propaganda and wishful thinking, and not to regurgitate these in undiluted form. They know that Afghan villagers, interviewed in front of Afghan police or US soldiers, are unlikely to say what they really think about either. Nevertheless, perhaps the most damaging effect of "embedding" is to soften the brutality of any military occupation and underplay hostile local response to it. Above all, the very fact of a correspondent being with an occupying army gives the impression that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, countries which have endured 30 years of crisis and warfare, can be resolved by force.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/opinion/embedded-journalism-a-distorted-view-of-war-2141072.html

Increasing Dangers for Reporters in Afghanistan

2010-11-12T05:05:00.000-08:00

NPR's Fresh Air aired a story about the dangers for reporters in Afghanistan. The interview was conducted with New York Time's, Dexter Filkins.

Filkins recently broke the story about how Iran recently handed over a bagful of cash to a top Karzi aide. You can read the full article here.

NYT photog Joao Silva wounded in Afghanistan

2010-10-23T07:34:00.000-07:00

Joao Silva, a world-reknowned conflict photojournalist now working for The New York Times, has been severely wounded while embedded with American troops in Afghanistan. Silva is one of the two surviving journos who were nicknamed "The Bang-Bang Club" while covering South Africa's break from apartheid. Dexter Filkins filed this article about the incident:

Times Photographer Wounded in Afghanistan

By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — A New York Times photographer was severely wounded Saturday when he stepped on a mine while on patrol with American soldiers in southern Afghanistan.

Joao Silva, 44, was wounded in his legs while moving through an area near the town of Arghandab. Mr. Silva was evacuated from the scene and taken to Kandahar Air Field, the American and NATO base, where he is receiving treatment.

Three American soldiers sustained concussions. A group of minesweepers and bomb-sniffing dogs had already moved over the area several steps ahead of Mr. Silva when the bomb went off.

Homemade bombs and mines account for more casualties among American and NATO troops than any other means. Many of the bombs are made with a minimum amount of metal and are extremely difficult to detect.

Mr. Silva and a New York Times reporter were embedded with a unit of the 4th Infantry Division. American soldiers have been clearing Taliban insurgents from Arghandab and the surrounding area for the past several weeks, as part of a larger effort to secure the approaches to Kandahar.

Mr. Silva has photographed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, southern Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East. He has won many awards for his work. He is the author, with Greg Marinovich, of “The Bang-Bang Club,” a chronicle of a group of four photographers covering the violence in South Africa in the 1990s. The other two were Kevin Carter and Ken Oosterbroek.

“Joao is the state-of-the-art war photographer, fearless but careful, with an amazing eye,” said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times. “We’re all waiting anxiously and praying for his quick recovery.”

Below is one of Silva's photographs taken in Iraq during a sniper attack on American forces:

View more of his work on his website.

Cal Perry to speak in Fredericksburg

2010-10-18T11:59:00.000-07:00

Former CNN Baghdad Bureau Chief Cal Perry will speak at the University of Mary Washington on Wednesday from 4:30 until 6 p.m. The public is invited to attend.

The speech will be in Room 109 of a trailer called Annex A, which is next to George Washington Hall. Perry’s appearance is hosted by the Department of Classics, Philosophy & Religion and the Middle Eastern Studies Program.

Perry’s talk is titled “Covering the War in Iraq: American Journalism and Coverage in the Middle East.”

Former CNN Baghdad bureau chief to speak at UMW

Nir Rosen 's new book "Aftermath" - available October 26

2010-10-05T12:13:00.000-07:00

Nir Rosen has a new book coming out, and it sounds like a definite must-read. Check out the reviews on the website. Then order it!

Tim Hetherington answers questions about Restrepo

2010-09-22T12:05:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Sharon for pointing out this excellent Q&A with Tim Hetherington:

Rebecca Bates: Q&A with Tim Hetherington, Co-Director of Restrepo

And don't forget that Tim's book Infidel is now out!

Nir Rosen on what the "combat troop" withdrawal means to Iraqis

2010-08-19T11:07:00.000-07:00

Freelance reporter Nir Rosen visited the CNN Baghdad bureau and appeared on NewsRoom to talk about what is happening in Iraq now that US "combat troops" have withdrawn:

Richard Engel in Baghdad

2010-08-17T23:04:00.000-07:00

Catching up with Richard Engel's reports from Baghdad:

8/11

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8/13

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8/14

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8/15

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Tim Hetherington on AC360: Charles Taylor, Naomi Campbell, and blood diamonds

2010-08-06T06:19:00.000-07:00

Tim Hetherington appeared on AC360 last night to discuss the Charles Taylor war-crimes trial currently underway at The Hague. Sadly, this would be receiving almost zero coverage Stateside if not for the fact that a supermodel was forced to testify today... Anyway, at least Tim was able to talk about some of the important issues:

Recent Scenes from Iraq

2010-07-19T13:09:00.001-07:00

It is always good to get some news from Iraq, especially in the form of exceptional and telling images.

What makes these photos so remarkable is their ability to express a feeling and situation without words.

"Guilt By Association..."

2010-07-09T10:00:00.000-07:00

This article in The Nation is a must-read. A recent Supreme Court ruling defines giving "material support" to terrorists as not just what we would normally associate with that term -- donating money, giving instruction how to build bombs, etc -- but also anything that lends such a group credibility. The article describes how former President Jimmy Carter could technically be charged under this law. (I would also add Bill Clinton, who met with Kim Jong Il to secure the release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee.)

It also has been ruled to apply to NGOs and aid organizations, even when they are trying to teach such a group how to progress in a non-violent way. But by definition, it could also be applied to any journalist who interviewed insurgents in Iraq (Michael Ware comes to mind, obviously) or worked with possible Taliban-sympathizers in Afghanistan (Rory Stewart? Deep trouble...) and that's not even getting into terror-groups-turned-political-factions, like the IRA or Hezbollah.

Guilt by association: how the US Supreme Court

let fear overshadow common sense

Jere Van Dyk

2010-07-02T20:00:00.000-07:00

This is chilling... I had not heard his story before:

From Publishers Weekly

An American journalist exploring the war zone on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border reports unwanted lessons in its perils in this harrowing memoir. Having traveled with the freedom fighters in the '80s, Van Dyk thought he had the connections and knowledge to navigate the tribal lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but he was captured by a fractious band of Taliban fighters in 2008. Van Dyk (In Afghanistan: An American Odyssey) and his Afghan guides spent 44 days in a dark cell. Well-fed but terrified, he felt a nightmare of helplessness and disorientation. Dependent on a jailer who mixed solicitude with jocular death threats and a ruthless Taliban commander who could free or kill him on a whim, the author performed Muslim prayers in an attempt to appease his captors; wary of murky conspiracies involving his cellmates, he was afraid of everybody, including the children. Van Dyk's claustrophobic narrative jettisons journalistic detachment and views his ordeal through the distorting emotions of fear, shame, and self-pity. But in telling his story this way, he brings us viscerally into the mental universe of the Taliban, where paranoia and fanaticism reign, and survival requires currying favor with powerful men. The result is a gripping tale of endurance and a vivid evocation of Afghanistan's grim realities. 1 map. (June 22)

He appeared on The Daily Show last night:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Jere Van Dyk

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

A Year At War: Chronicling One Battalion's Deployment to Afghanistan

2010-06-29T06:56:00.000-07:00

Over the course of the next year, The New York Times will be visiting First Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, based in Kunduz Province, Afghanistan, "to chronicle its part in the surge and explore the strains of deployment on soldiers, many fresh out of basic training, others on their fifth combat tour in nine years."

This series should be required reading for all Americans. It personalizes the war effort and brings home a little of the reality and sacrifices, the soldiers and their families face.

The first article in the series is titled "Leaving the Family Behind". There is also a great interactive feature, where you are introduced to the soldiers via photos and videos. It will be amazing to follow their mission and hear their thoughts throughout the year.

Richard Engel: "A Father's Mission"

2010-06-27T21:30:00.000-07:00

Richard Engel had a terrific special on Dateline tonight about Chosen Company and the Battle of Wanat. Check it out on their website.

Tim Hetherington NYT Lens blog interview

2010-06-24T13:15:00.000-07:00

Tim Hetherington explains more about making his film "Restrepo" and his new book "Infidel". Very interesting to hear more of the back story behind it.

Go. See. "Restrepo."

2010-06-22T23:30:00.000-07:00

I saw the film at USC tonight -- it is incredible. While I am sure nothing can truly convey what combat is like to experience, this is as close as most of us will ever get to having an honest look at what our troops go through. And if you have a loved one who served but won't or can't talk to you about it ... this will help you understand a little bit better.

This is not a movie that glorifies violence, nor is it a movie that delves into the politics of the war. It shows some of what the guys go through -- the tedium, the fear, the courage, the bonding -- without once preaching. It is moving without being cloying, and impressive in its self-restraint.

It opens in New York and Los Angeles this Friday, then in more cities next weekend, but it is still getting fairly limited distribution. So if you know anyone who should see this movie, find out if it is showing where they live and tell them to go see it! The more who do, the better everyone else's chance of getting it! (And get Sebastian's book, War, and plan on getting Tim's, Infidel, when it comes out in October!)

Tim Hetherington: "Restrepo"

2010-06-19T10:46:00.000-07:00

Insightful interview with Tim Hetherington, GRITtv with Laura Flanders.

Richard Engel in Afghanistan

2010-06-14T10:59:00.001-07:00

Incredible footage of the 82nd Airborne fighting the Taliban near Kandahar:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Thanks to Delie for the tip.

CNN's "Home and Away" page

2010-05-26T12:59:00.000-07:00

Kudos to CNN for putting up an interactive guide to all the Coalition troops who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Giving the public a way to put names and faces to our fallen warriors is so important. Spend some time there during Memorial Day weekend, and read the stories of these brave men and women.

Home and Away

Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington talk about "Restrepo"

2010-05-08T15:00:00.000-07:00

Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington discuss their movie Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Award at Sundance this year, for the magazine Moving Pictures:

Movieline also published a lengthy interview with them in January.

About the movie, which opens July 2 in the US:

Filmmakers Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington pay a visit to the Afghanistan's Korengal Valley to spend a year with the Second Platoon, a besieged squadron who dubbed their stronghold Outpost Restrepo in honor of their fallen comrade PFC Juan Restrepo. An al Qaeda and Taliban stronghold, Korengal Valley sees some of the fiercest fighting in the War on Terror. At Outpost Restrepo every shot fired is personal, and every target hit a gift to a fallen friend.

Sebastian Junger also has a new book coming out next week titled War:

From Publishers Weekly. (Starred Review.)
War is insanely exciting.... Don't underestimate the power of that revelation, warns bestselling author and Vanity Fair contributing editor Junger (The Perfect Storm). The war in Afghanistan contains brutal trauma but also transcendent purpose in this riveting combat narrative. Junger spent 14 months in 2007–2008 intermittently embedded with a platoon of the 173rd Airborne brigade in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, one of the bloodiest corners of the conflict. The soldiers are a scruffy, warped lot, with unkempt uniforms—they sometimes do battle in shorts and flip-flops—and a ritual of administering friendly beatings to new arrivals, but Junger finds them to be superlative soldiers. Junger experiences everything they do—nerve-racking patrols, terrifying roadside bombings and ambushes, stultifying weeks in camp when they long for a firefight to relieve the tedium. Despite the stress and the grief when buddies die, the author finds war to be something of an exalted state: soldiers experience an almost sexual thrill in the excitement of a firefight—a response Junger struggles to understand—and a profound sense of commitment to subordinating their self-interests to the good of the unit. Junger mixes visceral combat scenes—raptly aware of his own fear and exhaustion—with quieter reportage and insightful discussions of the physiology, social psychology, and even genetics of soldiering. The result is an unforgettable portrait of men under fire. (May 11)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

You can follow Sebastian Junger on Twitter (@sebastianjunger). And you might also be interested in following @afpakchannel from the New America Foundation/Foreign Policy Magazine.

CNN crew in combat - Operation Moshtarak

2010-02-26T08:05:00.000-08:00

CNN International Correspondent Atia Abawi and CNN photographer Mary Rogers have been embedded with the US Marines (1/6’s Alpha) for Operation Moshtarak, in Marjah (Helmand province, Afghanistan).

They have filed many reports and videos available on the blog “Afghanistan Crossroads”.
Don’t miss Atia’s Reporter’s diary and these two must-seen videos:

A “natsound” (without reporter voice) with US Marines on patrol:

A behind-the-scenes of the embed (with also NBC crew – Sebastian Rich)

You can also check Atia Abawi’s Facebook page for more info about this embed and follow her on Twitter.

Death of a Fixer

2010-01-27T08:04:00.000-08:00

Rescue workers sifted through the rubble of buildings around the Hamra Hotel
that were devastated in a bomb attack in Baghdad on Monday.

Stephen Farrell of The New York Times has a heartbreaking article in today's "At War" blog about a friend who died in the bombing of the Hamra Hotel. Please read it, here.

The gun markets of Pakistan (CNN/VICE)

2010-01-27T07:55:00.000-08:00

CNN.com has posted a fascinating report from an independent media company about "Darra Adamkhel, the massive open-air market located deep in the tribal areas, where a frighteningly high percentage of Islamic holy warriors goes to buy their guns." The article and video are available here.

Bombs target Baghdad hotels

2010-01-25T11:00:00.000-08:00

The crater outside the Hamra Hotel in Baghdad after Monday's attack.

Smoke rises Monday following an explosion near Baghdad's Palestine Hotel.

A series of bombs targeted three hotels in Baghdad this morning, two of which are well-known as locations where journalists often stay.

The Palestine was the hotel that was shelled by American troops during the 2003 invasion, killing two journalists and wounding several others. The Al Hamra was where Time magazine's bureau was located when Michael Ware became bureau chief. More recently, it was home to the McClatchy and Christian Science Monitor bureaus. They left the hotel recently. John Walcott, the Washington bureau chief for McClatchy, sent out a note to his staff this morning about that move:

The recent move out of the Hamra was no accident, nor was it simply good luck. Hannah Allam, who oversees the Baghdad bureau from her base in Cairo, was in Iraq late last year overseeing the merger with the Monitor and was alarmed by the deteriorating security conditions at the hotel and some developments in the immediate neighborhood, most colorfully the openings of two brothels across the square, which in addition to their primary purpose provided an ideal place to survey the Hamra and its defenses without attracting much notice. The security force had shrunk to about half of what's needed, largely because NBC News has bailed out of Iraq and taken its budget with it, and one day workers arrived and began tearing down the blast walls, we suspect because of a dispute over payments to someone in authority.

The death toll from this morning's blasts currently stands at 36, with 71 injured; no journos have been reported to be among the dead/injured.

Read the rest of Walcott's note here.
Read McClatchy's coverage of the bombings here.

Junger/Hetherington Afghanistan film to air on NatGeo

2010-01-19T09:27:00.000-08:00

Nat Geo Channel Grabs Afghanistan Doc

National Geographic Channel has acquired exclusive global broadcast rights to a feature-length documentary about U.S. troops on the frontlines in Afghanistan, reports The Hollywood Reporter.

"Restrepo," which will premiere on the opening night of the Sundance festival, is based on Sebastian Junger's latest book, called “War,” and comes from Junger and photojournalist Tim Hetherington.

Theatrical rights have yet to be sold. The move is expected to air on Nat Geo in the fall.

Daily Mirror journo killed in Afghanistan; photog wounded

2010-01-10T10:59:00.000-08:00

Rupert Hamer, a reporter for Britain's Daily Mirror, has been killed by an IED while embedded with US Marines in southern Afghanistan. His cameraman, Philip Coburn, was seriously wounded. A Marine and a member of the ANA were also killed, and five Marines wounded.

The full article on the incident is available here.

Hamer's blog on the Daily Mirror site is here.

Peter Bergen, Assessing The Threat in Afghanistan

2009-12-04T05:35:00.000-08:00

Peter Bergen appeared on NPR's Fresh Air to talk about President Obama's decision to send more troops, the Taliban and its connection to al-Qaida, and the state of security now. You can listen to the audio and read a synopsis here.

Interview with Yuri Kozyrev

2009-12-04T00:32:00.000-08:00

A very insightful interview with Yuri Kozyrev by Anton Marakhovsky for Nikon Russia, Sept. 2009. In this incredible article Yuri talks about his intense experiences working as a conflict photographer in many war zones. He reveals some of the dangerous encounters he has had including his imprisonment by the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1991.
Many stunning photographs by Yuri Kozyrev are included in this article.
Photo of Yuri Kozyrev by Sergei Art

Afghanistan Crossroads

2009-12-03T09:16:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to give a plug to a new blog on CNN called "Afghanistan Crossroads." Launched yesterday, it will feature on-the-ground reports, video, analysis, etc., from some of our favorite war journos.

The direct link to the blog is http://afghanistan.blogs.cnn.com/

Something From Nothing: US Policy in Afghanistan

2009-12-02T15:54:00.000-08:00

Nir Rosen has an excellent article about Afghanistan in the Boston Review. The seering conclusion:

Afghanistan should have been easier. Eight years after overthrowing the Taliban—the world’s most detested and backward regime, which provided no service to its people—the United States has restored many brutal warlords the Taliban expelled. The authority the United States established is a failure, corrupt and brutal. Americans and their allies manage to kill innocent civilians, and the Taliban have once again become attractive to many Afghans. A few tens of thousands of troops will not turn things around.
President Obama’s stated goal in Afghanistan is to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda. Why, then, did McChrystal argue for fighting the Taliban and remaking Afghanistan? Why has Obama agreed? Assuming that al Qaeda will set up bases in Afghanistan recalls predictions that Saddam Hussein would give his imaginary weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda. It assumes that the Taliban are irrational and unaware of their interests. And it rests on much more fundamental assumptions, too: that al Qaeda is a significant threat to the United States and that the best way to reduce the threat is by attacking the movement itself.

The attacks on September 11, 2001 were tragic and criminal. They were painful for the victims and their families and a shock to a powerful, arrogant, and proud nation blissfully unaware that it was so resented.
But beyond the terrible murders, the attacks themselves had little impact on the American economy or way of life, though the response at home and abroad changed everything. Al Qaeda used its “A-team” on that day to attack a slumbering nation. Can a few hundred angry, unsophisticated Muslim extremists really pose such grave dangers to a vigilant superpower, now alert to potential threats?
Al Qaeda is not determined to do evil for the sake of evil. It is a movement that won support, to the extent that it has, in response to America’s imperial excesses. Many of the popular grievances and resentments it mobilizes—including U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine and for friendly dictators—are legitimate, even if killing American civilians is a heinous means of addressing them. The resentments were not produced by al Qaeda’s ideology. They have existed for decades. The causes have remained the same, though the discourse used by those who fight imperialism has changed from secular to religious. Addressing these problems at their roots would do much more—for Afghans and for us—than sending in the military once more to do the work of decent politics.

Yuri Kozyrev | Russian Legacy and Loss | Karabash and the Yamal Peninsula

2009-12-02T10:28:00.000-08:00

Although Yuri Kozyrev is still a war photojournalist and is headed back to Iraq in the next few weeks, his latest project along with his NOOR colleagues has been to document the devastating effects of climate change on people around the world. In Yuri's case he went to Karabash and the Yamal peninsula and has put together a video with a series of photos and voice-over explanation in English of his experiences for this documentary. The video will be shown along with all his NOOR colleagues videos next week at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

With Troop Pledge, More Demands on Afghans

2009-12-02T05:35:00.000-08:00

"In laying down the gauntlet for the Afghans, President Obama is setting criteria for success that he and his field commanders may be able to influence, but which ultimately they will not be able to control."

You can read Dexter Filkins fanalysis on President Obama's speech here.

The Big Picture - Afghanistan, November 2009

2009-12-01T18:33:00.000-08:00

The Boston Globe's "Big Picture" has updated their blog with the November 2009 images from Afghanistan. You can view all the remarkable images here.

Maziar Bahari: Iranian guards were "masters of psychological torture."

2009-11-24T09:55:00.000-08:00

On Sunday's GPS, Fareed Zakaria spoke with Maziar Bahari, the Newsweek reporter who was detained in Iran after the election protests and spent 118 days in jail there. It was an incredible interview and a stark reminder that the dangers journalists face are not just from guns and bombs.

CNN has not posted the full interview on its own, but the podcast of the entire program is available and the Bahari interview is the first segment. Apparently his Iranian interrogators told him that Fareed is a CIA agent and also used a clip from The Daily Show as "evidence" that Bahari was meeting with spies while in Iran.

GPS 11/22/09

As Afghans Resist Taliban, U.S. Spurs Rise of Militias

2009-11-22T05:34:00.000-08:00

Dexter Filkins writes about the rise of the militias in Afghanistan and the the American hope that they will encourage a demoralized Afghan population to take a stake in the war against the Taliban.

"The American and Afghan officials say they are hoping the plan, called the Community Defense Initiative, will bring together thousands of gunmen to protect their neighborhoods from Taliban insurgents. Already there are hundreds of Afghans who are acting on their own against the Taliban, officials say."

You can read the full article here.

"Why can't we share the truth about war?"

2009-11-20T11:31:00.000-08:00

There is a wonderful, moving Op-Ed piece on CNN.com that asks why the mainstream media is not sharing more of the soldiers' stories, both while in the battle zone and after returning home. It was written by a man who has written/directed a movie about the men and women who perform the notifications to families of those killed in battle, and it raises important issues. After describing a visit to a wounded soldier at Walter Reed Hospital, he says:

In room after room, our delegation encounters stories of war that are just not a part of the national conversation. I keep thinking: Whatever happened to the telling of these stories in America? Do we need a Washington lobbyist to push the soldier's-story agenda?

Individual tales make up the reality of war; anecdote by anecdote, they become the truth of combat. But in the U.S. mainstream media, they have too little presence. How did we get to a place where sharing a soldier's narrative or reading soldiers' names on television or meeting their coffins when they are brought back to their country becomes a political or disloyal act? Why can't we share the truth about war?

Definitely worth a read. The article is here.

New Jihadi Code

2009-11-10T09:50:00.001-08:00

Nic Robertson and Paul Cruickshank have a documentary coming up on International on November 15th titled The Jihadi Code. There are a couple long articles and a clip available on CNN.com: New jihad code threatens al Qaeda

The code itself is very interesting, and since it was developed by former hard-core terrorists, maybe it will get some traction.

Part of the code reads: "Jihad has ethics and morals because it is for God. That means it is forbidden to kill women, children, elderly people, priests, messengers, traders and the like. Betrayal is prohibited and it is vital to keep promises and treat prisoners of war in a good way. Standing by those ethics is what distinguishes Muslims' jihad from the wars of other nations."

Not exactly a standard that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are upholding...

Same Booms, Different Terrain

2009-11-07T12:47:00.001-08:00

Dexter Filkins gives an intelligent comparison and picture of the war in Iraq versus the war in Afghanistan, in a post for the "At War" blog.

IAVA events for Veterans Week

2009-11-05T10:35:00.000-08:00

Pardon me for using the blog to make an unpaid public service announcement... but please take a moment to check out IAVA's events next week to honor our veterans and then publicize, participate, and make sure our troops know how much we appreciate their service.

CNN to air "Killings At The Canal"

2009-11-04T16:54:00.000-08:00

Special Four-Part Investigative Series Killings At The Canal: The Army Tapes to air on Anderson Cooper 360 beginning Nov 10th

Nov 4, 2009 - 12:15:26 PM

Anderson Cooper 360 reports Killings At The Canal: The Army Tapes, a powerful and provocative four-part series about U.S. soldiers who were convicted of murder on the battlefield. The series runs over four nights beginning Tuesday, November 10th, and concludes Friday night, November 13th.

Three sergeants used their service pistols to execute four Iraqi men they had in custody who they believed were insurgents. Questions have emerged: On the battlefield, is murder a crime? And is the Army's policy on detainees realistic for its soldiers in the battlefield?

While many were focused on the outcome of the presidential election, courts-martial were underway at a U.S. Army base in Germany. Ultimately three army sergeants were found guilty of the execution-style murders of the four Iraqis their 13-man unit had detained. The soldiers were certain the Iraqis were insurgents who had been shooting at them. But under Army rules for holding detainees, they knew they could not meet the burden of proof -- and they feared the suspects would be released only to be shooting at soldiers again. So the sergeants made a decision: bypass the detention center, take them to a canal, and kill them.

Anderson Cooper 360 also obtained almost 24 hours of interrogation footage which includes a confession from one of the sergeants.

In the series, investigative correspondent Abbie Boudreau and senior investigative producer Scott Zamost also shine a light on the U.S. Army's policy about how to handle detainees, a policy that was a response to the abuses of Abu Ghraib. Some say it puts an undue burden of proof on U.S. soldiers.

On Saturday, November 14th at 8pm ET, CNN's Special Investigations Unit premieres an hour-long special titled Killings At The Canal: The Army Tapes. The special will reair Sunday, Nov. 15th at 8pm ET.

Rory Stewart on TheSitRoom

2009-11-01T21:11:00.000-08:00

By special request... Rory Stewart on TheSitRoom Friday, talking about Afghanistan:

Karzai Rival Says He is Withdrawing From Runoff

2009-11-01T05:30:00.001-08:00

Dexter Filkins and Alissa Rubin have an article in the New York Times about the recent news that Abdullah Abduallah, the chief rival to President Karzai, will withdraw from the Nov. 7 Afghan runoff election. Filkins and Rubin write: "Before Mr. Abdullah's announcement, American and other Western diplomats said they were worried that a defiant statement by Mr. Abdullah could lead to violence and undermine Mr. Karzai's legitimacy, and they were urging him to bow out gracefully."

You can read the full article here.

Rory Stewart: A new kind of Tory

2009-11-01T04:50:00.001-08:00

The UK's Telegraph has an editorial/commentary on Rory Stewart today. The opening paragraph is as follows:

"Britain doesn't make men like Rory Stewart any more. The former diplomat has trekked 6,000 miles across Asia; at 28, wrote a best-selling book, The Places in Between, about the walk; was governor of a province in Iraq at 29; and last year, as well as becoming a Harvard professor, was hailed by Esquire magazine as one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century. Brad Pitt has already bought the rights to his biopic. And he's only 36."

You can read the full article here.

The Big Picture - Conflict in Pakistan

2009-10-31T06:42:00.001-07:00

More from The Boston Globe's Big Picture, incredible images from the conflict in Pakistan.

The Big Picture - Afghanistan, October 2009

2009-10-31T06:34:00.001-07:00

Part of an ongoing series from The Boston Globe's Big Picture, images of Afghanistan collected over the past month.

Rory Stewart's Appearance on CNN's The Situation Room

2009-10-31T05:37:00.000-07:00

Rory Stewart appeared on TSR yesterday to share his perspective on Afghanistan. Here is the transcript of Wolf's interview with Rory:

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: My next guest has a unique perspective on Afghanistan. Rory Stewart literally walked across the country as part of a 6,000-mile journey from turkey to Bangladesh. He served as a coalition deputy governor in Iraq. He's now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy school of government. Rory Stewart is joining us now. Rory, thanks very much for coming in.

RORY STEWART, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Thank you.

BLITZER: The president's been meeting today, as you know, on what to do next in Afghanistan. We expect a decision soon. "The New York Times" columnist this week Tom Friedman suggested maybe it's time to start getting out of Afghanistan. Tom Ricks, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer says it's time to build up and give it some more time. You've suggested, correct me if I'm wrong, maybe it's one option would be to muddle through. What does that mean?

STEWART: Of course I don't say that we should muddle through. What I'm saying though is we need to see Afghanistan in a strategic context which means we need to treat it as a very long-term venture. We need to understand that we have to protect U.S. national security. We should be doing things for the Afghan people, but we should be doing it in affordable and realistic fashion because the major threat that we're really going to face in Afghanistan over the next five to ten years is going to be that people will get fed up and withdraw and that's such a fragile traumatized country that if you were suddenly to go from troop increases to withdrawal and from engagement to isolation you'd probably leave the situation much worse than you found it.

BLITZER: So if you're President Obama right now or one of his top advisers, what do you do in the short term? He's got to make a decision pretty soon.

STEWART: I'm afraid that President Obama faces a massive political problem. He has boxed himself in. If he didn't intend to send more troops, he should not have allowed General McChrystal to write that report. So probably for political reasons I think President Obama will feel forced to send those troops, so we now need to think two to three years into the future because those troops won't remain forever, and we need to define what a long-term strategy would look like, and I would say it would involve saying there is a terrorist threat from Afghanistan, and we need to keep a few troops there to deal with it. We do have obligations to the Afghan people and we should be generous with our development side, but more broadly we should realize that Afghanistan is not the be all and end all. There are many more important countries in the world and we should have a generous flexible attitude towards Afghanistan and should not put all our eggs in one basket.

BLITZER: You're hearing there are 68,000 U.S. troops, part of a bigger NATO operation in Afghanistan right now, but he should accept General McChrystal's recommendation for political reasons to dispatch another 40,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, is that what you're saying?

STEWART: If I was the president I would not be sending those troops because I don't think it's good for the United States, and I don't think it's good for Afghanistan, so I'm very much hoping that he's not going to send those troops, but I fear that for political reasons he may feel that he's forced to.

BLITZER: Here's what one of your critics Andrew Exum from the Center for New American Security who participated in General McChrystal's review said in the new republic in an article that was just published. "I think the first 22 pages of the McChrystal assessment of the war in Afghanistan were more grounded in evidence- based reality than Rory's was. That's not to say he's delusional, just that he has a very limited view of Afghanistan and operations there." I don't know if you know Andrew Exum but I wonder if you want to respond.

STEWART: Yeah. My response is that what we need to bear in mind, and I have lived in Afghanistan and I don't want to get into a fight with Andrew about this, but I have spent the last three and a half years living on the ground there and as you've said I've walked across the country but it's not about expertise, it's about trying to understand what our limits are. We need to be realistic about what the U.S. military, what the state department, what developing nations can do in a country as poor and fragile and as traumatized as Afghanistan. My guess is that we tend to overestimate our own capacity, overestimate our ability to transform other people's countries, and my guess is that if we're going to look back at this in 20 years time we will realize that we made a mistake, that we tried to do things that we couldn't do. The problem with Andrew's argument and with all these arguments is not that they are not trying to do good things. It would great if we could create a wonderfully stable legitimate effective state in Afghanistan and if we could defeat the Taliban. The problem with it is that we can't and we've got to be more realistic about our own power and our own capacity.

BLITZER: Explain how your walk across Afghanistan, that 600-mile journey that took place back in 2002 or 2003 I believe, but explain how that informed your current decision-making, your current thinking on what to do in Afghanistan.

STEWART: It's more of an intuitive thing, but what I discovered on that journey, of course, is -- and I was sleeping in village houses night after night staying with different families is that those communities are very isolated. They are probably more conservative, more anti-foreign than we like to acknowledge, and their priorities are such that they don't like the Taliban very much, but they certainly don't like the Afghan police and in many ways they don't like foreign soldiers either. We're really fighting for the imaginations of Afghans. We're trying to get them to believe in the Afghan government, and those things are moral, they are political. They are religious. They are not things connected with how many boots you've got on the ground directly and they are not really connected with how much money we spend. In fact, unfortunately, they are connected with things over which the United States and its allies have relatively little influence.

BLITZER: So basically you agree with Tom Friedman as opposed to Tom Ricks? STEWART: I believe we should keep a light long-term footprint in the country. I think it would be very dangerous to follow Tom Friedman's recommendations of leaving entirely. I think we need a light long-term sustainable footprint.

BLITZER: Thanks very much, Rory Stewart, for coming in.

STEWART: Thank you for your time.

Dexter Filkins on MSNBC

2009-10-29T06:04:00.000-07:00

Dexter FIlkins appeared on MSNBC to discuss Ahmed Wali Karzai's involvement in the opium trade and his ties to the C.I.A. Thanks to Sharon for the link!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A Payroll

2009-10-28T09:36:00.000-07:00

Dexter Filkins contributed to an in-depth article about Ahmed Wali Karzai (pictured above), the brother of the Afghan president. According to the article, Karzai "a suspected player in the county's booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from C.I.A, and has for much of the past eight years...The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.'s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai's home."

You can read the full article here.

A Reporter's Tale of Ambush And Captivity

2009-10-27T19:28:00.000-07:00

New York Times reporter, David Rohde gave a thirty-eight minute interview today to NPR's Fresh Air host, Teri Gross. Teri Gross is a skilled interviewer and it was really interesting to hear David Rohde talk about his kidnapping and captivity. You can hear the full audio interview here.

Former royal tutor Rory Stewart selected for safe Tory seat

2009-10-26T17:59:00.000-07:00

For those of you have not heard, Rory Stewart - the former foreign civil servant, writer, and academic tutor - beat five other candidates to win selection to the safe Conservative seat of Penrith and the Border. You can read details of the win and reaction from Rory Stewart in a recent Guardian article. Stewart will be busy getting to know everyone in his constituency; but let's hope he continues to share his invaluable perspective and knowledge of modern war zones to the world.

For more on Rory Stewart, The New Republic profiles him in an article by Jason Zengerle. Thanks to Mary for the tip!

Iraq Twin Bombings

2009-10-25T07:11:00.000-07:00

Arwa Damon posted a great tweet this morning with respect to the two bombings in Iraq:

"More than 130 killed in Iraq, 2 gov't bldgs - when will govt stop playing 'things are returning to normal' political games?"

You can follow Arwa Damon on Twitter here. You can also read more about Arwa Damon on her CNN bio page.

The Great American Arm-Twist in Afghanistan

2009-10-25T05:52:00.000-07:00

In today's New York Times, Dexter Filkins discusses the events surrounding President Karzai's decision to accept the revised vote totals and a second round of election. He writes:

"Eight years after the American-led coalition pushed the Taliban from Kabul, democracy in Afghanistan is still a very fragile thing. So fragile, indeed, that the deadlock last week seemed to raise fundamental questions about the wisdom and direction of the American-led project here."

You can read the full article here.

His Long War

2009-10-18T07:07:00.000-07:00

Is it just too late - politically and militarily - for General Stanley McChrystal to win in Afghanistan? Dexter Filkins takes this question to task in his cover story for the New York Times, Sunday Magazine. There is also a 10 minute audio interview with Dexter at the same link, titled "The Takeaway With Dexter Filkins."

Held by the Taliban: 7 Months, 10 Days in Captivity

2009-10-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

David Rohde, a New York Times reporter who was held 7 months in captivity by the Taliban in Pakistan, is finally giving a detailed account of the events surrounding his kidnapping, months in captivity and final escape. This is the first installment of a five-part series. The second installment, "Inside the Islamic Emirate," will appear in the Monday NYT's print edition.

The articles are based on Mr. Rohde's recollections and, where possible, records kept by his family and colleagues.

Obama's War

2009-10-14T07:11:00.000-07:00

Rory Stewart was part of the PBS Frontline special "Obama's War". You can watch the full program online or read the transcript of Rory Stewart's interview here.

Thanks Cyn for the tip!

More about MSNBC's Tip of the Spear

2009-10-09T08:07:00.000-07:00

More about "Tip of the Spear" can be found on this special MSNBC web page: archives, latest videos, articles, blogs and slideshows. Videos of Richard Engel's recent appearances on many NBC shows are available on this page. He was also Charlie Rose's guest on Oct. 7th.

(Photo: courtesy of David Furst / AFP - Getty images)

Two Arguments for What to Do in Afghanistan

2009-10-02T18:02:00.000-07:00

In a recent article for Time.com, Peter Bergen and Leslie Gelb agrue two different options for Afghanistan: "Give it Time" and "Turn it Over." You can read both of their arguments here.

Special "Tip of the Spear" on MSNBC

2009-10-02T06:14:00.000-07:00

A one-hour special documentary “Tip of the Spear” will be aired on Sunday, Oct. 11th (8pm ET), based on Richard Engel’s NBC Nightly News series.

This special includes never-seen-before footage of firefights, an interview with a Taliban commander and a special behind-the-scenes material.

More info in this World Business News article.

Afghanistan, September 2009

2009-09-30T16:12:00.000-07:00

Impressive and heartbreaking images of Afghanistan appeared on The Boston Globe website. They are part of a new regular feature on the Big Picture: a monthly focus on Afghanistan. You can view all the photos here.

Rory Stewart's Appearance on Bill Moyers Journal

2009-09-26T16:50:00.000-07:00

Rory Stewart, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, appeared on Bill Moyers Journal to talk about an alternate strategy for the international community in Afghanistan. Stewart argues that the stated goals for Afghanistan of routing the Taliban, banishing Al-Qaeda, and restoring a functioning government are unrealistic. He believes that the U.S. should deploy a much smaller force devoted to stopping al-Qaeda from rebuilding a base in Afghanistan rather than risk provoking a public backlash against any presence.

Regardless of what President Obama may personally desire, Stewart states that political and electoral pressures will likely compel him to deploy more troops. You can watch the video and read the transcript here.

I'll Kill You If You Speak

2009-09-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

I'll kill you if you speak, this article by Imma Vitelli appeared in Vanity Fair, Italy edition. It tells the story of Civita an 11 yr. old Afghan girl who two years ago was abducted and raped by her neighbor, a military commander. He put a gun to her head and told her he would kill her if she told anyone. Also she is being threatened with death by warlords in Kabul. There is a follow up article, United for Civita, which has an outpouring of support from readers who want to help her as well as other Afghan victims of brutality. Here is a rough Google Italian-English translation of the original article and the United for Civita article.
Civita, photo by Yuri Kozyrev

Giving Afghan Women Hope

2009-09-24T05:35:00.000-07:00

Atia Abawi reports on how some Afghan women who have been considered property, are now getting help. The video version is below and you can read her report here.

Afghanistan: Ware, Bergen, Stewart

2009-09-22T18:00:00.000-07:00

Anderson Cooper hosted a panel discussion about Afghanistan on AC360 last night with guests Michael Ware, Peter Bergen, and Rory Stewart. If you're looking for a clue as to what the US should do now... these guys know the score:

Calculations of War: Which Risk is Reasonable

2009-09-21T05:53:00.000-07:00

Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor of the New York Times has written an editorial in response to criticism directed at reporter, Stephen Farrell for venturing into dangerous territory in pursuit of a story in Afghanistan. The debate has been prevalent in the British press, where they went as far as questioning whether Farrell had been "too grand" to take a safer route and embed with the British or American military. Hoyt brings up an excellent point about how embedding does not always eliminate the risk.

Personally, I abhor a recent headline in The Daily Mail of London which read "Journalist's lust for glory and a risk too far." However, I have mixed feeling about the risk that reporters take. There is a definite need to venture into these dangerous areas of the world to fully understand a story, and I am in awe of reporters that do this. At the same time, the price to pay for such a story could be the reporters and crews lives. As Hoyt aptly puts it, "...even with the best precautions, covering war can exact horrible costs.

'Behind The Veil'

2009-09-20T08:41:00.000-07:00

The Globe and Mail reporter Jessica Leeder has a video series called Behind The Veil An Intimate Journey into the Lives of Kandahar's Women.

'Kite' Author's Plea

2009-09-18T08:40:00.000-07:00

CNN's Atia Abawi travels with one of my favorite author's, Khaled Housseini, as he visits internally displaced Afghans.

The Reporter's Account: 4 Days with the Taliban

2009-09-09T17:29:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has published Stephen Farrell's account of his four-day ordeal. It appears on their blog "At War, Notes From the Front Lines".

John Burns on Those Who Aid War Journalists

2009-09-09T15:10:00.000-07:00

"Behind these deaths lie complex and highly emotive issues for those of us who have traveled to war zones for the Times and other news organizations, involving our responsibilities for the lives of the locally employed people who make it possible for us to operate in faraway lands -- interpreters and reporters like Sultan Munadi (pictured left), but also drivers, security guards and domestic staff members; altogether, in the case of The Times, at least 200 people in Iraq and Afghanistan over the years of those two wars."

You can read John Burns full blog entry here.

Hell? No. I Won't Go.

2009-09-09T05:54:00.000-07:00

The last post from Sultan Munadi appeared in the New York Times website on September 2, 2009. Munadi was the New York Times interpreter kidnapped along with Stephen Farrell, and killed in the military raid in Afghanistan which freed Farrell. In this heartbreaking post, Mundai explains why he would never leave Afghanistan.

NY Times's Reporter, Stephen Farrell is Freed in Afghan Raid

2009-09-09T04:38:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has an article on Stephen Farrell, who was recently kidnapped by the Taliban and then freed by a military raid that killed his Afghan interpreter, Sultan Munadi, a British commando, and Afghan civilians.

David Rohde, a New York Times reporter who recently escaped after seven months of captivity, also had the opportunity to work with Mr. Munadi and called him an "extraordinary journalist, colleague and human being."

You can read the full article here.

CNN's Cooper, Gupta, Bergen and Ware Headed To Afghanistan

2009-09-02T05:54:00.000-07:00

Starting next week for the anniversary of September 11th, CNN's Anderson Cooper will anchor "AC360" from Afghanistan. Dr. Sanjay Gupta will be embedded to deliver reports on field trauma surgery, while Peter Bergen and Michael Ware will provide analysis and field reports.

Looking forward to the reports and coverage. Stay safe all!

Afghan Tribal Leaders Say Karzai's Team Stole Votes

2009-09-02T05:26:00.000-07:00

In today's New York Times, Dexter Filkins writes about a big election allegation in Afghanistan. In one district there is charge of forging 23,900 ballots: "The accusations by Mr. Bartz, and several other tribal leaders from Shorabak, are the most serious allegations so far that have been publicized against Mr. Karzai's electoral machine, which faces a deluge of fraud complaints from around the country." You can read the full article here.

Rough Terrain

2009-08-29T15:21:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post has an intriguing piece by Vanessa M. Gezri about an experimental program in Afghanistan, where teams of anthropologists and social scientists are working alongside soldiers to help win over the Afghan people. I first heard about this program on NPR. As with most programs in Afghanistan, there are controversies as well as struggles. The full article appears here. Alongside the article, is a multimedia gallery about the program called "Reaching Out in Afghanistan."

Seven Days That Shook Afghanistan

2009-08-29T14:56:00.000-07:00

"In the space of a single week, a string of disturbing military and political events revealed not just the extraordinary burdens that lie ahead for the Americans and Afghans toiling to create a stable nation, but the fragility of the very enterprise itself."

The article by Dexter Filkins appears in tomorrow's edition of the New York Times.

Bearing Witness: Five Years of the Iraq War

2009-08-28T19:41:00.000-07:00

At this year's Visa pour l'Image photojournalism festival there is a new Web Documentary award category. One of the nine finalists is from Reuters "Bearing Witness: Five Years of the Iraq War". It is a profoundly disturbing and very graphic five minute multimedia presentation. Something we would never see on television, not in the U.S. anyway. It reminded me of when Michael Ware talked about the footage he took in Fallujah, Nov. '04 that jars the sensitivities and depicts the terrifying experience of what war is really like.

Cheney's Jihad

2009-08-28T05:58:00.000-07:00

Peter Bergen has a great piece in Foreign Policy about why enhanced interrogation techniques don't enhance U.S. interests. You can read the full article here.

PR v. Journalism

2009-08-27T11:07:00.000-07:00

An interesting update on the PR firm that is still recommending to the Pentagon which reporters should be given an embed with American troops based on the number of "good news" stories they have produced in the past. How is it possible that this is still going on?

A School Bus for Shamsia

2009-08-22T16:33:00.000-07:00

This week's edition of the Sunday, New York Times Magazine is dedicated to 'The Women's Crusade'. There are many wonderful articles appearing in the magazine, including one by Dexter Filkins. Filkins writes about his involvement with the Mirwais Mena School, the brave Shamsia, and the state of education for girls in Afghanistan. This is an amazing follow-up to his piece from January, 13, 2009. In the former article, Filkins wrote about how Afghan girls were defying terror and embracing school even after being scarred by acid.

Baghdad truck bomb aftermath

2009-08-21T10:30:00.000-07:00

Arwa Damon shows us the enormous crater caused by the truck bomb detonated outside the Foreign Ministry Wednesday, as well as the remains of the nearby houses that were destroyed in the blast.

Under fire in Afghanistan

2009-08-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

ITN's Nick Paton-Walsh comes under fire at a remote outpost in Afghanistan.

(This is from the airing on The Situation Room because only about half of the report was posted at CNN.com.)

Afghanistan: A War We Should Be In?

2009-08-20T05:47:00.000-07:00

Rory Stewart appeared as part of a panel on Channel 4 News in London, UK, discussing the Afghan war. Along with Rory Stewart the panel consisted of a mother of a British soldier killed in Afghanistan, a Captain who served from 2003-2005, an Afghan interpreter, and a Pakistani community worker. The video of the panel is shown in three parts below:

Major Attacks in Baghdad Reveal Iraq's Vulenerability

2009-08-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

With all eyes focused on Afghanistan's election tomorrow and the 24-7 healthcare debate coverage here in the U.S., it is important to not let Iraq fade into the background. Iraq continues to be a violent and fragile state. In a coordinated attack involving powerful truck bombs, insurgents killed 95 people and wounded nearly 600 people at the Foreign and Finance Ministries in central Baghdad.

Sam Dagher filed a detailed report for the New York Times and made the following disturbing assertion: "Nearby American soldiers stood by helplessly - despite the needs of hundreds of wounded - waiting for a request for help from Iraqi officials that apparently never came."

John Burns on Afghanistan

2009-08-19T15:44:00.000-07:00

In today's 'At War' blog, John Burns answers questions on Afghanistan. He made the following statement ahead of tomorrow's presidential election: "Afghans, of course, would like the kind of elections Americans enjoy, but the ones they are being offered are surely a far, bar better way of assigning power than any offered by the ruthless men of the Taliban.

Rory Stewart: The 'Impossible' Afghan Mission

2009-08-19T14:18:00.000-07:00

Rory Stewart appeared on "On Point" with Tom Ashbrook for a reality check on Afghanistan's election eve. Asked whether Pakistan and Afghanistan should be treated as one problem, as the administration asserts, he dismissed the notion with a colorful analogy:

"It's like you're going into a room with an angry cat a big tiger. And the angry cat is Afghanistan and the big tiger is Pakistan. Pakistan has nuclear bombs. Pakistan has Bin Laden. Pakistan can destabilize India. And you're in that room and you're whacking the cat. And somebody says to you, 'Why are you whacking the cat?' And you say, "Oh, it's a cat-tiger strategy - it's an Afghanistan-Pakistan Strategy.' Really the reason we're whacking the cat is we don't know what to do about the tiger."

You can list to the full audio interview with Rory Stewart here. The interview with Rory begins at 5:45 point.

Afghanistan Imposes News Censorship on Election day

2009-08-18T15:40:00.000-07:00

Carlotta Gall of the New York Times writes about the restrictions on all news organizations, "banning them from reporting suicide bombings and other violence during the Thursday vote."

The restrictions follow a spike in violence as recent as today, where seven people were killed and 52 wounded after a suicide car bomb in Kabul.

You can read the entire article here.

Taliban Threats May Sway Vote in Afghanistan

2009-08-17T05:34:00.000-07:00

In today's New York Times, Dexter Filkins writes about Taliban threats and lack of polls in the Pashtun Region.

He states that "across the Pashtun heartland in eastern and southern Afghanistan, where Taliban insurgents hold sway in many villages, people are being warned against going to the polls...Conditions have been so chaotic that many Afghans have been unable to register to vote...In many areas, there will not be any polling places to go."

You can read the full article here.

At War: Notes From the Front Lines

2009-08-13T15:17:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has a great feature on their website that includes blogs/posts from their war correspondents. Included in this group is Dexter Filkins, Stephen Farrell, Carlotta Gall, Ashley Gilbertson, John F. Burns, and many more.

Today's post is aptly titled "At War Contributors". You can find the latest and most recent posts here. Check it out and show your support to the many journalists who sacrifice their time and safety to bring their stories home to us.

Generation Islam

2009-08-13T09:30:00.000-07:00

CNN's Christiane Amanpour presents another terrific investigative special this week, premiering Aug 13 on Domestic and August 14th on International. She traveled to several war-torn countries to find out what the future promises to be like for the next generation of Muslims -- raised turning such turbulent times, are they destined to become enemies of the West or will they be the ones who transcend the differences between cultures and forge a better future for generations to come?

“In my travels through Gaza and Afghanistan, again and again I found people more interested in a future than a fight. Parents who want the best for their children and children who know there has to be something better,” says Amanpour. “And their allegiance will be to whoever helps them get there.”

CNN also has a web page up with links to all the different components of the program and links to the different organizations that are working to better conditions in Gaza, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It is a terrific resource for anyone looking to learn more about the regions and the issues.

Inthesandbox's Blog & Inside Iraq Blog

2009-08-12T09:29:00.000-07:00

Wanted to draw attention to two excellent blogs:

The first blog is new to me (many thanks to Delie for the tip). It is called "Insidethesandbox" and can be found here. You can also follow the blog on twitter. The purpose of the sandbox blog is to give one insight into the world of war reporting, from the viewpoint of journalists and photographers on the front line.

The second blog is called "Inside Iraq" and can be found here. Inside Iraq is updated by Iraqi journalists working for McClatchy Newspapers. They are based in Baghdad and outlying provinces and for security reasons, their full names are not given.

Also, do not miss CNN's Backstory clips (many thanks to Delie again, for posting them). You can find a link to Delie's archive of CNN Backstory here or on the link at the bottom of this blog (next to the wonderful 'Wareabouts' brought to us by Cyn). For those of us in the U.S. who do not get CNNI and are in search of honest reporting, these sites are invaluable.

Hardly Winning

2009-08-12T05:58:00.000-07:00

Short article in Foreign Policy by Peter Bergen.

Life, Death and the Taliban

2009-08-12T04:46:00.000-07:00

Charles M. Sennott is the Executive Editor and the Vice President of GlobalPost an online international news service. He is an an award winning journalist and author with a distinguished career in international reporting for both print and broadcast news organizations.

A longtime foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe, Sennott served as the Globe's Middle East Bureau Chief based in Jerusalem from 1997 to 2001 and the Europe Chief based in London from 2001 to 2005.

He recently returned to Afghanistan and Pakistan where he revisited the people and places he got to know through his reporting. While in the region, he spoke with high-level Taliban officials and visited a refugee camp and a girls' school His reporting is part of a special multimedia project for the GlobalPost entitled "Life, Death and the Taliban."

He appeared on NPR's Fresh Air to talk about his recent trip to Afghanistan, his extensive GlobalPost report on the Taliban and the value of international reporting from the ground. You can listen to his interview here.

Karzai In His Labyrinth

2009-08-09T15:52:00.000-07:00

The New York Time's Sunday Magazine has an excellent piece on President Karzai by Elizabeth Rubin. Elizabeth Rubin is a contributing writer and Edward R. Murrow fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has reported extensively on Afghanistan for the magazine and spent several days in the presidential palace with Karzai and his entourage for this article.

Rubin writes about Karzai's isolation, the distrust the people have for him, his relationship with the warlords, and the corruption inside his inner circle. The article also has a preview of the various presidential candidates including Dr. Abdullah Abdullah (a leading candidate) and Ashraf Ghani (a former Afghan finance minister and adviser to the World Bank).

A Precarious Election in Afghanistan

2009-08-05T12:08:00.001-07:00

This slide show by Tyler Hicks of the New York Times, captures some amazing images of Afghanistan as it readies itself for the election.

Roadside Bomb Kills 6 Afghan Civilians

2009-08-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

Dexter Filkins filed a report in today's New York Times website about a roadside bomb that killed six civilians in Afghanistan. The violence comes three weeks before the country's presidential election. In Filkin's piece there are links to a short video on the roadside bomb and a must read article by Carlotta Gall about the upcoming elections.

More troops needed for Afghan war

2009-08-04T14:50:00.000-07:00

Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann comment on the need for more troops in Afghanistan.

Lunch with Rory Stewart

2009-08-04T05:36:00.000-07:00

Financial Times columnist, Emily Stokes sat down with Rory Stewart for an insightful chat (Rory Stewart states that there is no distinction between personal chat and interview). Over lunch at a sedate restaurant of New England cuisine, they touched upon Stewart's Turquoise Mountain charity, the need for more of a development strategy in Afghanistan, British politics and his upcoming BBC documentary series on Lawrence of Arabia.

CNN special Witness to War

2009-07-30T10:54:00.000-07:00

Witness to War' airs on CNN International on Thursday, July 30, 8am and 11am, Saturday, Aug 1 3am and 1pm, Sunday, Aug 2 10am and 10pm (all ET).

'Witness to War' sees a team of six CNN correspondents (Atia Abawi, Stan Grant, Nic Robertson, Reza Sayah, Michael Ware and Ivan Watson) provide an unique, first-hand account of the horrors of conflict - from civil war, to the war on terror and the recent offensive in the Swat valley - in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The unparalleled one-hour documentary allows them to draw on their years of experience living and working in the region, as they answer several critical questions, including: What effect does the ever-present violence have on people's psyches? What danger does the constant conflict pose to the world? And, how difficult is it to report from a region where journalists are often targets?

They also investigate the human cost of conflict, discussing the stories they covered and the people they met that most profoundly affected them. They look at the reality of life in refugee camps, examine how children are impacted by the instability, and perhaps most importantly, discuss whether there’s any hope for the future.

More about this new CNN documentary and correspondents' interviews here.

No word yet as to whether it might air on CNN Domestic, but it might not hurt to send an email via the Contact Us page to ask for it!

** Update - August 4 **

CNN/US will air Witness to War on Saturday, August 8, at 8pm ET (1st airing).

More about this special and all the videos.

And the promo: