#Afghanistan

First off, my friends at Rising Powers beat me to a SCO Summit report. In the shadow of the Iranian election drama and the first real BRIC get together, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Don’t know what the SCO is?) held their annual Heads of State Summit in the Russian Ural city of Yekaterinburg. The Heads […]

One American woman’s personal battle to turn back the tide on the Taliban Sonia Nassery Cole commands a room no matter what the size, and it’s for a good cause. Cole, who has both Afghan and American citizenship, is founder and CEO of the Afghanistan World Foundation (AWF). The non-profit organization works to assist the […]

U.S. President Barack Obama reversed a significant decision this past week. He decided to go back on his promise to release photographs of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan that were taken a few years ago. The popular sentiment among the more conservative-minded might be that Obama is well within his right as Commander-in-Chief to do […]

After months of trying to track her down, I spoke with female journalist Farida Nekzad in Kabul, Afghanistan in the wee hours of a March morning by phone from New York. Nekzad shared with me her vision for her work and the future of journalists in Afghanistan.

You can read a feature-length story about Nekzad and other female journalists in Pakistan and Afghanistan in this month’s issue of Quill magazine here.

Jon Lee Anderson is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the “The Fall of Baghdad” and “The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan”. Anderson is an accomplished journalist who has reported on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran extensively. His most recent work for The New Yorker is entitled Can Iran Change?. I had […]

Air Force Staff Sgt. Phillip A. Myers was only 30 years old when he died in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. He was thousands of miles from his home in Hopewell, Virginia when an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) wounded and killed him. But as fate would have it, his death and return to his family in the […]

Press freedom in war-torn Afghanistan is regressing to a Taliban-era level of restrictions, according to a recent report. Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a Paris-based press advocacy organization, visited Afghanistan in January to survey the current situation. Their report is entitled, “We have free speech, but we’re not safe and don’t act responsibly.” “Because of the […]

Carlotta Gall is the Kabul-based veteran war correspondent with The New York Times who reports on both Afghanistan and western Pakistan. Read one of her recent report from the front lines, Pakistan and Afghan Taliban Close Ranks. I caught up with her last week while working on a piece for an upcoming article for Quill, […]

Frontrunner Monday, March 30 at 6:45p.m. at the Paley Center for Media in New York City, 25 West 52 Street The Bread Winner The Asia Society in cooperation with the Foreign Policy Association, at 725 Park Avenue (at 70th St) in New York City, on Monday, April 6 at 6:00p.m. *** Two documentaries depicting the […]

Bob Schieffer, a journalist with more than five decades of experience, said it best during a recent event at the New York Press Club: “A free press is vital to a healthy democracy.” What an encouraging thought at a time of dramatic changes in the news business. And what a fitting prinicple in light of […]

“I think the American invasion of Iraq was the biggest mistake in American foreign policy history,” said veteran journalist Ricks, who added that the future of the region looks bleak, especially when it comes to who will ultimately come to power. “I think what we [will] end up with is a smarter, tougher version of Saddam Hussein.”