By Mark Thompson Source: time.com Briton Ben Anderson is a documentary filmmaker (the BBC, HBO, the Discovery Channel), but he turns to the written word in No Worse Enemy : The Inside Story of the Chaotic Struggle for Afghanistan . The book offers a gritty – and grim — assessment of the war. Anderson embedded with U.S. and British troops for months in the southern part of the country from 2007 to 2011. He details corruption, incompetence, fear — by both allied troops and Afghan civilians — and a Groundhog Day kind of existence., where a battle fought for days has to be fought again, later. Most distressingly, he argues that the American and British publics are getting a misleading picture of progress on the ground. Battleland conducted this email chat with Anderson last weekend. Why did you write No Worse Enemy: The Inside Story of the Chaotic Struggle for Afghanistan? I’d been travelling to Helmand for five years, first in 2007 with the Brits, t...
By Hanan Habibzai It is truly a matter of controversy as it appears that non-Taliban Afghan poets are presented as Taliban. It is a matter of shock to read in the Independent that Ezatullah Zawab, a permanent journalist and poet, is Taliban poet. It is still unclear how many more (non-Taliban names) are there in the ‘ Poetry of the Taliban ’. Zawab is not a Taliban but a critic of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and the continuous political and social corruption within Karzai’s government. He studied at the Nangrahar University, working as a freelance journalist since 2001 in eastern Afghanistan. His reports mainly published by IWPR and the Pajhwok Afghan News . He was among the first journalists who covered the killing of tens of civilians in June 2008 where American-led air-strike bombed a wedding convoy in Shinwari district in eastern Nangrahar province killing more than 55 civilians including the bride. Most of the victims were children and women. In the aftermat...
Decisions to be taken about the future of media and journalism will have an impact on the future of democracy, warned the Spanish Deputy Prime Minister, Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, who told the world's largest group of journalists leaders meeting for the World Congress of the International Federation of Journalist (IFJ) in Cadiz, Spain that. "Whatever the future brings, the press will remain the pillar of democracy," she told the IFJ conference on the future of journalism. "We are nearer to having an informed citizenry than never before thanks to media." In her remarks, Sra. De la Vega paid tribute to journalists who provide invaluable journalism as a public good often under difficult and dangerous conditions. Referring to the bicentenary celebration of the 1812 constitution declared in Cadiz, she said the Spanish public and media have enjoyed the benefits of a constitution which enshrined the "freedom to publish information without its being reviewed and ...
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