22 April 2010 • 6:00 pm 0
The autobiography of Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the pre-invasion public face of the Taliban, is a fascinating document from within the Taliban movement. It is also permeated with narcissism and grandiosity. I review it today in The National.
Filed under: National, Afghanistan, books
8 April 2010 • 2:35 pm 1
The Lord’s Resistance Army has been kidnapping, brainwashing, and murdering unlucky adolescents in a remote corner of the Central African Republic. The Ugandan military is trailing the LRA, sometimes killing them and sometimes not.
Click through to read my report for The National on the world’s most technologically outmatched insurgency.
Filed under: National, Africa, Central African Republic, military, war
22 January 2009 • 5:18 pm 0
Originally published in Abu Dhabi’s The National.
At the entrance to the Afghan police and military base in Zhari district, half a dozen wrecked police trucks sit in a small dirt lot. As a first sight greeting visitors to the base, they are a poor recruitment tool for new policemen. The most intact truck is missing its windscreen and a door, and has caked blood on one seat; it will never drive again. The worst off is a twisted clump of metal, scorched so badly that any blood would probably have cooked away in the fire that followed the initial blast of the roadside bomb that did it in. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: National, Afghanistan, Canada, war
