Afghanistan a Decade on from September 11
How We Lost the War
By Sally Neighbour
"The vast majority of the Taliban hadn't been driven anywhere," says Lieven. "They went back to their villages to wait and see what would happen. That was our opportunity to make a change in Afghanistan, to ensure they didn't re-emerge. But over the next few years we made such a shambles of it on the ground that they all took up arms again." The American-led effort, enthusiasticall
Comment: Hazara Asylum Seekers
By Sally Neighbour
Yusuf Hamid was a shoemaker in the village of Kharaba in Ghazni Province, eastern Afghanistan. It was the time of the Taliban, as Afghans invariably refer to the years between 1996 and 2001 when the bearded talib, students from the Islamic madrassas strung along the Afghan–Pakistan border, imposed their draconian brand of Islamic law on Afghanistan.Hamid (not his real name) is a member of t
'Against Remembrance' By David Rieff
By Maria Tumarkin
In the last decade of the twentieth century American journalist David Rieff was in Bosnia covering the war. His mother, the late Susan Sontag, was there as well, staging Waiting for Godot in the second year of Sarajevo’s 1395-day siege. (A square in the city’s centre is now named after Sontag; nothing so far for Rieff.) Bosnia was not the only terrible and dark place Rieff came to know. He saw Rwanda, Kosovo, Congo and the Middle Ea
