Category: Blog

It’s hard to believe, but ten years ago to this day I filed my first story about the war in Bosnia. Feels like yesterday, and a lifetime ago.

When I was an intern at The Washington Post, the foreign editor was Jim Hoagland, a Francophile who treated me well, perhaps because I lived in Paris for a year and he assumed I loved the French as much as he did (I did not). Hoagland is now the Post’s principal foreign affairs columnist, ...  (Read more)

One of the delights of reporting in Pakistan—or India, for that matter—is that English-language newspapers are prevalent and important and, in many cases, enjoyable reads (both the truth and the English language are stretched in exciting ways). The crisis between Pakistan and India has led me ...  (Read more)

Ed Vulliamy, who filed the first eyewitness dispatches about Serb-run prison camps in Bosnia, writes in The Observer that journalists should testify at war crimes trials. “I believe there are times in history–as ...  (Read more)

Why can’t Thomas Friedman say “I was wrong”? His column on Sunday argues, rightly, that President Bush’s war on terrorism fails to embrace non-military strategies that would help ensure America’s security. ...  (Read more)

Can the United Nations do anything right? The surprising answer, in light of the U.N.’s failures in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda during the 1990s, may be “yes.” East Timor’s new government takes over from the U.N. on Monday, and as The ...  (Read more)

Two years ago Sierra Leone was a symbol of everything that was wrong in Africa. It was suffering through a civil war that was notable, in its brutality, for the prevalance of men, women and children whose arms were chopped off by doped-up rebels wearing tutus and wigs. U.N. peacekeepers were nearly ...  (Read more)

The terrorists who killed 11 Frenchman in Karachi, using a car bomb outside the Sheraton Hotel, selected a target that could lead to their undoing. The Frenchmen were engineers overseeing construction of a submarine for ...  (Read more)

It’s got 16 basketball courts, a Cybex fitness center, a chess club, a motorcycle club, aerobics classes, recovery meetings for alcoholics, financial planning seminars, a coffeepot that dispenses 5,000 cups an hour, and 403 toilets. That’s right, it’s ...  (Read more)

From April 13 to May 4 I stayed at the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi. The hotel is as ugly as a bunker, with unpainted cement as an exterior, and it feels like a bunker, too, because there’s no shortage of security around its perimeter. Private guards, police, paramilitary. Business was getting ...  (Read more)