The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Repost)
The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan By Kim Barker
2011 | 320 Pages | ISBN: 0385533314 | EPUB | 3 MB
2011 | 320 Pages | ISBN: 0385533314 | EPUB | 3 MB
War correspondent Barker first started reporting from Afghanistan in 2003, when the war there was lazy and insignificant. She was just learning to navigate Afghan culture, one caught between warring factions, and struggling to get space in her newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. Lulled into complacency, everyone from the U.S. military to the Afghan diplomatic corps to the Pakistani government stumbled as the Taliban regrouped. Very frank and honest, Barker admits a host of mistakes, including gross cultural ignorance that often put her in danger even as she found Afghanistan similar in some ways to Montana, her home state, what with bearded men in pickup trucks stocked with guns and hate for the government. She reports a string of characters: an amorous Pakistani former prime minister, a flashy Afghan American diplomat, an assortment of warlords, drug lords, fundamentalists, politicians, and fellow correspondents struck by wanderlust and plagued by messy personal lives all of them against a backdrop of declining war coverage in declining American newspapers. A personal, insightful look at covering an ambivalent war in a complicated region.