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Working the Borderlands I read Aryn Baker's article on Talibanistan [April 2] with interest, since I spent time working in the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the early 1980s and '90s. It isn't in the least odd that a Waziri elder in Pakistan should look to Afghan President Hamid Karzai as his leader. When I first went to Peshawar, I discovered that Pashtuns had contempt for Punjabis, that they speak a different language and have very different customs. Lieut. General Hamid Gul may be a former director general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, but old soldiers...
...Gilles. In the wake of the 2005 riots in suburban projects and pitched battles between police and immigrant youth last month in Paris' Gare du Nord train station, more French are gravitating toward hard-line positions. Sarkozy, the former Interior Minister, is a natural law-and-order candidate who spent his time in office noisily battling crime and deporting illegal aliens. But even some of his allies have questioned his campaign pledge to create a "Ministry for Immigration and National Identity"--a linkage many decry as a Le Penesque invocation of a creeping foreign menace to France. However controversial...
...scorching. Otherwise, Kurdistan was a refuge. In Baghdad, journalists had begun hiring security entourages and erecting guarded compounds. To the north in Arbil, as a visiting American, I was practically given the keys to the city. I did my reporting by foot or hailed taxis from the street, spent my evenings in beer gardens or pizza parlors, and slept on the roof of the house, with the sound of crickets rather than Kalashnikovs in the cooling night...
...MINUTE CONVERSATION WITH THE miner in West Nicholson turned out to be my last interview. The plainclothes officers brought me to the West Nicholson police station, where I spent the night. The next day I was driven north to the provincial police headquarters at Gwanda. My escorts accused me of planning to write "negative" stories about Zimbabwe--as if arresting me would dispose me to more positive stories--and carried with them a report from West Nicholson's police chief describing me as a "dedicated journalist on a clandestine mission...
...began to see my captors as victims as much as persecutors. Many had not been paid. A drive to Bulawayo, ostensibly to search my hotel room, became a shopping trip as five officers crammed the car and spent the day hunting roadside stalls for cheap tomatoes, queuing at gas stations and ATMs, seeking out a country butcher with a reputation for value. "I cannot lie to you. The situation is very bad," said Moyo. "You can see for yourself...