What I really enjoy about this section is the ability to write little insights into a few of the people I met in Afghanistan. A friend of mine shared his knowledge of some of his country’s more notorious characters, including Akbar Agha, a former...
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Sometimes we get bogged down in stereotypes, and I was always happy to meet Afghans who did not conform, men and women who wanted and worked for a better Afghanistan. One of those was Janan Mosazai, who I am proud to say studied in Canada before ...
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Living and working in Kabul was often intense, sometimes complicated, frequently frustrating, always interesting, and at the best of times incredibly rewarding. There were periods when I never wanted to leave, and times when `i felt `I needed to ...
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For some reason I often found myself either on Chicken Street or nearby, and it always mesmerized me. It was not dissimilar to a modern day version of the ancient Silk Road with all its glorious goods. There were sheepskin coats, tacky souvenirs, ...
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Echoing streets in night-time Kabul are generally only peopled by guards at the ‘Ring of Steel’, a series of checkpoints around the capital. Despite this there was a lively nightlife. It was early spring and I decided to have a small birthday cele...
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I always liked to think of Debbie as the queen of Kabul, and when she had her café her personality drew in the crowds. She would sit at her usual table, working on her computer, surveying the scene, always smiling and talking, always charismatic, ...
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In less than 18 months world attention will cease its already waning interest in Afghanistan as the 2014 deadline looms. Nato forces are in the process of handing the reins over to Afghan security forces in this period known as Transition. Once ag...
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Tirana, Albania – Mention that you have decided to visit the birthplace of King Zog and Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, who shut the country off from the rest of the world for four decades, and people simply ask, “Why?” Yet Albania, on the wester...
Continue readingFormer Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was helped to the podium, a frailer man now than when he brought Glasnost and Perestroika to the world almost thirty years ago. One of the 20th century's most seminal figures delivered a fairly bleak keynote ...
Continue readingAt the same time as I was given Shadow Lives [The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror] by Victoria Brittain to review, I was in the process of reading the Man Booker prizewinning novel Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. Brittain's book is abo...
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Dispatches from the Kabul Café 
Genocide – Personal Stories, Big Questions 