OA has two titles published this autumn...
Old Amplefordian Alex Strick van Linschoten (O02) first came to Afghanistan six years ago as a tourist. In 2006, he founded AfghanWire together with Felix Kuehn, an online research and media-monitoring group to give a more prominent voice to local Afghan media.
He has worked as a freelance journalist from Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon and Somalia, writing for Foreign Policy, International Affairs, ABC Nyheter, The Sunday Times (UK), The Globe and Mail (Canada) and The Tablet (UK).
Alex has two of his written works published this autumn:
'Poetry of the Taliban'
From audiotapes traded in secret in the bazaars of Kandahar, to mp3s exchanged via bluetooth in Kabul, to video files downloaded in Dubai and London, Taliban poetry has an appeal that transcends the insurgency. For the Taliban today, these poems, or ghazals, have a resonance back to the 1980s war against the Soviets, when similar rhetorical styles, poetic formulae and tricks with meter inspired mujahideen combatants and non-combatants alike...
read more here...
and 'An Enemy We Created'.
To this day the belief is widespread that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are in many respects synonymous, that their ideology and objectives are closely intertwined and that they have made common cause against the West for decades. Such opinions have been stridently supported by politicians, media pundits and senior military figures, yet they have hardly ever been scrutinised or tested empirically. This is all the more surprising given that the West's present entanglement in Afghanistan is commonly predicated on the need to defeat the Taliban in order to forestall further terrorist attacks worldwide.
There is thus an urgent need to re-examine the known facts of the Taliban-al-Qaeda relationship and to tell the story of the Taliban's encounter with internationalist militant Islamism, which is what Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn set out to do in An Enemy We Created.
Read more here...
Both books are to be published this autumn by C Hurst & Co Publishers and will be available at all good book shops.