On Wednesday 26 September 2007 Mr Ahmed Rashid, Author and Journalist, Pakistan, will lead a discussion meeting on "The Pakistan-Afghanistan Border: Tribes, Taliban and the Army" from 12 noon - 1pm.
Mr Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist based in Lahore, has covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia for the past 25 years and writes for the Daily Telegraph, The Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Review of Books, BBC Online, The Nation, Lahore and academic and foreign affairs journals. He appears regularly on international TV and radio such as CNN and BBC World Service.
His book Taliban: Islam, Oil and the new Great Game in Central Asia (2000) was a world wide best seller. It was translated into 26 languages and over 1.5 million English language copies have been sold since 11 September 2001. For five weeks it was also the No.1 book on the New York Times best-seller non-fiction list. His latest book Jihad, The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (2002) has been translated into 15 languages. His first book The Resurgence of Central Asia: Islam or Nationalism? was published in 1994.
In 2001, Ahmed Rashid was awarded the Nisar Osmani 'Award for Courage in Journalism', by the Human Rights Society of Pakistan. He is a Member of the Advisory Board of Eurasia Net of the Soros Foundation, a scholar of the Davos World Economic Forum and a consultant for Human Rights Watch. In 2004, he was appointed to the Board of Advisors to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva for a period of four years. In November 2002 at the invitation of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, he became the first journalist to address the UN General Assembly on the commemoration of the signing of the Bonn agreement on Afghanistan.
Ahmed Rashid was born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan in 1948 and was educated at Malvern College, UK, Government College, Lahore and at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University.
This meeting will take place on the Fourth Floor at Arundel House, 13-15 Arundel Street, Temple Place, London WC2R 3DX
If you would like to attend, please RSVP Kathleen James on E-mail:
james@iiss.org or Tel: 020 7395 9109
