At Columbia University on Monday evening, CPJ board member Ahmed Rashid held forth to a full house
in a conversation with Steve Coll about U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan and
Pakistan. If you're reading this blog, there's most likely no need to explain
who Rashid is--or Coll, for that matter. The earliest reference
I could find on cpj.org to Rashid dated back to 2000, about events in 1999, when he
was the Islamabad bureau chief for the now-defunct Far Eastern Economic Review. His latest book, Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan,
is the most recent installment in a steady stream of trenchant, reliable,
reality-based analysis of geopolitical affairs in Central and South Asia. If
you need to be convinced, check out Foreign
Policy's list of Top 100 Global Thinkers.
A video of the event, which was co-sponsored by CPJ, is now available here.