On December 13, 2014, I woke up and crawled out of the queen size canopy bed that had been custom built for my predecessor at the NPR bureau in Kabul. For the last time, I took a shower and enjoyed the consistent hot water that predecessors had not enjoyed.

When I moved into the house in 2012, the hot water system was bipolar—the temperature would fluctuate from just right to freezing cold every 30 seconds or so. Showering involved a certain waltz in and out of the spray from the corroding, cheap Chinese showerhead.

The system had outwitted several Afghan plumbers hired by previous correspondents. Finally, in early 2013 someone recommended “the guy” who finally tamed the system, after which I could enjoy lengthy hot showers—as long as the electricity stayed on, which was another matter in the city.

After showering and getting dressed, I unlocked the giant deadbolt on the armored door separating the bedrooms from the living room. The Afghan staff entered the house and disassembled the bed as I packed my remaining clothes and personal items into one of the two hockey gear bags in the living room. Next to those bags were two cheap Chinese suitcases I had purchased in the airport in Dubai when I moved to Kabul in October 2012. When I checked in for my flight to Kabul, the Safi Airlines staff said the maximum weight for any piece of luggage was 70lbs, and my hockey bags were each 30lbs overweight. I found a shop in the check-in hall, bought the two suitcases and sat on the floor of the hall unloading items from the hockey bags into the generic suitcases as other passengers walked by unphased. It was far from the weirdest sight in that airport.

The two bags remained in a closet in the bureau for the next two-plus years.

I had spent the first two weeks of December frantically clearing out the house—selling off furniture, giving away piles of clothing and housewares to the Afghan staff, burning stacks of documents, packing up giant gear boxes and having friends at NGOs drive them to DHL since the Afghan police wouldn’t stop and search the white Toyota LandCruisers of international organizations, and selling off my rather obscene alcohol stash to expat friends who weren’t as connected as I had been in that department.

With everything packed, all that was left to do was say goodbye to the Afghan staff. We were all somewhat numb. None of us really knew what was next in our lives. I had tried to find other jobs for my driver, doormen, cook, and housecleaner. Some had been with the NPR bureau since long before I arrived as NPR’s last Kabul-based correspondent. But it was a difficult time with many news, development, and humanitarian organizations downsizing with the international military mission concluding its combat phase and transitioning to a train, advise, and assist operation—along with ongoing counterterrorism operations—starting January 1, 2015.

Some of my staff had found part-time work with other organizations, including the one that was taking over the house NPR had been renting for at least the previous seven or eight years. Other staff were in limbo and would have to live off their severance pay—one month for each year they worked with NPR, which was Afghan labor law. It was probably one of the few laws rigorously followed in the country at the time.

It was a difficult moment for all of us as they were staying behind in a country that we all knew was going to continue to decline economically and security-wise as the international community continued to draw down its military presence and humanitarian and development assistance. Their futures, after years of working for an international news organization and getting paid far more than Afghans who did not work with outside organizations, were not particularly bright.

My future—as a Magic Eight Ball might say—was also hazy.

When I moved to Kabul in 2012, my assignment was to stay through the end of 2014 and then shutter the bureau. In theory the war was going to be over by the end of 2014, so NPR had decided there was no need to continue to maintain an expensive bureau in the country.

However, in late summer of 2014 I tried to convince management to maintain a small presence through at least the first half of 2015 to see where things were going to head under the new phase of the mission. While there was agreement that editorially it did make sense for me to stay in Kabul—I had pitched renting a room at another news organization’s house at a fraction of the cost of the NPR bureau—there was no money available. The budget had been baked in long before, and NPR was going through another contraction and laying off staff and canceling programs.

That’s largely why my time was ending at NPR and my future uncertain. I had completed my assignment, and with the organization laying people off, there was no position available for me after Kabul.

I contemplated staying in Afghanistan as a freelancer, but after years of having a salary and benefits, housing and staff paid for, a security contractor, hazard insurance, and the cache of working for a major news outlet, I decided I was way too old for the freelance life in a place like Afghanistan.

So, after we took some farewell photos in the yard of the compound, the staff and I hauled my two hockey bags, two suitcases, a guitar in a road case, a guitar in a gig bag, and my carry on backpack out of the compound and loaded all the bags into the SUV of a guy who ran one of those “don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of services in Kabul. He could expedite, or outright bypass, the numerous security checkpoints getting into the airport. Basically, you gave him $200 and you’d meet up with him in the parking lot closest to the airport reserved for dignitaries, UN officials, and other connected people.

I rode to the airport with my driver, who didn’t say a word the entire drive through the city. To be fair, he only spoke about 10 words of English, but also, what was there to say at that point?

I wouldn’t quite say I felt guilty about leaving the Afghans behind, especially since it wasn’t my call, but I felt bad for them having to continue living in a country in decline. I was also lost in my own daze over how I was going to miss the work and the people, Afghans and expats.

Traffic was light by Kabul standards, and we passed through the dusty streets lined with clothing shops, cafes, fruit stands, and wedding halls—all looking tired from years of war, pollution, and uncertainty.

I had flown out of the airport so many times by then that I could sleepwalk through the process. Step one, at the entrance gate off the traffic circle, get out of the car, show passport, walk through x-ray, and get back in the car. Drive to another circle, turn right, and pull into the next checkpoint. Take all bags out of the car and put them through an x-ray machine while security officers conduct a search of the car. Load everything back into the car and drive to a parking lot.

I said goodbye to the driver and walked through a small hall with cafes and shops and continued the process: exit the back, walk past money changers and other vendors to a lot full of rickety shuttle busses. Get on a bus that drives maybe 50 yards to another parking lot. Exit bus and pass through another bag x-ray shed.

Then, walk to the next parking lot and meet the mystery guy with the rest of your bags and load them onto a hand cart. Walk another 100 feet to a bag x-ray just outside the airport. Then, enter the airport and go through metal detector and hand search and run the bags through another x-ray. Proceed to the check in counter and drop bags.

Next up the stairs to passport control. While in the serpentine line waiting to exit immigration for the last time, I typed my farewell morning advisory to the news desks:

In the immigration line at Kabul airport. Given the length of the line I’m hoping I’ll get though in order to catch a flight on Wednesday. The reason many flights leave late here is because they can’t process people through immigration and security in any remotely efficient fashion.

Anyhow, this is my farewell advisory. It’s been a whirlwind 2.5 years I’ve spent covering Afghanistan for NPR. It’s a job I started dreaming about shortly after 9/11 and I’m glad it became a reality.

Since I’ve been here many things have changed, many have stayed the same. This country has been cursed by 13 years of unrealistic expectations and promises there was no chance of realizing. It’s going to be a long and very rough road ahead for this place.

I’ve covered everything from elections to house fires to juggling contests to more attacks than I can count, some of which claimed the lives of friends. It’s been a lot to process, and I’ll continue processing it for some time.

Through it all, there’s one thing that kept me going and that’s every time I said, “Sean Carberry, NPR News, Kabul.” That’s been one of the most satisfying things in my career and a source of pride to represent this organization here.

I wish I could stay on and keep saying that, as this story will continue to be important.

Alas, the bureau is now closed. It’s the second time I’ve been involved in closing a bureau for NPR, and I can say it’s a lot more difficult doing it solo.

There was a lot going on in that message. There were clearly a couple of veiled digs at management: that we shouldn’t be abandoning the story, and that unlike when I was an NPR producer who helped the Baghdad correspondent close that bureau in December 2011, NPR didn’t send anyone to help me close out the Kabul bureau.

I was definitely a bit crispy on many levels when I sent that message. I had spent years covering wars and human suffering, and that had taken a toll. I was also crushed that my time at NPR was coming to an end. Being an NPR international correspondent was the high-water mark of my career, probably of my life, to this point.

I expressed a clear desire to stay on with the organization after Kabul, but budget cuts and changes in management—managers who had my back retired, took buyouts, or otherwise left in late 2013 through early 2014—meant I was a victim of numbers and bad timing.

As I noted in my farewell email, leaving Kabul was closing a 13-year chapter of my life that began on 9/11. I was early in my journalism career then, and the attacks of that day and then the invasion of Afghanistan stirred something in me. I decided then I had to cover that story.

It took years to work my way up the journalism ladder, and in January 2009, I made my first trip to Afghanistan. That was followed by several more years of parachuting into conflict zones and finally in summer 2012, NPR tapped me to be the organization’s last Kabul-based correspondent.

That assignment was everything to me. It was the story I had longed to cover. It was the official joining of the tribe of foreign/war correspondents and other expats who worked in those environments. I felt at home in that world and that work. It was the Star Trek nexus. It was my Rushmore.

It was some of the most challenging and fulfilling work I’ve ever done. It was an incredibly difficult period for Afghanistan and those of us there. Numerous friends and acquaintances were killed in 2013 and 2014. Security got worse, conditions deteriorated, and it took a toll on all of us.

But telling the story, doing the work, and living in the tribe was where I wanted, and I think needed, to be. Even if my time in Afghanistan had a December 2014 expiration date, I had every intention of continuing that work—doing international journalism, covering difficult stories, and living among the expat/internationalist tribe.

But on December 13, 2014, that ride came to an end, against my wishes.

As I passed through immigration and the last security check before entering the departure hall, I was simply unable to process what I was thinking and feeling. I was going through the motions of transiting the airport and getting on the afternoon Fly Dubai flight.

I was in a daze the entire flight and barely remember it. I had my usual long layover in Dubai and went to the 1847 spa at the Emirates Towers for one last massage by Lawan, a sweet Thai woman who had been my regular masseuse at the spa since 2009. After a sushi dinner, I returned to the airport for the United flight to Dulles. I had upgraded to first class and spent the first half of the flight consuming all the wine I could to numb myself as the 777 hurtled away from the life I had spent years building and toward a new chapter, one that frankly I had no interest in writing at that time.

At 8am on December 14, 2014, I walked into my condo in D.C. I hauled my two hockey bags, two suitcases, guitar case, gig bag, and backpack into my living room and sat down on the couch. Before me were empty bookcases and shelves. It was silent.

It was also a metaphor. I had nothing at that moment—no job, no relationship, and no idea what would come next. It was my “The Candidate” moment—what do we do now?

In the 11 years since, I lived out just about every cliché of being a former war correspondent: multiple career paths, a disastrous—and fortunately very brief—marriage, mental health struggles, an expensive phase as a “high roller” at Maryland Live Casino (I have a long-form essay about that chapter of my life I’m trying to get published somewhere), and, of course, I wrote a book about my journey into and out of being a conflict journalist: Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home.

The subtitle came to me after I had completed the first draft in September 2021. As I wrote about, I had been on a search for the place—physical, career, emotional—where I felt at home. I found that home as a journalist in Kabul.

On December 13, 2014, that came to an end. I have felt existentially homeless since then.

Here’s hoping you’re able to be “home” for the holidays (by the way, autographed books make great gifts), and best wishes for 2026.

“She definitely wanted to be where people were doing something wrong, where she had a purpose. CNN was just a different drug.”

That description of Margaret Moth, videographer and CNN cameraperson, by one of her former lovers Jeff Russi, could describe any number of journalists past and present who cover war and devastation.

But even among those drawn to covering conflict, Moth was extreme.

I recently watched “Never Look Away,” the Lucy Lawless-directed documentary about her fellow New Zealander Moth. I knew little about Moth prior to watching the film. She largely predated my time in war zones. In 2009, cancer finally took the life that a sniper’s bullet in Sarajevo in 1992 could not. We never crossed paths.

Moth was almost a caricature. I met some larger-than-life people in war zones, but no one as “big” as Moth. According to the film and testimonials from friends, family, colleagues, and lovers, there wasn’t enough sex, drugs, and rock and roll to satisfy her. An avid skydiver, that rush wasn’t enough.

In 1990, she joined CNN, and soon after she deployed to the Arabian Gulf.

Russi said Moth found her high shooting for CNN during Desert Storm. “That’s where she felt the most comfortable,” he said. “I think that's where she knew she was who she was. At a certain point drugs and rock and roll just wasn't enough. War was the ultimate drug. Desert Storm was where she made it. Her dream had come true.”

That resonated deeply with me, although in a slightly different way. While I never had Moth’s hedonistic appetite, I related to the notion of finding your place in the world.

“I wasn’t who I was because I was a journalist, I was a journalist because of who I am,” I wrote in my book, “Passport Stamps,” in 2023. Considering the subtitle is “Searching the World for a War to Call Home,” I definitely understand much of what drew Moth to that flame, and why she returned to action after recovering from being shot in Sniper Alley in Sarajevo.

Despite severe facial injuries and having difficulty eating and talking after the shooting that nearly killed her, she returned to the Balkans and filmed conflicts in Rwanda, Zaire, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories.

Her footage, seen throughout the documentary (along with a lot of footage by other CNN shooters), was some of the most vivid and gruesome of those conflicts. As much as I was chasing that kind of action when I first went into conflict reporting, I’m glad I ended up experiencing very little of it.

During my time in hostile environments, I found photographers and videographers to be the biggest risk takers. They would run closer to the action than I had any desire to. The late NPR photographer David Gilkey used to refer to his feet as his telephoto lens.

Still, Moth was on a different level.

Former CNN correspondent Stef Kotsonis related this anecdote in the film that gives a sense of Moth in the field. At one point during the civil war in Georgia in 1991, gunmen for the militia trying to take over the former Soviet republic opened fire on a crowd. (Quick disclosure, Kotsonis and I worked together at WBUR in the early 2000s, and he tipped me off about the documentary in 2023 when it was in production.)

When the firing started, the other cameraman stuck behind the cars, and they're trying to wait to see what shots they can get. And one cameraman later on back at the hotel said to me “I'm hiding behind the car to get out of the gunfire, and I suddenly see a shadow across my arms, and I think ‘what the hell?’ I look up and there's Margaret standing straight upright, not hiding behind the vehicles filming the action.”

That's the only pictures. She's filming people going down as they get hit. The other camera people were kind of startled that she had the guts to just say “uh uh” and step right out in the middle of it.

Based on the descriptions in the film of her childhood and life to that point, it’s clear Moth had a mix of demons and a lust for danger and adrenaline that could only be satisfied by being as close to death and destruction as possible.

Kotsonis said: “I never fully understood what was ticking inside of her, but I always felt that my god, you know, there's a deep anger in there somewhere. I mean, you could sense that's behind all of that. It came from a place of anger and defiance.”

But there was clearly more to it, a need to show people the horrors in the world.

Kotsonis:

As a journalist, I had this romantic notion that we're supposed to make this a better place. We're supposed to bring up the good in every person and all that. She was more cynical, and I think for her the photographs, the images, the video she captured was shoved in your face—here it is, and she had no more trouble with it than that. It was like “Here it is. Take it. This is your shit.”

Those comments also struck me because they hit on things I wrestled with as a journalist and still think about. I mused about the range of personalities and motivations in what’s referred to as “vulture journalism,” which encompasses war reporting and other reporting on human suffering that involves descending on those in the aftermath of trauma and capturing their stories and pain.

I wrote in my book:

Within the field of vulture journalism there is a spectrum. There are those like Dick Thornburg in Die Hard who are sociopathic, narcissistic, predatory reporters who want pain and suffering to capture audiences, win awards, and advance their careers. They don’t give a shit about the distressed people in front of them. Some of them will cross lines like staging photographs, coaching interviewees, or inventing details and conversations. They will further traumatize interviewees by pushing their buttons to get more vivid material. From my experience, those personalities are most common among TV journalists because of the nature of the medium. That said, I have known plenty of radio and print reporters who made my skin crawl.

At the other end of the spectrum are bleeding heart journalists who want to save every life they encounter. They are often crusaders and advocates who sometimes lose objectivity and should probably be working for aid groups or the UN.

I skewed a little off-center toward the sociopathic end of the spectrum, although I was hardly a Thornburg. I am not a Type-A personality, more of a Type-B+, like most of my grades in high school (we won’t discuss my college grades). I had empathy and gained more the longer I did the job. I felt an obligation to the people I reported on to inform the world about their plight. Raising awareness was how I could help them.

Several interviewees in the documentary talked about Moth’s drive to raise awareness through her footage.

Russi said: “Margaret had a very intense morality about her because what she shot went out to the world and affected hundreds of thousands of people.”

Former CNN CEO Tom Johnson said: “She wanted to show the world at times the brutality of war, particularly the impact on the innocents, the impact on the children.”

“Tough is what she did. Tough was not how she acted,” Kotsonis said. “She would tell you in so many different ways that she didn't care about people, you know, people are screwed, humanity’s a mess. But when it came down to it, she was relating to those kids. You could see she appreciated humanity.”

As the film went on, I found myself increasingly relating to Kotsonis as he described his ambivalence and internal conflicts about war journalism and how different Moth was.

Kotsonis talked about working with Moth in Iraq in the early ‘90s.

I was a few years into being a correspondent and part of me wanted out. I was sick of it. I was kind of heartbroken with the cruelty and heartbroken with innocent people going through awful, awful stuff. But Margaret didn't seem to feel the same way. For better or for worse, war is an amazing feeling, mind blowing. You've never experienced anything like this. It's an emotional, psychological, sensory explosion. Nothing compares.

Margaret got a little bit excited by it. Any such experiences or emotions, Margaret drank up. She just drank ‘em up. She was fearless, but she was always cool headed. She had a sense of not just a pretty pictures but of sort of the reality here, the messy human reality of war, and she would get that in the shot. She was calm, collected, but she was on. She was recording history.

I went into war journalism thinking I was going to be like Moth—fearless, in the center of the action, moving from one conflict to another. Instead, I found myself much more like Kotsonis—disillusioned and troubled by what we covered and experienced.

He said:

Depending on your personality make up, you may want to brag about war … it's intoxicating. If you're like me, you don't want to glorify it cause it's just awful. It is awful, but that said, your experience of it is an incredibly complex concoction of adrenaline and this and that and upset, and so you could be upset and excited at the same time. So, while I hate to glorify it, also it was kind of a rush. War is a tough job, and we self-medicated. This is life and death.

Indeed.

Coming home, though, can be even more difficult. As Russi said, Moth was never the same after her first assignment in a war zone. As so many veterans and journalists experience, it can be incredibly difficult to relate to the “real world” or “normal world” after you have spent time in a war zone.

Many people find their way back, many don’t. Some simply can’t leave that world.

I have seen it in some journalists. They fear missing the next big story. Others fear—often unconsciously—slowing down enough that all the sights, sounds, smells and the experiences and emotions will wash over them. They need to stay in the action and keep moving to stay one step ahead of the pain and trauma.

While I have no desire to do front-line, or “bang-bang,” reporting anymore, I can’t help but want to be in Ukraine, Sudan, Syria, and such places telling the stories of those living through conflict or the aftermath. Those stories and voices need to be heard.

As the chapter of my book “Aftermath” describes, I am not the same person I was before I went into conflict journalism, and I have not felt “at home” or that any of the work I’ve done since has been as satisfying or meaningful. Had NPR not closed the Kabul bureau at the end of 2014, I would have stayed in that world and continued that work.

And had Moth not died from colon cancer, I have no doubt she would have stayed in the action because there was nowhere else in the world she felt at home or at peace. The odds probably would have caught up with her the way they did for so many like Gilkey, Marie Colvin, Anja Niedringhaus, Tim Hetherington, Chris Hondros, and others who kept going until they didn't make it back.

Ultimately, I give Lawless credit for showing Moth in all her complexity and not glorifying any of it. There is no judgement in the film. She was an extreme, damaged person who did incredible and incredibly important work, and unlike so many TV correspondents, she didn’t make herself the story.

“Never Look Away” is not an easy film to watch as it’s wall to wall death and destruction. But we would not see and have the opportunity to try to comprehend war without Moth’s footage and the footage and reporting of others like her.

Perhaps the most difficult part of watching the film is reconciling how leaders around the world continue to be so quick to resort to violence and war given the death and devastation it causes as captured by the likes of Moth.

By now you’ve likely seen images from Syria ranging from elated citizens celebrating the fall of one of the most heinous and sadistic regimes in the modern era to the horrifying images inside the regime prisons. Citizen and professional journalists have been flooding into former regime territory chronicling history.

It’s a complex moment with people racing to the streets firing guns in the air and chanting and cheering. Others have been rushing into regime compounds ransacking and looting. Others still have been flocking to cameras and microphones to tell their stories.

Covering the fall of a regime is an overwhelming experience as you seek to capture the range of emotions while processing as a human your own reactions to the joys and horrors of the moment.

There is a well-worn playbook for journalists in such situations. I lived it in Libya in 2011.

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Run to the prisons, hospitals, morgues, and regime compounds. The stories are there. Some are stories of survival and perseverance. Some are stories of hope—families looking for loved ones who were regime prisoners. Some are pure tragedy as people find only remains.

In the last couple of days, I have seen every story from the playbook: hospitals, prisons, Assad compounds and bunkers. These stories paint a vivid picture of another brutal regime and the lengths it went through to hold onto power for so long.

While there are few surprises, especially to those of us who covered Libya or other regimes, and who previously reported on Syria and the brutality and sadism of the regime, it’s still jarring and horrifying to see the images and footage.

As awful as the images are, they can’t possibly convey the full horror and gruesomeness. There are smells you don’t ever want to smell. There are physical sensations of walking across debris. There’s just an aura of death and ruin. It’s frightening to see in person what many humans are willing—and in the case of many in Assad’s inner circle gleeful—to do to other people.

There are also comedic moments like seeing people walking out of Qaddafi’s compound carrying old stereo equipment or pushing strollers full of gun cases.

And there are few experiences like climbing over the walls of a regime family member’s compound to roam around and explore the extravagance and eccentricity of their personal lives.

A few days after the fall of Tripoli, a group of us including Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Marie Colvin, and Babak Dehghanpisheh, climbed over the 20-plus-foot gate into Mutasim Gaddafi’s compound. Sadly, it had been heavily picked over before we got there, so there were no Rolexes or sensitive documents left to poach. Inside the house was an armored door to an underground vault, and the Libyan rebels had secured it and would not let us into that part of the compound. We didn’t get an explanation what was down there that they were protecting.

However, across the yard was the entrance to an underground bunker with long hallways connecting bedrooms, offices, and a medical suite. It was impressive construction and clearly designed and built for long-term sheltering if needed. It was surreal.

What was also surreal was speaking with people who were emerging from lives of oppression. In March 2011, I was in Benghazi shortly after the city had fallen to the rebels and people had taken to the streets to celebrate their freedom even though Gaddafi controlled much of the country still.

The following is a scene from my book. It picks up just after a two-day journey from Cairo to Benghazi.

We dropped our bags and caught a ride with a couple of Finnish reporters to the media center to obtain press credentials from the rebels. The media center was across the street from a corniche. Cars were packed up to eight across flooding into the port area. People were coming out to celebrate the liberation of Benghazi and the ongoing successes of the revolution. Thousands of people gathered outside the media center, in the street, and along the corniche. They climbed on abandoned tanks and strolled along as celebratory gunfire and explosions rang out. Celebrants waved pre-Gaddafi flags. Children had flags painted on their faces.

We went up to the roof of the media center building to soak it all in. History was unfolding before our eyes. People had risen and were casting off one of the world’s most reviled dictators. To bear witness to something like that, well, that was my job and why I got in the game. However, it was surreal to see it happening in real time. It was more powerful than watching the South Sudanese registering to vote for their independence, which at the time I thought was one of the biggest moments I had witnessed.

While in the past Libyans were reluctant to speak out or say anything critical of the Gaddafi regime, that had all gone out the window. Libyans were aching to talk to western media. Men and boys would approach us and ask to tell us stories. They would yell “Sura, sura” and ask you to take photos of everything, including them.

One man followed me through the media center for 20 minutes as I was completing my registration process and recording and photographing the sounds and sights. The man could barely contain himself. Once he saw that I was finished recording, he asked if he could tell me a story.

He wanted me to explore the controversial case of the Bulgarian nurses (and a Palestinian doctor) who were convicted of injecting 400 Libyan babies with HIV in a Benghazi hospital.

In 1998, the Libyan government charged the “Benghazi six” with the crime and their case played out over the next 9 years in Libyan courts. They were sentenced to life but transferred to Bulgarian custody and pardoned by the Bulgarian president.

The Libyan gentleman claimed that it was Gaddafi all along who infected the children and that the western media needed to investigate it so the world could put it on Gaddafi’s tab of terrorist offenses and crimes against humanity.

The man said that he could never say anything about it before because he would be arrested at best and killed at worst. He kept talking about how now there was freedom of speech in Libya, and he wanted to talk. I was hoping he was going to hand me some game-changing evidence that would lead to a killer scoop, but he just kept telling me that the media needed to report that Gaddafi had been responsible for the HIV epidemic. To date, there is no concrete explanation for the outbreak.

While I was disappointed that he didn’t have new and salacious details, I realized that wasn’t the story. The story was that he felt it was finally safe to speak out loud and denounce Gaddafi. It was as if the Libyan people were turning away from the shadows on the cave wall and walking out into the light. It was humbling to witness people exercising what Americans take for granted: freedom of speech.

That was the case the whole weekend. People were relishing the ability to talk for the first time in their lives. They would launch into anti-Gaddafi diatribes and list off his crimes against the world and the Libyan people. They would often say something to the effect of, “I could never say this before, but…”

That was the most amazing—and uplifting—aspect of covering fall of the Gaddafi regime. Hearing from people who had lived in fear and were now experiencing a moment of freedom was just moving.

However, there was a dark cloud hovering over all of it, and one that hovers over Syria.

I remember feeling a sense of doom about Libya as the rebels were basking in their glory. It was clear that with the common enemy gone, the rebel factions were eventually going to turn on each other. Despite the Libyan opposition forming a government in waiting ready to take over once Gaddafi fell, there were tribal divisions in the country that would be difficult to contain.

With the proliferation of weapons and the large population of young and amped up men, it was clear the country would devolve into civil war, and the international community was either overly optimistic or simply blind to the dynamics that would lead to years of civil war.

Libya is a cautionary tale for Syria. Iraq is as well. I won’t get into all the history and dynamics here, but Assad used to warn the world that should his regime fall, the aftermath and rise of extremist groups would make post-2003 Iraq look like a cakewalk. It was a scare tactic that worked for years and kept the international community from taking him out.

Many in the Syrian opposition that just prevailed have extremist leanings, some were al Qaeda adherents and allies. Some claim to have renounced those ways. Some people believe them, others do not.

There should be no tears shed for Assad and his family and loyalists. They all deserve the most gruesome fates imaginable and more.

But the road ahead for the Syrian people and the region is fraught. While I hope the various opposition factions have learned from Iraq and Libya that there is nothing to gain by turning on each other, I am not optimistic.

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I generally avoid writing about domestic politics/policy that I’m not paid to cover because, well, it’s thankless.

But in the last couple of weeks, there have been mass shootings in Texas, California, Ohio, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Kentucky, and Arkansas, and other states.

In the midst of it, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a ban on bump stocks—devices designed to make semi-automatic weapons fire faster, most famously used by the 2017 Las Vegas shooter who killed 60 and wounded hundreds—was illegal.

So, I’m going to vent as someone who has spent more time around guns than most people.

I’ve said this in countless private conversations: America’s gun culture is a death cult, a perverse religion that worships and advocates the proliferation of an invention with one purpose: killing living beings.

The result is daily gun violence that often takes the lives of innocent people just going about their business, whether they are children in school, people shopping for groceries, or people attending concerts. Nearly 50,000 people die each year from gun-related injuries in the United States—about 55 percent suicides, 40 percent homicides, the rest a mix of accidental, law-enforcement related, and unknown causes. And the majority of deaths result from incidents involving legally obtained firearms.

For context, the number of gun-related deaths each year in the United States is almost as many U.S. troops killed in the entire Vietnam War.  

Speaking of war, I spent a lot of time in war zones or unstable countries wracked by militia violence. I have seen the use and the aftermath of the use of guns. It’s horrifying.

And that’s why I feel America’s love of guns is a pathology. This country believes 50,000 lives a year is an acceptable price for the right to own guns, which many equate with “freedom.” That’s not a political or partisan statement; it’s empirical, it’s data.

I remember the first time I saw an assault weapon up close. It was 1993. I was walking down the jetway after arriving at Heathrow Airport. There were two kitted-out police officers with tactical weapons eyeing the arriving passengers. It was during the height of the Troubles, and there were frequent bomb threats.

I felt uncomfortable at the sight of the officers. I felt unsafe. Part of it was the message their presence sent—there were active threats during my visit to London. But part of it was just the unnerving sight of military hardware in public like that.

Not that I had a problem with guns, per se. I grew up with and around guns. It started as it often does with BB guns at summer camp. Then, in my tween and teen years, I graduated to shooting rifles and handguns—and the occasional musket gun. I have an uncle who had guns at a house in the woods, and we would target shoot there.

It was all adult-supervised, and I was trained in gun safety. I enjoyed shooting.

In my 20s, I obtained a carry permit in Massachusetts. I didn’t really have a compelling reason to carry, but I felt since it was a right, I might as well exercise it.

In Massachusetts, the chief of police in each jurisdiction sets the standards for issuing gun licenses under overall state regulations. I first tried to get a carry permit in Boston. I passed the range qualification test, which only two of the 10 of us did the day I took the test. But during the interview process, I was told I did not have a compelling reason to need a carry permit, which I didn’t, and I was offered a permit for target practice only.

A couple of years later, I moved to a different town with different regulations. To obtain a carry license, I was required to pass a comprehensive gun safety course that included classwork on gun laws, such as the use of lethal force, and complete range sessions. After completing the course and passing a background check, I was issued a license. I purchased two handguns, which had to be registered with the state, and I felt that was completely reasonable. I felt Massachusetts regulations were a reasonable minimum for gun licensing and ownership.

I concealed carried a handgun maybe a half dozen times in the 12 years I had a license in Massachusetts. I hated the feeling. I felt self-conscious. I was worried that someone would notice and it would become a “thing.” I also felt hyper-vigilant because I had legal obligations should an incident take place where I might need to use the weapon.

I felt less safe when I carried a gun.

Not everyone has that reaction, obviously, but I didn’t like it because every second I was in public with the gun tucked in my belt, I was thinking about the gun and not being in the moment of whatever I was doing. I felt like I was “on duty.” And legally, I was. I had duties that came with the right to carry my gun. I had the duty to avoid using it unless absolutely necessary. I had the duty to avoid threatening or escalating situations. I had a duty to ensure conditions met legal standards for the use of lethal force should I brandish my weapon.

In the time I had my carry license, I recall only one moment in 1997 when a situation was bordering on a level of danger that I would have been within my rights to draw a gun and protect a friend—I was not carrying at the time. Fortunately, the situation de-escalated. I don’t recall feeling the need to or wanting to carry after that episode, and I did not.

In the years after, I periodically took my guns to ranges, and otherwise they remained locked up at home, to the dismay of one partner during that time who said she felt anxious having guns in the apartment.

Before I moved to DC in 2007, I sold the two handguns I owned.

In 2007, I started a new career as a foreign/war correspondent. My first reporting trip was to Serbia and Kosovo, which was in a state of cold peace after the hot war of the 1990s. There were still bullet wounds in buildings and streets, and there were armed peacekeepers in some of the areas I visited.

Next, I traveled to Sudan, where I was detained at gunpoint in the capital. That was the first time anyone had pointed a gun at me—let alone four men with AKs—and it’s not something you want to experience a second time.

In Colombia, I saw armed men roaming rural villages, and I couldn’t tell who they were and what “side” they were on. When I was checking in for a flight from the remote Choco region back to Bogota, I saw airport employees inspecting a handgun they had confiscated from a passenger.

In summer 2008, I traveled to Lebanon, where men with AKs were on the streets outside every “significant” building, ranging from government buildings to political party offices to the homes of powerbrokers.

Then, I went to Iraq for an embed with U.S. forces.  

Over the next few years, I took reporting trips to Afghanistan, Congo, Pakistan, South Sudan, and Yemen, places where you regularly saw AKs in public. Those places were either in hot conflict, teetering back and forth, or otherwise battling terrorists and militias. Seeing guns on the streets was a sign of insecurity, not freedom.

I interviewed countless civilians who lived in terror. They had all lost someone to conflict.

Then, in 2011, the Arab Spring kicked off, and I spent time in Libya during the civil war. I saw more guns and shooting there than anywhere. I spent one day in a hospital behind the front lines watching doctors frantically treating rebels who had been shot in the fighting. At one point, an ambulance brought in a French journalist who had been shot in the leg.

Covering the war in Libya was nerve-racking, not just because you were around frequent gunfire and clearly at risk of being shot in a hot conflict, but because there were so many amped up young Libyans armed to the teeth and who had little to no military training or weapons discipline. Half the time, you feared getting shot accidentally by friendly rebels who loved firing their weapons in the air for the hell of it.

During the final days of the fight for Tripoli, the other journalists and I who were wolf-packing together regularly had to run as bullets whistled by. In one particularly chaotic episode, I watched tracer fire pass 10 or 20 feet over our heads.

And my experiences and stories are nothing compared to other journalists and friends who took direct fire in war zones—let alone friends who are combat veterans.

At one point, the Tripoli hotel, where many other journalists and I were staying, implemented a gun-check policy at the entrance. The hotel put a giant cardboard box inside the front door, and people deposited their AKs and other machine guns in the box and reclaimed them on the way out. It was like an umbrella check in an American restaurant. It was perversely comical.

In the midst of it all, I saw countless bodies of men and boys killed by gunfire. I recall interviewing a man in a hospital standing next to his 10-year-old son lying in a hospital bed with his life fading from him. He had been shot in the head by a stray AK bullet while playing outside his home in eastern Libya.

In between stints in war zones, I took work trips and vacations to places like Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Croatia, Hungary, Belgium, the Caribbean—places where I didn’t see or hear guns. When I was in those places, I felt myself unclenching, so to speak. I wasn’t worried about being shot—intentionally or accidentally.

Then, I spent 2012 through 2014 living in Afghanistan, where gunfire was a weekly occurrence in Kabul at least. Fortunately, it was sometimes celebratory or recreational, but often it wasn’t.

The only time I legitimately freaked out was Thanksgiving 2014, when a major attack took place atop one of the hills in Kabul about a mile from my house. Afghan forces shooting down at the attackers were spraying bullets all over the city.

The audio booth was located in the rear building of the NPR compound, and at one point, I walked out of the house to head into the booth to do a debrief with All Things Considered on the attack. As I crossed the yard, I heard blasts of gunfire—some of which sounded much closer than the gunfire that had been cracking off for hours—and bullets whistled over the compound.

The louder gunfire seemed maybe a block away, and I didn’t know if there was another attack in my neighborhood or what was going on, so I ran back into the house and shut off the lights to shelter in place until things cooled down. This is audio of that night I recorded on the patio of my house.

In my time as a conflict-zone journalist, I used to try to put friends and family who worried about my safety at ease by joking that I was probably more likely to get shot in D.C.

And that is the problem.

Gun violence in warzones is expected and “understandable,” even if the reasons for the underlying conflict are not. While it can be unsettling and depressing to see AKs everywhere you look in Baghdad, Beirut, Goma, Kabul, Khartoum, Tripoli (Lebanon or Libya), you expect it, and as a journalist, that’s often why you’re there.

But when you come back to the United States, the beacon of light, the city upon a hill, the nation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, you want to be able to relax and put aside any concerns about being the victim of gun violence.

Unfortunately, I can’t.

While any serious reading of the Federalist Papers shows the American founders did not intend the Second Amendment to be applied as liberally as it has, the fact is, guns are woven into the fabric of the nation.

Gun rights advocates have placed unfettered gun ownership at the center of American ideology and life.

For the gun lobby, Americans should be able to purchase high-powered, high-capacity weapons and modify them to shoot at higher rates of speed. Why? Because freedom, Second Amendment.

There is no public policy or societal upside to America’s gun culture, only downsides, according to every statistically valid study. Subsistence hunting aside, which does not require AR-15s or semiautomatic handguns with high-capacity magazines, guns do not serve a “positive” purpose in U.S. life.

Guns are for killing. Full stop. Guns don’t have any other function. They are designed to rip, mangle, and mutilate flesh and cause the injury or death of living things.

Guns don’t kill people; people kill people is the classic dismissive comment. Yes, guns do kill people because people choose to kill people with guns because it’s a lot easier than killing them with knives, bats, arrows, or kindness.

The evidence has been out there for ages. The proliferation of guns means gun violence and gun deaths. Serious studies have shown over and over again that in households with guns, there are far higher rates of spousal murder and suicide. Despite the rare examples of a homeowner fending off an intruder with a gun, data show that having a gun in the house makes residents less safe.

I have many friends and family members who are law-abiding gun owners, as most gun owners are, and I was. I don’t see how their lives are quantifiably “better,” or that they are freer because they own guns. I get that some enjoy hunting, and I don’t have a problem with subsistence or consumption hunting—trophy hunting is a different matter—and I don’t have a problem with people owning reasonable hunting guns, which do not include most handguns or semiautomatic rifles.  

I recently traveled to Poland and Norway for work. I was there covering military exercises and thus was around guns part of the time. But because I wasn’t in war zones and was in countries where gun ownership is not a pathology like America, I was relaxed. I walked around the streets knowing I wasn’t going to get shot. I knew that if people around me had a disagreement over something, none of them would settle it with a spray of bullets as often happens in the United States.

European and other countries have chosen that gun ownership is a net negative and have banned it. Not surprisingly, they have exponentially less gun violence. I have yet to run into a European complaining that they feel less free because they can’t own guns. More often, it’s the opposite; people will say they feel the freedom to not get shot.

Yes, there are criminals in other countries. There is murder and violence in Europe. There are bad people everywhere. But criminals in Europe or other advanced economies/nations do far less damage with knives and cars than criminals in America do with guns.

America has chosen that school shootings like Columbine, Newtown, Parkland, or Uvalde are an acceptable price to pay for the right to own guns.

Americans are OK with bowling, grocery shopping, outdoor concerts, pool parties, and worshiping being life-threatening activities because it’s more important for citizens to have guns.

America has chosen that the freedom to have guns is more important than freedom from being shot. That’s the pathology in this country, and people have spent billions getting politicians elected and judges confirmed to ensure that unfettered gun ownership is the law of the land.

It’s disgraceful. It is a stain on this nation that makes America a joke around the world. I can’t tell you how many times I had people in places like Lebanon or Afghanistan—let alone England or Greece—say they couldn’t understand America’s gun culture.

I have seen more guns, gun violence, and the aftermath of it than anyone should. And so much of what I have seen has been the impact of that violence on innocent civilians caught between warring factions or civilians viewed as fair game because they “support the other side.”

It’s sickening. It’s embarrassing as a member of the human race that we have not evolved to the point where we value human life (at least once that life emerges from a woman) enough to take reasonable steps to protect it.

I’m tired of all the excuses and justifications—most gun crimes are committed by people who obtained the gun illegally, that the shooter was mentally ill, had the teachers been armed, the shooter wouldn’t have killed all those children.

Stop it. The problem is that America decided guns are the second-most important right in society. Today, there are more guns than people in the United States.

At least when the founding fathers resorted to gun violence to settle their disputes, they had the decency to do it in a controlled duel rather than today’s approach of driving by a rival’s home and spraying bullets out the car window and shooting up a neighborhood.

Cut it out with the thoughts and prayers nonsense. Stop pretending that some greater force is responsible for this. America chose guns. With that comes accidental and intentional gun violence.

Stop clutching pearls and hand wringing. Stop rationalizing that the problem is mental health or the lack of enforcement of gun laws. Have the balls to say, “Well, I believe the right of gun ownership is more important than anyone’s right to life.”

Because that’s simply what it comes down to in America.

In summer 2021, I was on Cape Cod when my phone rang one night around 11:30 p.m. A neighbor told me a man had been shot and killed behind our condo complex. The police needed access to our surveillance system—I was the condo board president and the only one, other than management, who knew how to access the footage. The footage in the linked article is from our system.

The victim was not the target. He was a man my age walking back to his car after having dinner with his wife at a nearby restaurant. He was struck by a stray bullet when two men opened fire at each other on an adjacent street—a street in the middle of an upscale D.C. neighborhood, a street where there is frequent drug activity and periodic gunfire.

To be fair, I’d bet all the guns carried or fired on the block are illegally obtained, but in a country that has decided it should be easier to get a gun than a driver’s license (something else way too easy to obtain), it’s kind of a joke to resort to the claim that better enforcement of gun laws would prevent this activity. It’s even more of a joke when gun rights activists are constantly fighting to make it easier for people in D.C. to obtain guns legally. There’s some magical thinking there that only law-abiding people with no criminal intent would take advantage of laxer gun regulations in D.C.

Don’t think for a second that had the victim of this particular shooting been armed he would be alive today. Carrying a gun would have done nothing for him. He was not a party to the conflict and not threatened. Also, he wasn’t in the “wrong place at the wrong time,” as is so often said to dismiss some of these kinds of episodes.

In the greatest, freest nation, there should be no wrong places or wrong times.

A week later, there was another shooting about a block away that could have gone far worse for people nearby. A gunfight erupted on the street near outdoor dining areas on a Thursday evening. It’s amazing that more innocent people weren’t killed.

I’ve walked the stretch of street behind my condo probably thousands of times over the 17 years I have lived in the neighborhood. And every time I do, in the back of my mind, I am thinking about the possibility of being shot and am surveilling for potential threats. I have never once felt that carrying a gun would make me safer walking home at night.

Frankly, it’s appalling that the solution so many advocate is that, as a law-abiding citizen, I should carry a gun, as that would deter crime, and if crime happens, I could defend myself.

You might recall I wrote about being assaulted in summer 2022—it was on the same street where the man was shot in 2021. I have played that incident over and over in my head—as one does with trauma—and I can tell you there is no way that situation would have played out better had I been armed. When you are surrounded and outnumbered like I was, at best, you might be able to draw and take out a couple of assailants before the others are on top of you, take your gun, and kill you with it—if one of them hasn’t already shot you with a piece they are carrying.

There is no question in my mind that had I been carrying at that moment, I would be dead. Frankly, that is something I learned from my NRA gun safety course I took before I got my license in Massachusetts. We watched videos showing assailants 20 feet from an armed person run toward the victim and disarm them before they could draw and fire a shot. The lesson was that inside a certain distance from a threat, your gun is useless at best and the instrument of your own death at worst.

As I noted earlier, I say none of this as a partisan, political screed. I’m no anti-gun peacenik. I belong to no political party. My view on guns is entirely empirical. I look at what I have seen and experienced around the world. I look at the data. America is an outlier among advanced economies. America’s take on guns is unique.

Again, the law is the law in the United States. The Second Amendment isn’t going away, nor are the monied interests supporting laws and lawsuits to ensure there are as few restrictions on gun purchases and ownership as possible.

Mass shootings will continue. Innocent people will die. Wives and children will be intimidated and killed by husbands and fathers. Criminals will roam the streets with guns they obtained illegally but effortlessly—and if the gun lobby had its way, many criminals would have obtained their guns legally.

There’s no putting it all back in the bottle.

That doesn’t mean give up. That doesn’t mean stop being outraged by every shooting and every political official who utters the pablum “thoughts and prayers.”

That doesn’t mean stop pushing for bans on weapons like AR-15s that mass shooters are so fond of. That doesn’t mean stop pushing for bare-minimum measures that will make it more difficult for people who shouldn’t have guns to get them. At least the Supreme Court got one thing right recently when it upheld restrictions on gun ownership by people under domestic violence restraining orders.

I’ll happily endure the criticism and vitriol of the gun lobby for speaking out at this point. Again, I’ve spent more time downrange and seen more carnage than most American gun fanatics have. I’m perfectly comfortable saying the proliferation of guns in America is a net-negative across the board.

I’m tired of reading stories about people like Callie Weems, the 23-year-old nurse who was killed in the June 21 mass shooting at the grocery store in Arkansas. She was shot while tending to one of the other shooting victims.

She’s now a statistic. But she was a human first, and she deserved better. We all do.

First, Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers out there. Forgive me for “hijacking” your day, but I need to make an important public service announcement.

If you live in one of 1,000 cities in the world — ranging from Austin to Zagreb — you’re likely to see a spectacle a week from today: dozens, maybe hundreds, of people dressed in tweed and other distinguished attire tooling around on motorcycles.

It’s not Rolling Thunder (although that’s coming up soon) or some sort of bike week event. It’s the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride.

If you aren’t familiar with it, which not enough people are (unfortunately), it’s an annual global fundraising and awareness event for Movember. Unfortunately, not a lot of people — certainly in the United States, at least — are familiar with Movember, but you should be.

Movember is the largest international nonprofit supporting men’s health. Movember funds prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and mental health/suicide prevention programs, and has raised more than $1 billion for those causes in the two decades the organization has been active.

Here’s Movember in its own words:

Men’s health is in crisis. Men are dying on average 4.5 years earlier than women, and for largely preventable reasons.

A growing number of men – around 10.8M globally – are facing life with a prostate cancer diagnosis. Globally, testicular cancer is the most common cancer among young men. And across the world, one man dies by suicide every minute of every day, with males accounting for 69% of all suicides.

…

We’re doing what others can’t. We unite experts from around the world to collaborate on projects that will fundamentally change the way men in need are treated and supported. To ensure our impact is significant, far-reaching and long-lasting, we prioritise funding for the three biggest health issues facing men: mental health and suicide prevention, prostate cancer and testicular cancer.

…

We use funding to impact men’s health both locally and globally. We invest in country- and culture-specific health projects while collaborating on game-changing solutions that address the men’s health crisis on a global scale. We share what we learn and report thoroughly on every initiative we fund. We hold ourselves accountable, measuring success along the way to ensure we’re always learning and improving.

I have been participating in the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride since 2018. I got involved because of my family history of prostate cancer. Since then, I can think of at least eight men I know who have been treated (successfully) for prostate cancer.

During that time, Movember added mental health to its causes, and that has become my focus in recent years, as I have detailed in my book and testimonials I have done for Movember.

What has surprised and disappointed me since I have been involved with Movember is how difficult it is to get attention for men’s health. Each year, I do media outreach to get press coverage of the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride — which is made for visual and audio media — and the response has been crickets.

Two years ago in Boston I did an interview with a WBZ radio program, and last year one of the Washington, D.C., TV stations posted some photos online I sent them after the ride. That’s the extent of the media coverage I have been able to generate — as a journalist with a lot of friends in the business I have reached out to about this.

It shows how far we have to go to get people to take men’s cancers and mental health more seriously. This year I reached out to members of Congress who have survived prostate cancer and who have experienced mental health struggles. I reached out to the House Men’s Health Caucus to invite members to attend the event next weekend to speak or to do some social media promotion.

Nothing.

You might remember back in December and January the controversy around Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s prostate cancer treatment and how he played it so close to the vest he didn’t inform the White House prior to his surgery. That’s an example of a big part of the problem: men are still uncomfortable talking openly about their health. Austin later called his attempt to keep things quiet a “missed opportunity” to set an example and provide leadership when prostate cancer affects one in six black men compare to one in eight for men as a whole.

It’s such a stark difference from women. Think about how many famous/high profile women have shared their battles with cancer to raise awareness and motivate women to get screened and take steps to reduce their cancer risks. Think about how many women turn out for breast cancer walks and runs: you can picture the sea of pink shirts.

While some famous men have discussed their prostate cancer and become advocates for awareness/screening such as Al Roker and Ben Stiller, they are the exception rather than the rule. More men need to open up about their experiences and normalize discussions about physical and mental health. That’s all the more reason I’m disappointed none of the members of Congress I reached out to about the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride responded — granted it’s likely their staffers never relayed my emails, but that’s a symptom of the problem.

In the meantime, I will continue to support Movember and participate in events like the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride to help raise awareness and funds. Please join me in this cause.

If you have a vintage, modern classic, café racer, bobber, or scrambler motorcycle in particular, register and ride next week. If you can’t join the ride, please make a donation here.

***

Now, in the better late than never category, Kirkus Reviews finally did a write up of my book, calling it “a poignant, gritty memoir of a disillusioned reporter.”

After you make your donation for the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride, pick up a(nother) copy of my book, Passport Stamps, which is a call to action for better mental health education and treatment for journalists and civilians who work in conflict zones.

And once again, Happy Mother’s Day!

April 4 was the 10-year anniversary of the murder of AP photographer Anja Niedringhaus, who was killed by an Afghan police officer while covering the preparations for the 2014 presidential election. AP reporter Kathy Gannon was seriously wounded but survived the shooting. Here is one of the news spots I filed for NPR from Kabul that day:

Anja Niedringhaus was a veteran war photographer who had covered Afghanistan for years. According to the AP, she and correspondent Kathy Gannon, who’s also covered Afghanistan for years, were traveling with a convoy of election workers and Afghan security forces. The convoy stopped at a district center in eastern Khost Province, and a police commander there approached their car. He then fired his AK-47 only at the two women. The shooter surrendered at the scene. There is still no indication of a motive or any claim of credit. The Taliban have been conducting high-profile attacks against foreigners and Afghans in recent weeks to disrupt tomorrow’s presidential election.

Anja was one of some 20 foreign civilians killed in Afghanistan during the first four months of 2014. Others included UN officials, teachers, medical workers, and election monitors. It was a brutal period and was a turning point for the international civilians in Afghanistan who had become direct targets of attacks. Conditions for the international community there only deteriorated over the following years.

I wrote about the growing danger to foreigners in early 2014 in my book Passport Stamps. NPR photographer David Gilkey—who was killed in Afghanistan in 2016—was with me in Kabul in March and early April 2014, and we had been traveling around doing some fun stories about Buzkashi, security improvements in a violent part of Kandahar, and the Nowzad animal shelter/charity, along with tough stories about displaced Afghans and election violence.

David had been covering Afghanistan since 2001 and had seen just about everything, but what was going on then had him unnerved—which was unnerving to me. If he was starting to feel that things were getting dark and dangerous in Kabul, then it must be bad.

I was grateful to have him there. It was a tough period having to cover all the violence and report on the deaths of friends and people I knew, and it was also stressful to figure out how to react to the increasing danger in the city. Having a guy in the house who had lived through the worst of Iraq and Afghanistan helped keep me somewhat grounded. Squeak, whiskey, Ambien, and Xanax also helped.

We talked about friends and colleagues we had lost over the years. We talked about why we did the work. We questioned whether Afghanistan was worth our lives. We joked about how it would be OK for NPR if either he or I got killed in Afghanistan, but if something happened to Renee it would be a tragedy of epic proportions. “Imagine the shit show if a host bites it,” he said.

…

We discussed PTS and self-medication (and prescription meds too—David was on some heavy stuff to battle the ravages brought on by a life of covering the shit and near-death experiences). There wasn’t anything we couldn’t discuss candidly and without judgment. David became my tribe within the tribe.

We realized that no matter how bad it got, we had to stick it out, for the sake of the story. David had been there from the beginning. He rode in with U.S. Special Forces in 2001. He had spent more time in the country, mostly with the U.S. military, than a lot of troops did. He had seen more shit in Afghanistan than anyone I knew.

He said he had to see the story through for the Afghan people and the members of the military and their families. It wasn’t about him, and he sure as shit wasn’t in it for the glory and awards. He was committed to making sure the world never forgot about the plight of everyone on the ground in Afghanistan.

…

In mid-April, David departed. I soldiered on until the completion of my eight-week rotation at the end of April. The day before I left on my break, an Afghan police officer shot and killed three American medical workers as they entered a hospital in Kabul.

That was the most intense and emotionally draining of my rotations in Kabul. During that break I considered quitting. Why should I go back to Kabul again and risk life and limb for an organization that was going to cut me loose? Friends, and some coworkers, advised me to bail. I thought about it.

I didn’t. I stayed until the end of 2014 when NPR closed the bureau. While that decision had been made in 2012, I disagreed with it and felt NPR should have kept someone in Kabul after 2014 to keep full-time attention on the story and the declining conditions. I don’t think it would have changed the outcome, but the American people and policymakers needed more reporting from Afghanistan in 2015 through 2021 showing that conditions were getting worse as international support dialed back.

There were abundant signs that years of efforts that cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars—trillions when factoring direct and indirect costs—were not transforming Afghanistan into a peaceful democracy. Policymakers needed to see that the Taliban was gaining ground and leverage and that it was heading toward a bad outcome.

Had policymakers spent more time working on a political deal when the Afghan government and international community had greater leverage in the 2010-2011 timeframe—and less time crowing about ephemeral progress and turning corners—there was a chance to end up with something better than the Afghanistan of today. But it was never going to be the Afghanistan the United States in particular was promising to the people of Afghanistan and the United States.

This is something I recently discussed with Beth Bailey on The Afghanistan Project Podcast. We talked about my time on the ground as a journalist and my work at the Defense Department Office of Inspector General on Afghanistan oversight reports.

The conversation was largely about how there were so many clear indicators for years that U.S.-led efforts to remake Afghanistan as a democracy with liberty and justice for all were not working and yet policymakers, the military, and Congress kept investing in failing strategies. I’ve written and talked extensively over the years about how frustrating it was to hear the talking points in Kabul and Washington about “progress” and the “young generation of educated Afghans who were going to lead the country forward” and then see the realities on the ground in rural Afghanistan where there was little change in customs and attitudes and little appetite for democracy and women’s rights.

One of the disconnects I tried to expose in my journalism and IG work (particularly in this IG report, pages 12 through 20) was between the metrics being used to show progress and success and the actual change that was or wasn’t happening on the ground. There was a lot of emphasis on how many Afghans were going to school, particularly how many women and girls, and how that was an indicator of how much Afghanistan was transforming.

Similarly, there was a lot of emphasis on how infant and maternal mortality rates were declining and life expectancy was increasing. Those were also signs of great progress, officials said.

But all the metrics were misleading because they were counting and measuring quantitative outputs and not qualitative outcomes. In other words, it sounded great that more kids were enrolled in school, but the amount of quality education being delivered was a fraction of what was being touted in talking points.

I did a story about this for NPR in 2013. Here are some snippets of that report.

But the numbers tell only part of the story: While 10 million students might be enrolled in all levels of education, they aren't all attending classes, and there are questions about how many of those attending are actually learning.

One Afghan official told me that on most days attendance across the country was maybe 50 percent.

Although some 4,000 schools have been built since the fall of the Taliban, some provinces are desperately in need of more. At the same time, there are other provinces where large numbers of schools are closed because of a lack of security or of teachers, or simply because not enough families want to send their children to school.

Classroom space isn't the only thing in short supply, says teacher Roshan Rasooli.

"We have a shortage of books," she says. "Seventeen of 55 students are present today, and we still don't have enough books."

Officials like Bashir Ahmad Abed, headmaster of the Sadeqi school, says even if a student has a book, there's no guarantee he or she can read it: Many books are too complicated for the students.

An Afghan official said that half of the teachers at the time did not meet the minimum qualifications, and many did not understand the material they were teaching.

Furthermore, some schools lacked space and teachers, so students attended in shifts, meaning in some schools, students would only attend class two-to-three hours a day.

So, even though maybe 10 million children were enrolled in school, at most five million showed up each day. Half of them were taught by unqualified teachers. Many did not have books. And many attended class for only a couple of hours a day.

Thus, the difference between the impressive sounding, quantitative talking point that since the fall of the Taliban nine million more children were enrolled in school and the qualitative outcome of how much education was being delivered and received by children and how much it was changing their life prospects was orders of magnitude.

That was the case with everything in Afghanistan. While some of the health statistics sounded like big improvements, how much was it translating to healthier lives for poor Afghans? Monthly per capita income grew substantially, but how much was that skewed by the big salaries educated Afghans were receiving from Western governments, contractors, and non-governmental organizations that was not trickling down to the average Afghan outside the cities?

Tens of thousands of Afghan women were participating in empowerment programs, but how many were returning to villages and families where the men still held traditional values and didn’t want women working outside the house?

And then there were all the security metrics that might have been measurable but gave false impressions. There were never as many security forces as claimed, but of the 280-something-ish-thousand actual Afghan military and police forces, how many were effectively trained and equipped and showing up on a regular basis?

Even some of the things that could be measured did not tell a good story. In the years leading up to the withdrawal and collapse, the number of districts controlled by government forces was in decline, as was the percentage of the population living in areas under government control or influence.

Bottom line, it was abundantly clear as the Obama surge wound down that the so-called positive indicators were winding down as well and continued to until the end. The efforts were not changing the fabric of Afghanistan and its society outside of some elite bubbles in Kabul and a few other major cities.

And this is the unanswered question today: why with all the clear evidence from journalists, academics, and inspector general offices that programs and policies were not leading to fundamental, lasting change in Afghanistan did policymakers not change course and focus on what was achievable in the Afghan context and would be better than where things are now?

***

Two quick promotional things to note. First, I did an author Q&A with Deborah Kalb recently about why I wrote Passport Stamps, where the name came from, what it meant to me to write the book, and what I hope readers will take away from it. You can read the Q&A here.

Second, the 2024 Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride is coming up in May. It’s the annual global motorcycle ride and fundraiser for Movember, which supports men’s health, particularly prostate cancer and mental health. It’s a great and important cause, and I hope you will go to my DGR page and donate all the money you have left after buying my book if you haven’t already!

The following essay is adapted in part from my book Passport Stamps. It contains some graphic descriptions of violence.

January 17, 2014, started as a typical Friday night for expats in Kabul. A small group of us were settling into a round of gin and tonics at the Associated Press bureau before heading to an Abba-themed party at the Russian embassy.

The alcohol hadn’t begun to wash away the stress of another week in Afghanistan when there was the sound.

It was that ambiguous low-frequency sound, something between a boom and a rumble, that made your stomach drop when you heard it. Immediately, your brain started scrolling through the menu of possible causes like Iron Man performing a system scan. The options, from most palatable to least, were a door slamming downstairs, an earthquake, a controlled detonation by Afghan security forces, a gas canister blowing up in an Afghan’s home, a rocket or mortar, or a suicide bomb. All but the last two were generally singular events after which there was silence.

We all paused, waiting for another boom or gunfire. It was maybe five or 10 seconds—time always seemed to freeze in those moments—and then there was gunfire. It was loud and crisp, clearly close by—maybe two or three blocks away.

The “normal” response would have been to move away from windows and shelter in the house. Instead, a few of us ran out onto the balcony to look for evidence of the attack—it’s what journalists do.

The initial burst of gunfire only lasted a few seconds, not even an entire magazine of an AK-47.

The echoes of gunfire faded into an unnatural silence in a city of millions. The pause gave us time to continue processing. The gunfire had clearly been nearby, but was it an Afghan security person firing in a panicked response to the blast, or was it attackers storming a compound after a suicide bomb blasted an opening in a door or wall?

Twenty or 30 seconds later, there was another burst of gunfire. It sounded somewhat muffled, most likely it was farther away, maybe a mile, maybe more. It lasted longer—several sustained bursts.

At that point it appeared we were dealing with multiple coordinated attacks across the city. That was rare in the Afghan capital. It hadn’t happened in my tenure there at least. But it was always a possibility, and frankly I sometimes wondered why that didn’t happen more often given the enormity of Kabul and the limited reach and capabilities of security forces.

After that second volley of gunfire, we abandoned our drinks and any thoughts of attending the Abba party. We began calling our Afghan producers and fixers.

It was a well-rehearsed routine, unfortunately. Our local staff called contacts in the Ministry of Interior, the Kabul police, and the intelligence service. The ex-pats turned to Twitter, searching for posts that might reveal the locations and targets of the attacks. We alerted our newsrooms and tweeted initial details ourselves.

The New York Times correspondent soon left to go work the story separately. Jessica Donati from Reuters, Yaro Trofimov from the Wall Street Journal and I stayed at the AP house with bureau chief Patrick Quinn, and we continued working the story.

The practical reality was in a situation of an ongoing attack, you were all going to end up with the same information and story, and no one was really going to scoop anyone else, so there was an incentive to pool resources and share information. Sure, Reuters and AP were going to compete to be first and faster with details, and we all were looking for exclusive angles, but when you were all together to start with in a situation like that, it just made sense to collaborate on piecing together the details.

I can’t recall how long it took before details triangulated and we determined that there was at least one attack taking place just down the street in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood that was home to embassies, news organizations, NGOs, and upper-class Afghans. While it was a target-rich environment, it was also one of the safer neighborhoods because the targets demanded increased security measures.

We knew a lot of people living in the neighborhood, so there was a concern in the back of our minds that someone we knew could have been a target or victim.

Yaro, Jess, and I headed outside to see how close to the scene we could get. Patrick bunkered down in the AP office with his staff and worked the phones and started filing the available details.

Yaro, Jess, and I walked the 100 feet down the street to the Journal’s compound to grab body armor from their stash. We donned vests and then set out farther down the street until we arrived at a crowd of Afghan and expat journalists who security forces had corralled at the end of one of the main streets in Wazir.

One of my Afghan producers was there, and he provided me the limited details he was able to gather to that point. It appeared the attack was taking place at one of the popular restaurants in the city frequented by the international community. The Lebanese Taverna was one of our regular haunts. I had dined there with friends about a week prior.

We plied security officers for information, and initially “very bad” was about the extent of what they would tell us. Pickup trucks full of police and other Afghan forces drove in and out of the street. Ambulances and other emergency vehicles sped by.

Afghan security at the scene would not allow us to walk down the street toward the restaurant, so Jess, Yaro, and I decided to walk back up the hill and then along a parallel street to see if we could cut down another street that would come out closer to the restaurant.

The three of us walked through the neighborhood in the chilly, smoky winter air as gunshots periodically rang out. We turned a corner and headed down the street to approach the restaurant. Suddenly, we heard men yelling at us. Maybe they fired warning shots, or maybe those were just shots being fired in response to the attack—fog of war.

We identified ourselves as journalists, but the security forces insisted we turn back. In the heat of an attack like that, you made a quick appeal to be allowed closer, but you didn’t push it. Amped up Afghan police officers—who were often the least educated, trained, and steady of the security forces—were not people you wanted to test. They generally had a shoot first approach in situations like that, and they fired off rounds like people giving away Halloween candy. Fortunately, they tended to have the aim of Storm Troopers, but still.

The three of us worked our way back to the main press scrum at the other side of the neighborhood and searched for details.

With little information available from the security forces and journalists there, we moved onto the next step of covering an attack—head to the hospitals to find survivors and get eyewitness accounts.

Outside the Wazir Akhbar Khan hospital, we encountered crying family members of Afghan victims of the attack. One man said he was the uncle of an Afghan driver killed at the restaurant. He did not know who the driver was working for that night.

Doctors said they treated one Afghan worker from the restaurant for injuries from the blast, but we were unable to speak to that person to hear their account. Two bodies arrived at the hospital. Doctors said at least one body was brought to another hospital.

All the victims accounted for to that point were Afghan, but we sensed that was still preliminary information and the death toll would climb and likely include members of the international community.

By the time we returned to the AP bureau, the gunfire had long ceased and a small contingent of Afghan police kept journalists and others from getting any closer than a couple of blocks from the restaurant.

It was approaching midnight when we finally had most of the details. Around 7:30 p.m., a single suicide bomber approached the restaurant on foot and detonated an explosive vest out front, killing security guards and the Afghan driver sitting in his car.

The blast ripped open the security gate outside the restaurant and two gunmen ran inside and opened fire on the diners and staff. They murdered three UN staff, the IMF representative, two EU police trainers, two faculty members from the American University in Kabul, the Lebanese owner of the restaurant, and Afghan restaurant workers. Twenty-one people died in the attack, eight Afghans and 13 foreigners. Some were friends of ours.

It was a gut punch. We had to push aside grief and thoughts of how it could have been any of us in the restaurant that night and focus on reporting the story.

We worked until 3 a.m. Yaro and Jess had long gone, and Patrick and I were the only ones left at the AP house. One of the victims of the attack was a UN official who was one of Patrick’s closest friends, and Patrick was just devastated.

Some eight hours after we started our pre-party festivities, Patrick and I poured fresh drinks. Instead of drinking to loosen up and have fun, we were trying to numb ourselves and counteract the emotions and adrenaline. At 5:30 a.m., we finally crashed.

The next day, I visited the scene of the attack. It was gruesome. Blood stained the street. Bits of flesh clung to nearby tree branches 20 feet in the air. Windows of neighboring houses were shattered.

A few men were shoveling debris from in front of the restaurant as Afghan police officers surveyed the wreckage. A silver Toyota Corolla that had been parked out front was sitting in the street with the front end mangled and the glass blown out. One of the victims was the driver who was sitting in his car in front of the restaurant at the time of the blast.

The giant steel door to the restaurant was crumpled like a ball of paper. The police prevented me from exploring the inside of the restaurant.

As I stood there processing the devastation, I could hear the attack playing out in my head. First was the rumble of the blast. Then, the loud gunfire from the first attacker arriving at the scene. After that, the gunfire that sounded like it was somewhere across the city.

But it wasn’t. That gunfire was inside the restaurant, which is why it sounded muffled and distant.

To this day, I hear that sound in my head and know that was the moment the people in the restaurant were being shot to death.

As I was hearing that sound in real time, it was just another attack in Kabul, just another news story to cover. But that night set things in motion. None of our lives were the same afterward.

The Taliban issued a statement and claimed the attack was retribution for an alleged airstrike earlier in the week that killed civilians. They were targeting a restaurant “frequented by high-ranking foreigners where they used to dine with booze and liquor in the plenty.”

That part was true—diplomats, UN officials, journalists, and others regularly dined at the restaurant and partook of wine and beer served in white teapots.

Still, the attack was largely unprecedented. Over the years, the Taliban had staged attacks on some of the international hotels in Kabul, but generally Taliban attacks targeted military or government facilities. International civilians were generally considered off limits.

Again, there were exceptions, but for the most part, the danger for expat civilians was being in the wrong place at the wrong time rather than being targeted outright.

That all changed on Jan. 17, 2014. That night finally popped the “Kabubble,” as many of us referred to the city that often seemed removed from the conflict. While maybe the city itself and the security threats hadn’t changed that much, we changed.

In the days after the Taverna attack, Yaro, Jess, and I visited some of the grocery stores and restaurants we had frequented for years to inspect their security measures—blast walls and gates, safe rooms, exit routes, etc. It was something we should have done from the moment we each arrived in the country, but security was good enough and foreign civilians were generally not the target of attacks, so we deluded ourselves about our level of safety in the city and at places like the Taverna or some of the other clubs and restaurants.

In the weeks and months after the Taverna attack, the Taliban carried out numerous attacks in Kabul targeting the international community—often election workers as the Taliban had vowed to prevent the presidential election in April 2014.

Taliban militants attacked election offices and carried out a shooting inside the Serena Hotel in March, killing nine people, including Afghan journalist Ahmad Sardar, his wife, and two of his children as well as several foreign election workers.

The Taliban executed a Swedish journalist who was walking in the street. Militants tried to attack the offices of a western nongovernmental organization but hit a neighboring house occupied by Christian missionaries. An Afghan police officer—possibly influenced by the Taliban—murdered AP photographer Anja Niedringhaus and critically wounded reporter Kathy Gannon.

While the Taliban failed to prevent the election, it succeeded in drastically altering conditions for and the mood of the international community. Some aid and development organizations evacuated staff and reduced their activities. Many organizations restricted their personnel from leaving their secured compounds. The once infamous—and frankly somewhat obscene—social scene dried up as fewer people were allowed out at night and some restaurants and guesthouses closed.

Things grew bleaker over the course of 2014. While I left that December when NPR closed the bureau, friends and colleagues who stayed said things continued to deteriorate in the following years. As U.S. and NATO troops withdrew and handed over security responsibility to Afghan forces, perceived and actual security declined.

The Taliban continued attacking restaurants and hotels frequented by the international community, killing expats and Afghans who were trying to help the country. The mood grew darker, and people talked less about “winning” the war and more about how to prevent a hard landing.

Cliché as the expression may be, Jan. 17, 2014, was a turning point in Afghanistan. It was a moment when even some of the most optimistic members of the international community stopped to wonder what the mission was, where it was heading, what could be achieved, and if any of it was worth the lives of our friends and colleagues who died that night.  

December is the month of holidays and “year in review” stories and posts. From news organizations to relatives, people churn out articles and missives about the top news stories of the year, the notable passings, or the often cringe-inducing humble brags of the family travels and achievements of questionable significance.

I’m taking a different approach, compiling a “year in reviews” to make one last sales pitch for my book Passport Stamps before the end of the year.

That’s because other than the 20 to 30 copies I have sold directly, I have yet to receive a dime for any book sales. As I am with an independent publisher, my deal did not include an advance, and I get paid annually in the spring for the previous year’s sales.

So, if someone buys a book in the next three days, I will get paid for it sometime in the spring. If a buyer waits until January 1, 2024, I won’t see any proceeds until spring 2025. Thus, you can see why I want to cram in all the sales I can before the ball drops.

Plus, I spent 14 months with no salary or income beyond Substack subscription revenue while writing the book. While I don’t ever expect to ever recover what it cost me to write the book—it was more important to write it to heal and share my story in hopes of helping others—I obviously want to make back as much as I possibly can.

I know that most recipients of this Substack have already purchased the book (thank you), but if you’ve been on the fence, now’s the time to grab a copy. To help convince you, I’ve compiled reviews from Amazon, Goodreads, and Barnes and Noble. These are real reviews from real readers—many are friends, but they are still independent reviews. There is no better sales pitch for something in life than a testimonial from an actual user.

At the end of this post are links to some of the interviews I’ve done and some other coverage of the book.

Again, if you have read the book, please give it a rating and short review (Amazon, Goodreads, Instagram, etc.) to help inspire others to buy and read and to boost my placement in searches. And please share on your social media (and tag me: Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn). Selling creative work—books, paintings, music—is a viral thing and relies on “word of mouth” for those of us who are not James Patterson or Toni Morrison—or Britney Spears—who sell millions just by name recognition. Please forward this email to anyone you think might enjoy Passport Stamps.

Lastly, I still have copies on hand that I can autograph and personalize if you purchase through this link.

Hope you have had a great holiday season, and best wishes for a happy, healthy, and purposeful 2024!

Amazon Reviews:

A hard-hitting, funny, deep, blast of a book!

I very rarely recommend a book to others but Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home, is outstanding. The author is a former colleague. To me, a retired military officer, he’s a rare journalist who “gets it” regarding war. Sean is also a great guy and one hell of a writer. I can hear his voice in the pages. It’s a riveting and funny book, deep but not depressing, especially considering the topics. Fantastic writing by a guy who has truly seen and done it all.

A funny and exciting read!

Sean doesn’t hold back in this chronicle of his quest for danger and earning the credentials as a “real” war journalist. He is honest and self-effacing. It’s also a page turner because of all of his adventures. I love it!

An excellent, informative and easy to read book about Sean's years reporting from conflict zones.

I’ve known Sean since we were both fairly young and have followed his radio career since I unexpectedly heard him reporting from Iceland on my own public radio station. If you’ve heard him speak either in real life or on the radio, you’ll probably do as I did and read this book with his made for “NPR voice” in your head.

This book is fascinating, deep and darkly comedic, full of cultural references from our generation, and a raw autobiography of what Sean went through over the last 15-20 years, all while chasing his tribe through places many of us will never visit. His years as a parachute journalist and then in more permanent positions including as NPR's last correspondent in Kabul, he takes us along for the good, the bad, the 'too much information zone', the very scary and everything in between.

He informs us of the awful realities of the political public relations stunts that are pulled daily around the globe and in DC. If not for his candid reporting of what he saw at times, we all might believe what we were sold on TV regarding these various conflicts. I appreciate how he explains things to the layperson and this book is very readable and very candid.

He and Squeak returned to the states, but he was not the same person I first heard reporting from hot springs in Iceland or played in the high school band with. He is deeply changed and impacted by years of suppressing what he has seen, who he has interviewed and the death and destruction along the way.

If the task of writing this book has helped him process his experiences and the psychological implications of having worked in war zones, then it has done a better job than his employers who let him down. The lack of support and training for journalists working in war zones is appalling and hopefully may be improved upon this publication. He's clearly shown a need for mental health training for journalists and makes you think about what the voices on the air each day are going through, behind the scenes. I encourage everyone to grab a copy of this book.

An honest, compelling, and darkly humorous look into the world of a war correspondent

Sean Carberry has been to some of the worst places in the world - in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere - to tell the stories of the human cost of war in the various conflicts of the early 21st Century. This book takes you the behind the camera (or, in his case, microphone), as he illustrates the mental and emotional toll that this critical work can take on a person.

It's also a highly relatable story about searching for purpose in life and a sense of belonging, both of which always seem to be just out of reach. A story that might otherwise seem depressing is told with a wry, dark humor, peppered with the rapid-fire pop culture references of a Dennis Miller combined with the casual profanity of an Andrew Dice Clay. This book is both an adventure and a learning experience - 5 stars no question!

Hard truths of living in, working, and reporting in conflict zones

This book is hard to put down after turning the first page. It is an honest look inside the mind of someone breaking into the ranks of earning the title of foreign correspondent. I personally worked with Sean when he was later employed by the U.S. Government. As someone who has served as a USAID contractor working in some of the places mentioned (Afghanistan, Iraq) in the book, I recommend others with the same experience to have a look. I am also a non-combat military veteran who has been deployed to the Middle East in the early '90s, but I will always remember a saying that other international development sector contractors told me in Iraq in 2012: "the only people that get into this line of work are Misfits, Mercenaries, and Missionaries--you can choose two but not all three." I think they were wrong. This book brought back memories of working in those places shows how we can all resemble or relate to those three M's in some way, and our motivations for doing so.

Highly Recommended

A very open and revealing book about the journey of a foreign correspondent in some of the most frightening places on earth including war zones. It is warts and all. The author, Sean Carberry, a former NPR reporter doesn’t spare any details including his own mental-health challenges that can understandably read at times like a soldier’s memoir. It is entertaining, engaging, very accessible and sobering. The self-deprecating humor humanizes the storytelling. I loved it and it doesn’t require an interest in reading about reporting in world hot spots to enjoy.

Honest account of life as a foreign correspondent

There's a joke about expats working in danger zones overseas - they are all escaping one of the three M's: a marriage, a mortgage, or murder. Sean Carberry's memoir describes how for many foreign correspondents, that joke isn't far off the mark. He captures the multifaceted motivations that drew a rookie reporter to cover conflict, the mistakes he made, and the long-term consequences that persist now that he has returned home. (And I promise, he's not a murderer!) An important read for anyone who is interested in working in conflict zones or who cares about where their news comes from.

Insightful, unsparing, funny

This story of an overseas correspondent looking for “a war to call home” really pulls back the curtains on what it’s like to report on stories in war-torn countries. This no self-promoting “look at me the brave hero” story. It’s a fascinating story of the journey of a man braving danger to tell stories and the toll that can take. Carberry doesn’t pull any punches on anyone, even himself, in this compelling and raw book.

Inside view of war correspondent life and mental health

Sean shows a unique insider perspective of being a War correspondent. I remember hearing him on NPR, sounding clear, intelligent and polished. This book also lifts up the struggle with mental health for war journalists and the support they give each other.

Barnes and Noble Review:

Powerful Punch in The Gut 

This is a powerful read. What happens when someone experiences personal emotional trauma and then inserts himself into some of the most unstable environments around the world? When you circle the globe in search of the boom-boom you are likely to eventually experience some boom-boom. This is a compelling story of the author’s search for purpose and meaning and the explosive life experiences that resulted. 

Learning the back story about how the stories we hear from conflicts around the world get to us is compelling and often the description of what happens behind the scenes may say more about a region/conflict than the story that gets reported. This book provides extremely useful knowledge and a new perspective into world politics and reporting.

Goodreads:

Review 1:

I learned a lot about the life of a war correspondent and have a greater appreciation for the incredibly difficult job this is and the toll the work takes. I appreciated the honesty the author displayed and the accountability for his actions. He was candid about what he learned, his inexperience early on and how he grew and matured through his many experiences.

A good mix of humor, reality, and memoir.
Some of the experiences were too detailed for me (not too graphic, just too much detail) but it was easy to skim through and appreciate the overall experiences he had.
I have a whole new appreciation for war correspondents as I read the news of the current war.

Review 2:

An honest, frank, and sometimes funny account of the author's time as a war correspondent, this book tells the highly personal tale of 15 years covering war in the Middle East. The tone is conversational, making the reader feel more like a trusted friend than a spectator. The author also makes a convincing case for the need for increased awareness of the mental health toll (and appropriate care) on not only the military but also those who follow them.

Midwest Review of Books, Michael Dunford, Reviewer:

Of immense value to readers with an interest in contemporary battlefield journalism, "Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home" is as inherently fascinating as it is impressively informative. Exceptionally well written, organized and presented, "Passport Stamps" is a unique and unreservedly recommended addition to professional, community, and academic library Journalism collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists. It should be noted for journalism students, academia, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that "Passport Stamps" is also readily available in a digital book format.

Review in the Cipher Brief — it’s not a glowing review, but it does capture some of the dilemmas, or tensions, in the book about writing contemporaneously versus after years of reflection.

As a war correspondent, Carberry probably knows full well the paradox of writing the first version of contemporary history.  For maximum impact, he should have written about his travels and experiences as he was living them, i.e., in the midst of the global war on terror, mostly. However, that is not always possible nor desirable. On the contrary, proper healing, as for research and investigations done internally, requires time, distance and a good dose of introspection.

Carberry’s story also reminds us that the human mind and its emotional memories can be tricky things to process or simply acknowledge, especially following multiple traumatic circumstances and situations. In the meantime, history keeps marching on.

Adapted piece in The Atlantic (requires subscription of some kind)

Excerpt on Current.org (free, but registration required)

Article on my discussion at the National Press Club

Coverage of my talk at the Society of Professional Journalists annual convention

Interview on NPR’s 1A

Interview on Texas Public Radio’s The Source

Interview on Boise State Public Radio’s Reader’s Corner

Interview on the Beyond Politics Podcast

Interview on the LEO Warriors (video) and Tactical Living (audio) Podcast

Interview on The Misfit Nation Podcast and the YouTube Version

Interview with the Society of Professional Journalists New England Chapter

Interview on the A2 Podcast

First, I want to thank you for subscribing and reading my SubStack in 2023. I’m grateful for your support and interest in my analysis and stories about conflicts and fragile states.

Second, I want to thank those who have purchased my book, Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home. If you have read it, I’d really appreciate it if you can take a moment and go to Amazon and/or Good Reads and give it a rating (and review if you are so inclined). The more ratings I get, the more it helps my placement in searches.

If you haven’t purchased a copy, now’s the perfect time. Books make great gifts!

And books signed by the author make even better gifts. I have 25 copies on hand and for $35 will sign and ship a copy anywhere in the United States.

Buy Signed Copy

Otherwise, you can always purchase a copy (paperback or eBook) through the usual suspects:

Buy on Amazon

Buy on Barnes and Noble

Buy on Bookshop.org

You can also purchase directly from my publisher, Madville Publishing.

Buy from Madville

And if you haven’t already, please tell family, friends, coworkers, book clubs, or anyone else you know about the book and encourage them to buy it. Share this email. Post about the book on your socials! Selling books is a team effort, and I need your help to close out the year strong.

Also, if you work for or belong to an organization that deals with journalism, international affairs, or mental health, I’m still booking speaking events and happy to arrange talks in the DC area or online.

Lastly, I just found out Boise State Public Radio’s interview of me on their program Reader’s Corner aired right after Thanksgiving. You can listen here.

Hope you have a happy, healthy, and safe holiday season, and best wishes for 2024!

You may have noticed Passport Stamps has been a little quiet lately. Between the demands of the day job, travel and events to promote the book, and life in general, it’s been difficult to find time to sit and write.

On top of that, it’s been difficult to find words. It seems that every time I sit down to write about the latest bit of bad news in the world, the story shifts before I finish a piece, or something happens somewhere else.

So, I’m taking a “mental health” break from Substack and writing about international news for the rest of the year. In the meantime, Squeak and I will continue other efforts and activities to raise awareness and promote mental health for journalists (and frankly everyone).

Purchase a Copy of Passport Stamps

Last week, I visited Lehigh University, my undergrad alma mater, to speak to journalism, international relations, and political science students about my book and my life experiences.

One thing I pointed out is that trauma and difficult stories are not just the purview of war correspondents. I told students that any journalist in the United States today can end up covering a traumatic event that could affect their mental health.

As I often do in my talks, I mentioned how a journalist working for a small town paper covering high school sports or local politics could suddenly end up reporting on a shooting at a school, mall, place of worship, or restaurant.

The next day, local journalists in Lewiston, Maine, many of whom probably never had any interest in covering war or violence, were covering another horrific incident of gun violence. Journalists probably knew some of the victims. They will be forever changed by this story they had to cover.

This is the reality today. There is darkness everywhere you look these days, so it’s critical to step outside, enjoy beautiful fall weather, dress up for Halloween, play with your cat, or whatever else you can to recharge. Not everyone has that luxury these days, and so we will continue to do what we can to help them, but we still need to take care of ourselves too.

For paid subscribers, you won’t be billed again until I resume posting. Next year.

In the meantime, if you haven’t read my book, I suggest picking up a copy and diving into that to tide you over!

Stay safe and healthy.

Attend my Wellesley Books Event

Sea and air temperatures weren’t the only things heating up in the Levant this summer. Tensions have risen and clashes have broken out in the West Bank and Gaza, in the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, and lately along the border between Israel and Lebanon.

Media reporting last month indicated Hezbollah was seeking to capitalize on clashes between Israelis and Palestinians by carrying out provocative acts along the border with Israel. It’s led to escalating volleys of rockets and tear gas along the border with Israel claiming Lebanon instigated by firing rockets into Israel. The Lebanese army has claimed that Israel violated the border.

The Jerusalem Post chronicled the back and forth claims:

Clashes broke out Saturday afternoon between the IDF and the Lebanese army near the northern border after a heavy-duty vehicle illegally crossed into Israel.

Armed forces fired “protest dispersion” tools such as stun grenades at a tractor that crossed from the border into Israel in the Mount Dov area after surveillance identified the vehicle.

A statement released by the IDF stated that the tractor crossed the Blue Line from Lebanon into the Mount Dov area by about two meters, leading to multiple grenades being fired from Lebanon toward where the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon was stationed.

The “Blue Line” refers to the demarcation line between the countries established by the United Nations in 2000 when Israel withdrew from territory it occupied in southern Lebanon in 1982 during Lebanon’s civil war. It’s not technically a border but a temporary “line of withdrawal” according to the United Nations. You can read more about that here and here, but that’s a deeper discussion for a different post. What’s relevant today is there is still controversy over the Blue Line and which territory ultimately belongs to which country.  

Here’s the Lebanese perspective on the latest clashes as expressed in the Jerusalem Post article:

Later on Saturday, the Lebanese Armed Forces said it fired tear gas at Israeli forces following the launch of stun grenades at the heavy machinery.

“Elements of the Israeli enemy violated the withdrawal line and fired smoke bombs at a Lebanese army patrol that was accompanying a bulldozer removing an earthen berm erected by the Israeli enemy north of the withdrawal line, the Blue Line, in the Bastra area,” the Lebanese army said in a statement.

“The Lebanese patrol responded to the attack by firing tear bombs ... forcing them to withdraw to the occupied Palestinian territories,” Lebanon’s army added.

For those unfamiliar with the terminology, the Lebanese statement isn’t referring to just the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it refers to all of Israel as occupied Palestinian territory and officially does not recognize Israel, despite the two countries signing a maritime border agreement last year. It complicated…

This is also why journalists, diplomats, aid workers, and other civilians who work in the region typically have two passports, as I used to when I regularly traveled the region. One passport was used for travel in and out of Israel, the other passport for the rest of the countries in the region. Israel heavily scrutinizes people entering who have passport stamps from Lebanon, Syria, and other countries hostile to Israel, and Lebanon and Syria generally will not allow entry to anyone with an Israeli stamp in their passport.

It's similar to Greek and Turkish Cyprus where you need to have a second passport or get a separate piece of paper stamped when entering Turkish Cyprus.

History of Blue Line Clashes

Returning to the thread of the clashes between Israel and Lebanon, the two countries have been able to avoid escalation along the Blue Line since 2006, when the countries fought a 34-day war after Hezbollah conducted an assault in northern Israel. The clash killed eight Israeli soldiers. Hezbollah also abducted two Israeli soldiers. The terrorist organization and party in the Lebanese government demanded a prisoner exchange.

Instead, Israel responded with airstrikes against targets in southern Lebanon, including the country’s airport, which is in Hezbollah-controlled territory.

Israel’s response highlighted a longstanding dynamic in Lebanon. The Lebanese government is built on a shaky sectarian structure whereby power in the country is divided up among 18 religious sects based on their population, which was determined decades ago and has changed greatly since.

What that means is some groups have grown substantially in population, particularly Shia Muslims, and the number of Christians has decreased. Yet, the power distribution has remained the same.

That leads to frequent government collapse and lengthy periods of negotiations to form a new consensus government—the country has been unable to form a new government since October 2022. In the meantime, people suffer because there is little governance and provision of services.

Hezbollah plays a dual game as a Shia Islamist terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel and a political party that acts as the de facto state and government in territory it controls in Lebanon, mostly in the south and in the Beqaa Valley. It operates like a militarized mafia for the most part and doesn’t hesitate to take up arms against the Lebanese army to protect its powerbase in the country.

And Hezbollah takes unilateral action against Israel periodically, action not sanctioned or supported by the Lebanese government or army—not openly at least. As it did in 2006, those actions can drag the entire country into war.

That was the point the Israeli government made in 2006—because Hezbollah is a political party and holds seats in parliament and the cabinet, its actions are official actions by the state of Lebanon, thus when Hezbollah crosses the border and attacks Israeli troops, Lebanon is responsible.

How Far Will Hezbollah Push Now?

The concern now is whether Hezbollah will—presumably with Iranian support and prodding—escalate hostile activity along the Blue Line as clashes continue in the West Bank and Gaza. It’s risky to say the least as Hezbollah appears to be counting on Israel being distracted by both the violence in the Palestinian territories and by the ongoing judicial reform crisis that led to Israeli Air Force reservists to protest, undermining military readiness.

What Hezbollah and Iran need to factor into the equation is that a war is often the “solution” to domestic crisis, and Israel could very well mount a 2006-like response to increased Hezbollah adventurism, even with the diminished Air Force readiness.

I’ve learned not to make predictions in cases like this because Iran and Hezbollah have a habit of acting in ways a rational person would see as contrary to political or national interests.

In the meantime, I invite my paid subscribers to enjoy another section of material from the cutting room floor of Passport Stamps. In this excerpt, I visit the Baalbek temple in Hezbollah country in the Beqaa valley, interview a terrorist cleric, and attend the 2008 prisoner/remains exchange resulting from Hezbollah’s 2006 incursion and kidnapping in Israel.

Lastly, if you are in the Boston/Wellesley area, please attend my talk at Wellesley Books tomorrow night. If you know people in the area, please encourage them to attend!

Thanks for reading!

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It reminds me of my geology class in college, and the main takeaway was: nature always wins. Want to build a house along the coast in Chatham, Massachusetts? Go ahead, just know that the sea will be coming for it and it’s just a matter of time before the forces of nature reclaim your land.

Want to live in the Hollywood hills in a house on stilts overlooking the city? No problem, but the San Andreas fault will eventually have something to say about it.

Not too many people have great sympathy for those who defy nature and geology and build indulgent properties in high-risk settings.

But for many in the world, there isn’t much alternative. During my time living in Afghanistan, I worried about the impact of the conflict on the people of Kabul and myself, but even the worst attack could do only a fraction of the damage an earthquake would.

Like many cities in poor countries, Kabul is a city sprawling out of control with inadequate infrastructure, notional building codes, and an essentially illegal villages and neighborhood barely clinging to the craggy peaks that ring and bisect the city. Decades of people fleeing poverty and conflict in rural areas led to an informal building boom of poorly built houses climbing higher and higher in the city.

Thus, my greatest fear when living there wasn’t necessarily conflict and violence, but the inevitable earthquake. Anything mid-6 or above centered near Kabul and the mountains would simply shake off the primitive houses. It would be an order of magnitude worse than the 2015 Nepal earthquake and probably worse than the Syria-Turkey earthquake in February.

During my time in Kabul, I experienced four or five small earthquakes. One was powerful enough to make my single-story house sway back and forth and sent Squeak diving under the kitchen cabinets. I couldn’t help but wonder if that quake was going to escalate into “the big one.”

Fortunately, it didn’t. But it did cause damage and kill some people close to the epicenter, which if I recall was 50-to-60 miles from Kabul.

Several times when I lived in Afghanistan, I reported on destruction caused be natural disasters and the struggles of the emergency responses. Despite the road construction during the war, there were still countless remote villages built into the mountains that were no match for earthquakes or heavy rains.

I’ve seen similar situations around the world. The outskirts of Lima, Peru, are the same—informal construction climbing the barren peaks. In the jungles of western Colombia, I toured villages where people had slapped together huts on stilts in the hillsides that the Big Bad Wolf, let alone a strong storm or mild earthquake—there are multiple tectonic plates and seismic zones on those areas—would have quickly destroyed.

Governments in many places are powerless to prevent informal construction. And governments in many places are unable or unwilling to maintain infrastructure that could minimize the damage of a geological or meteorological event and facilitate rescue and recovery.

Case in point: Morocco. The 6.8 earthquake in the Atlas Mountains has killed nearly 3,000 people. The epicenter was in a remote area that according to Washington Post reporting has not seen a lot of seismic activity. Thus, the construction was not designed to withstand the event—although given the economic conditions in the rural mountain area, it’s doubtful people had the resources to build seismic-resistant structures.   

According to aid organizations, the earthquake damaged roadways and created landslide risks, slowing the response effort.

Morocco’s cities like Casablanca, Rabat, and Tangiers are better constructed to withstand the seismic forces that frequently shake the country, but the quake outside Marrakesh was one of the most powerful in the country’s recent history, leading to the extensive damage and death toll.

In addition to earthquakes, Morocco also experiences periodic flooding, as I witnessed in 2008. I was on a reporting tripin October that year and after a few days in Casablanca and Rabat was to head to Tangier in the north. However, severe rains and flooding around Tangier shut down rail travel for several days, and when I finally made it to Tangiers, the city was still cleaning up the damage.

As Morocco continues its earthquake recovery efforts, Libya is dealing with a far greater crisis in the aftermath of the flooding caused by Storm Daniel, that also caused flooding in Greece and the Balkans.

But the damage in Libya, particularly the eastern coastal city of Derna, is a tragedy of unique proportions. Although it was an uncontrollable weather event that was the immediate cause, decades of human failure compounded the disaster.

The country’s infrastructure was in poor shape during Gaddafi’s rule and has only deteriorated since the 2011 civil war that ousted his regime and ushered in years of civil war between factions claiming power since.

I have to note that the post-Gaddafi civil war and political instability was entirely predictable. When I was producing NPR’s coverage of the fall of Tripoli and the end of the Gaddafi regime in August through November 2011, it was painfully obvious that the various militias that had generally banded together to fight the regime loyalists were going to splinter and fight for their “share” of the new order.

There were thousands and thousands of young, amped up, heavily armed men who believed their tribe or city or militia had done more in the war than others, and therefore they should have a bigger slice of the pie. After Gaddafi fell, the National Transitional Council, that had been the government in waiting and had western backing, could not hold the center and gain the critically important “monopoly of violence” in the country.

It all broke down and today the country remains divided between two would-be governments and unstable. Simply put, the international community didn’t prepare for or make the right investments to help secure the peace after the fall of Gaddafi.

That’s one of the reasons the recent flood in the eastern city of Derna was so devastating. The two dams that crumbled under the weight of Storm Daniel were in disrepair. The government based in Benghazi has spent more time battling the government of Tripoli than investing in services and governance for the people of Libya.

Engineers have argued that proper maintenance and then proper management during the storm could have avoided the breeches that led to a disaster that seemed like something out of a movie.

What happened in Derna was similar to the Maui fire in that danger came rushing toward a coastal town with little warning and with few options for residents of the city of approximately 120,000. Buildings, houses, and people were utterly powerless against the flow of water that surged through and wiped out as much as a quarter of the city.

Then, there’s the response. Again, poor governance and investment in emergency equipment and capabilities led to a slow and inadequate response. Derna’s location is also a complicating factor. As you can see on the map, it’s isolated on the Libyan coast. There is one small highway that runs along the coast, and the closest major city with an airport and any significant infrastructure is Benghazi, a six-to-seven-hour drive. There is a smaller airport in Tobrouk to the east, which is about a four-hour drive.

In 2011, I traveled by car from Egypt to Benghazi. The route passed through Tobrouk on the coast and then cut inland south of Derna. It is remote, dessert terrain. There were scattered small villages and minimal infrastructure. Bottom line, there isn’t much to work with in the area, so any major response operation means bringing in people and equipment from outside the region and that has been part of why the disaster response was so slow and inadequate.

It's going to take years for Derna to recover, and in the meantime, the city remains vulnerable. Libya built the dams in the 1970s to control the river that had flooded the city several times before and the devastated city is again at the mercy of the forces of nature and the river.

Moving onto book news. Thanks to all who have purchased Passport Stamps! If you have finished the book, please rate it on Amazon or Goodreads to help my standing in search algorithms.

If you are in the College Park, Maryland, area, please join me on Sept. 21 at 4pm for my talk at the University of Maryland, hosted by the UMD chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

If you are in Massachusetts, join me at Wellesley Books on Sept. 25.

Also, I’m going through more of the outtakes and deleted scenes from Passport Stamps and will be posting more of that in the weeks ahead. I have bits from Lebanon, Syria, and Libya coming soon.

This post is a slight detour from my usual format, but I recently had such a fascinating “small world” episode I couldn’t resist writing about it. Given how my life and career path resembles a Roomba traversing a living room, there are a lot of chapters of my life, and a surprising number intersected during a recent work trip to Austin, Texas.

Growing up, I always associated Austin with music — who didn’t, right? We’ve all seen Austin City Limits over the years.

Despite my time in the music business, I didn’t visit Austin until November 2016, and that trip was because I was covering a defense technology conference as a journalist.

At the time, the city was emerging as a major tech hub, to the point that the Defense Department launched an office of the Defense Innovation Unit there. Known then as DIUx, for experimental, DIU is an office charged with finding and maturing commercial technologies that could have defense applications, and since 2016 I have frequently reported on DIU.

I returned to Austin in September 2022 to cover another defense technology conference, and last month I graduated to the status of “moderator” at the Fed Supernova defense technology conference in the city.

While drinking from the firehose of panels about defense innovation, advanced manufacturing, AI, and autonomous technologies that make someone from Generation X think about movies like “War Games” and “The Terminator,” three other chapters of my life converged in the city.

During the first morning of the conference, I popped out of the keynote speech in the Capital Factory into the lobby and saw a familiar face among the attendees. I had to double check his nametag to be certain it was who I thought it was as I had not seen him since late October 2012, just a few weeks after I moved to Afghanistan for NPR.

I knew him as Lt. Col. Whit Wright, commander of the Army’s 1-91 Cavalry Squadron. I had embedded with his unit in Logar province to report on how the Army was progressing with helping Afghan forces secure the strategically significant province and train the Afghans to eventually take responsibility for security in the province. You can read/listen to that story here.

At the time, the United States and Afghanistan had not agreed on a new security pact that would allow U.S. forces to remain in the country after the end of 2014 when Operation Enduring Freedom and International Security Assistance Force missions were to conclude.

Thus, the goal at the time was to have Afghan forces ready to be self-sufficient by the end of 2014. As it later played out, the countries did sign a security agreement and U.S. and NATO forces remained in the country until 2021, but Afghan forces weren’t ready and able to maintain security seven years after the initial target date of withdrawal and handover.

It was evident in October 2012 that it was going to take years, if not decades, for the Afghan security forces to be anything resembling self-sustaining and able to keep the Taliban at bay without substantial intelligence, logistics, and other support from the United States and NATO. During my embed, I went out on a morning patrol with 1-91 troops in Baraki Barak, a part of Logar province where Afghan forces were struggling against dug-in Taliban fighters. Here’s an excerpt from that report.

A mile or so to the south of the base, 2nd Lt. John Alulis leads an early morning foot patrol through frost-covered fields to the village of Wawakel.

"As of right now, our mission is to kind of help the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] stabilize the district, so that come the final American withdrawal, they can take over," he says.

The Afghan forces include the army, police and the intelligence agencies. Despite the urgency of getting them trained and in the lead, there are none to be found on this patrol.

That's in no small part because of the surge of insider attacks. At least 60 NATO personnel have been killed this year in confirmed cases of Afghan security forces turning their weapons on coalition troops.

The platoon pushes on across a small stream and through the soft dirt of barren fields. Alulis ponders whether having Afghan forces on patrol with them would increase or decrease the level of threat they face.

"It's all based on the personal relationships that they have with locals," he says. "Sometimes they can be unpopular because their fire discipline isn't the same as ours — they like to shoot first and maybe ask questions after that. They perform well and badly, all on the same patrol."

That last line, “They perform well and badly, all on the same patrol,” summed up so much of Afghanistan and the security forces.

Anyhow, I spent a little more than a week with the 1-91 at three different bases in Logar seeing the mixed bag of security in the province. Forward Operating Base Shank stayed true to form and took incoming rocket or mortar fire each day I was there, continuing what was something like a 30-plus-day streak.

You can read more about that whole embed in this post I wrote last October on the 10-year anniversary of that embed.

But what’s relevant here is during that embed, I spent a fair amount of time with Lt. Col. Wright, who was candid and clear-eyed about the state of security and the Afghan forces in the province. He made no attempt to dress things up or sell me a narrative that in any way deviated from the facts on the ground.

Anyhow, I hadn’t seen him since that embed, so running into him in civilian clothes (he retired from the Army and is in the private sector) in Austin was a shock.

We ended up having a long coffee to reflect on Afghanistan and what’s happened in our lives since October 2012. Suffice to say, it was a heavy conversation that I wasn’t expecting to have during that visit to Austin.

I continued with my work of attending conference sessions, doing interviews, and gathering material for my day job. As one does at these events, I attended a networking reception hosted by one of the many companies attending the conference.

There, two more chapters of life intersected. One was Wellesley, Massachusetts, the town where I grew up (and where I will be doing a book talk Sept. 25).

One of the people at the reception lived in Wellesley and we ended up deep in conversation about the town, comparing notes from our time there. A lot of the conversation was about which schools were still open and what grades they housed as that was in flux when I was growing up as I ping-ponged between elementary schools.

He had grown up in a neighboring town and was a few years younger, but the Massachusetts memories were flowing.

As we discussed my hometown and what has and hasn’t changed over the years, a guitar player sat in the corner of the room providing background music for the event. When the party wrapped and the guitarist was packing up, I turned to him to ask about his amp — once a gearhead musician, always a gearhead musician.

We fell into conversation and quickly found we had many lines of intersection. He attended Berklee College of Music and completed his studies just before I joined the faculty as assistant professor of music production and engineering.

It turned out that Mark worked as the administrative assistant in the MP&E office — known as L-20. We ran through the names of the other faculty members in the department we both knew — sadly a few are no longer around.

Then, we got deeper into the weeds. Joe Stump, the shred-metal guitarist I had worked with at Room 9 recording studio in Boston on several of his albums (and who gave me the moniker, “Mr. Picky”), had been one of Mark’s instructors and was the evaluator for Mark’s practical exam — apparently it was a rough session.

Mark then mentioned that he was also a photographer and had recently shot photos of Susan Tedeschi sitting in at a club in Austin. And Susan is about to release a 25^th anniversary reissue of her album “Just Won’t Burn,” for which I did most of the engineering back in 1997 at Rear Window Recording studio in Brookline — yes, that’s me with the long hair in the photo in the CD liner notes if you have a copy lying around.

In the middle of the conversation about Boston music, one of the defense industry people passed by and I switched back to a day-job conversation about innovation and the defense department. It wasn’t a code-switching moment, but the career equivalent — switching from one professional field language to another in the blink of an eye.

So, within about a 24-hour period in Austin, Texas, I relived much of my life: the town where I grew up, my time in the Boston music scene, teaching at Berklee, my radio journalism career and time in Afghanistan, and my post-Afghanistan life covering the defense industry.

Interestingly, the one person I was hoping ahead of time to see in Austin was out of town. The Iraqi journalist who fixed for me a few times in Baghdad relocated to Austin seven or eight years ago, and I was hoping to catch up with him. However, he was back in Baghdad visiting family.

So, I wasn’t able to bring the Baghdad thread in my life into the Austin mix. And I still haven’t made it to South by Southwest…

Lastly, thanks to everyone who has come out to my book events to date and who has purchased, read, and rated Passport Stamps on Amazon or Goodreads. If you have finished the book, please take a moment to give it a review/rating to help me climb the algorithms.

It feels like every week, someplace I traveled during my years as a foreign/war correspondent makes news for the wrong reasons. Aside from the countries that are regularly in the news like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, in the last few months there have been everything ranging from clashes to coups in the Congo, Kosovo, and Khartoum.

Last week Pakistan was in the news for more than the ongoing political intrigue. Mobs attacked and burned two churches and ransacked a village in retribution for an alleged case of blasphemy.

According to Al Jazeera:

The controversy erupted after torn pages of the Quran, the holy book for Muslims, were discovered near the Christian colony with alleged blasphemous content written on them.

The pages were taken to a local religious leader, who reportedly urged Muslims to protest and demand that the culprits be arrested.

The report continued:

Earlier this month, a teacher was killed in Turbat in the southern province of Balochistan after being accused of blasphemy during a lecture. In February this year, an angry mob snatched a suspect from his prison cell in the rural district of Nankana and lynched him for allegedly desecrating pages of the Quran.

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This news story took me back to my trip to Pakistan in August 2009. I was reporting on the lack of religious freedom in the country and was planning to visit a village near Lahore that a month prior to my trip had been attacked by a mob in response to a blasphemy allegation.

However, unbeknownst to my fixer and me, during our drive from Islamabad to Lahore, a similar incident was taking place at another village, and the next morning, I was the first foreign journalist at the scene (unfortunately, this is all that’s left of my reporting as everything else has “aged” off the internet).

Distraught villagers stood among smoldering houses and smashed possessions as they explained that someone alleged a wedding procession tore up copies of a Koran to use as confetti. Officials investigated and dismissed the blasphemy allegation. However, villagers said a nearby mosque broadcast a message telling people to gather and deliver justice to the Christian community.

Here’s a quick excerpt from my book about this:

The streets were littered with smashed televisions and charred clothing. Destroyed houses smoldered. People dragged me through their houses to show me the devastation.

Walls were covered by thick black soot. Furniture was shat­tered and burnt. Dowries had been looted. Family photos lay under piles of ash and debris. The sun pierced through holes in burned out ceilings. Broken toys and dishes crunched under my feet. I stumbled across floors covered with bricks and tile from collapsed walls and ceilings. Smoke rose from piles of charred debris. The smell... I had never experienced anything like it. It was the smell of people’s entire lives—their possessions, their dignity, their sense of humanity—going up in smoke. It was sickening.

Pakistan’s blasphemy laws—which carry the death penalty—have long been a source of controversy. Islamist politicians I interviewed said blasphemy laws were important because Islam was under attack. I spoke with Shireen Mazari, who was spokesperson of the Movement for Justice political party and a political moderate.

We have blasphemy laws and they are—and can be, and have been—used for persecuting people. The uneducated mullah may fan up hatred. You have extremist mullahs in mosques, and therefore a lot of us are opposed to the blasphemy laws. They have been used to persecute people, they really have not been used in the spirit in which they should have been used, if they have to be used at all.

Unfortunately, in the 14 years since my reporting trip, little has changed. The laws continue to exist and individuals continue to take the law into their own hands. (To be fair, those two sentences could be written about gun violence in the United States.)

Again, from the Al Jazeera report:

Centre for Social Justice, an independent group advocating for the rights of minorities, has compiled data on blasphemy cases in Pakistan, which shows more than 2,000 people have been accused of blasphemy since 1987, and at least 88 people have been killed on these allegations.

As I mentioned earlier, the scene in Gojra was harrowing, and in my book I describe not only the situation, but also the process of covering the event. At the end of my radio story in 2009, I included a montage of villagers.

You can see the situation. We [unintelligible] our dead bodies outside the street, you go and you can see there…

Nobody give us justice, we haven’t any justice…

We are requesting you American please do something and help us. Please, please, please…

And save our lives, because we are not safe.

That was not the first time that someone I was interviewing asked me for help. Many times people plead for me to “deliver a message” to the local government or the U.S. government to help them. Sometimes they asked me for money or to have aid of some kind sent to them.

That is one of the difficult aspects of reporting on human suffering. How do you best “help” people and what is your responsibility to help people? There is also the journalistic drive to report a powerful and exclusive story, and it can be easy sometimes to prey upon the suffering for the sake of a more vivid story.

This dynamic is something I discuss in my book. Here’s another excerpt from the chapter about my trip to Pakistan and Gojra:

I was the only Western journalist there. I had the story to myself. I was trying to balance my responsibility as the conduit for the people there to voice their plight to the international community with my selfish desire to produce a story that could take my career to the next level. Fortunately, those two things weren’t necessarily in conflict—the better my story, the more it could help the people of Gojra, or if not them it could help prevent another Gojra, and it could help me advance my career.

That to me was the essence of the bargain of vulture journal­ism. Do right by the people on the ground, make the world aware of their situation so that governments, NGOs, the UN, whoever, would take action to address the underlying dynamics that led to their suffering. In the process, get recognized and rewarded for doing important work that makes a difference, a win-win.

Sadly, even the best reporting often fails to save people and drive change. I’m not saying that my story on religious freedom in Pakistan was the best reporting—although that program did win an award—but it clearly did not stop people from carrying out vigilante attacks in alleged cases of blasphemy.

Now, a pivot to another reporting location from my past making its way back into the news. In 2008, I visited the Ein el-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. In July, clashes broke out between Palestinian Fatah party members and Islamist groups in the camp, killing more than a dozen and threatening to spill over into the surrounding community.

The camp housing some 50,000 refugees struck me as a powder keg when I visited, and it clearly remains fragile and volatile.

Unfortunately, clashes in Lebanon are not uncommon, and I saw the aftermath of fresh clashes in the northern city of Tripoli during my 2008 visit.

Lebanon plays a major role in my book and is part of the origin story of how I ended up in conflict journalism. The original draft of the Lebanon chapter in my book contained a bunch of scenes I ended up cutting to tighten the narrative. In this and my next few posts, I am going to include scenes and reflections I deleted from the chapter.

And in celebration of the release of my book, the annual subscription price for Passport Stamps is half off until September 30. Subscribe now!

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As we approach the two-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul, people continue to debate what happened, point fingers, and throw out “if only” assessments. However, there are serious matters of consequence now that are far more important to address.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the two major problems in Afghanistan today: growing humanitarian needs and growing terrorist activity. Policy makers need to focus on those concerns and determine what kind of engagement with the increasingly oppressive Taliban is needed to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people and minimize the threat of terrorists using Afghanistan to plot and prepare attacks against the United States, its allies, and its interests.

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Today I want to explore another current and ongoing problem resulting from the war in Afghanistan: the plight of Afghans who worked with the United States and the international community to attempt to build a democratic and secure Afghanistan. Over the years, spikes in demand for Special Immigrant Visas were a warning that efforts to secure Afghanistan were failing, and the United States is still failing to meet the demand for visas.

Since the fall of Afghanistan in August 2021, the United States evacuated some 90,000 Afghans, according to a January 2023 letter from the Department of Homeland Security. Of those Afghans, 40 percent are eligible for Special Immigrant Visas, DHS said in a fact sheet about Operation Allies Welcome.

In 2006, the U.S. government developed the Special Immigrant Visa program in response to the growing number of Iraqis who were being murdered for working with the U.S. military. In January 2008, the SIV program expanded to cover Iraqis who were employed by or on behalf of the U.S. government, not just the military. The cap was set at 5,000 slots a year.

In 2009, the program expanded to cover Afghans with 1,500 slots per year through fiscal year 2013. In theory, the war was going to conclude at the end of 2014 and the SIV program would terminate once all the Afghans who had met the employment requirement by December 31, 2014, had been processed. Congress upped the cap to 4,000 slots for 2014.

However, while the “combat” phase of the war ended in December 2014, the train, advise, and assist phase began and continued through 2021. Congress repeatedly extended the SIV program and kept raising the cap to 7,000, then 8,500, 14,500, eventually up to 26,500 visa slots for Afghans who fulfilled the work requirement after December 2014.

It is telling that as the United States was winding down its operations and withdrawing most of its troops in 2014 the number of visa slots for Afghans who had worked with the U.S. government and faced threats increased. And from 2015 onward, the number of visa slots kept shooting up, as did demand.

As the “progress” in Afghanistan gradually regressed with the drawdown of U.S. forces and investment in the country, the number of Afghans seeking a ticket out increased. In fact, during 2014 when the United States and Afghanistan had yet to sign the agreement allowing U.S. troops to remain after 2014, Afghans were looking to flee in droves through the SIV program or other means. While the anxiety level dropped in fall 2014 when the countries signed a new security pact, the writing was on the wall.

The SIV program was intended as a life-saving measure for Afghans who faced threats because they helped the United States, but it also became an opportunity for some Afghans looking for a way out of the country. There is no reliable data I have seen, but there are plenty of anecdotal accounts from Afghans who chose to work for the U.S. military or other government agencies in Afghanistan not because they wanted to help the effort or their country, but because they saw the SIV program as a fast-track out of Afghanistan.

Regardless, the growing demand for Special Immigrant Visas was a blaring siren telling the world that the international effort to build a stable, democratic Afghanistan was not working and Afghans, particularly those with language or other skills, were in danger and wanted out. Congress kept having to increase the number of SIV slots because the United States couldn’t deliver on its promises to the Afghan people.

And that extended to the failure to deliver on the promises of visas. Aside from the fact that the continued expansion of the SIV program signaled failure in Afghanistan, the U.S. government never adequately resourced and administered the SIV program—in Iraq or Afghanistan.

According to April 19 testimony from the deputy inspector general for the State Department:

We found that from 2009 through 2021, the Department received nearly 60,000 complete Afghan SIV applications, from which it subsequently approved and issued SIVs to about 37 percent of applicants and denied SIVs to about 48 percent of applicants. During this same period, 15 percent of applications remained pending.

As of May 31, 2022, more than 15,000 Afghan SIV applications were still in process.

Since that time the number has significantly increased — in an upcoming report we note that as of last month the Department reported that more than 152,000 SIV applicants remain in Afghanistan.

While a substantial number of applicants over the years didn’t meet the terms of the program—or were determined to pose security risks—SIV processing has been woefully slow and non-transparent.

Here’s more from the deputy inspector general’s testimony:

… the Department lacks a centralized database to effectively document the identity of locally employed staff and contractors and instead has relied on multiple IT systems that were not interoperable.

Specifically, we found that the method for collecting, verifying, and reporting on applicant wait times was inconsistent and potentially flawed because the entities responsible for reporting processing times at each of the four stages of the Afghan SIV process were using differing methodologies to perform their calculations.

Our review found Department actions to address our prior recommendations provided minor improvements to quarterly reporting but did not improve methods for collecting or verifying Afghan SIV application processing times. In addition, although the Bureau of Consular Affairs included, in its quarterly reports, explanations for failures to process applications within 9 months, the Department lacked internal controls for verifying Afghan SIV data, resulting in inaccurate information. We concluded that, despite taking some recommended actions, the Department continued to face a significant Afghan SIV application backlog.

This came after years of reporting by oversight agencies and the media about the flaws and lack of investment and political will to improve the processing of SIV applications.

In April 2021 I wrote a piece calling on the U.S. government to step up and honor its promise of visas to Afghans.

The failures and mistakes the United States made in Iraq and Afghanistan will provide fodder for opinion pages, think tank discussions, and academic papers for years to come. Most of it is water under the bridge, but there is one chronic failure that the United States can still do something about: honoring the promise it made to Afghans who risked their lives helping the U.S. government.

This has been one of the most disgraceful narratives of the last decade for those who have followed the conflicts closely. As noted in a recent study, tens of thousands of Afghans (and Iraqis) are facing increased danger as they wait for visas promised by the United States. Despite continued advocacy from service members and veterans, the number of qualified applicants far exceeds the number of slots allocated by Congress, and processing times are perilously long.

Every reporter who has covered Iraq or Afghanistan has produced at least one story about the plight of interpreters who were promised Special Immigrant Visas for working with U.S. forces. I first reported on this for NPR in December 2011 as U.S. forces were exiting Iraq.

…

People risked their lives to help U.S. forces—many chose to do so specifically because of the promise of a visa. They did their time, filed applications, and sat in limbo as they and their families faced threats. Some were killed as they waited years for a visa. Others got tired of waiting and paid smugglers enormous sums to sneak them into Europe.

Some received rejections because of unspecified “security risks,” but the lack of transparency in the process prevented them from learning about what the red flag was and appealing the adverse ruling.

In my time reporting on these cases, I found that red flags could be a result of a name matching that of a known militant—similar to no-fly list errors. In one case, I was told that an interpreter was denied a visa because he had the phone numbers of militants saved in his phone. However, there was a simple explanation—the unit he was on patrol with stopped and questioned some suspicious men and asked the interpreter to capture their numbers. Yet, he could not appeal the decision.

The SIV program is inherently risk averse. No one working for the State Department or any of the agencies vetting visa candidates wants to be responsible for letting someone into the United States who goes on to carry out a crime or terrorist attack. So, it’s simply easier to deny a candidate if there is even the slightest concern about their background. The lack of a transparent appeals process has been a failure of the system. Other failures have included the usual suspects: insufficient funding, staffing, and political will.

Right now, the United States is in the process of withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan. The Unites States has a moral, and under the terms of the SIV program legal, responsibility to provide visas to the Afghans who risked their lives to support U.S. troops, diplomats, and civilians.

To be fair, there will be Afghans looking to game the system. As I reported in the fall of 2014 when it was unclear if U.S. forces would remain in Afghanistan after the end of that year, many Afghans who did not qualify tried to get into the SIV program. Some will try that now, which is all the more reason Congress and the State Department need to dedicate appropriate resources to properly vet applications and issue visas to deserving candidates as quickly as possible.

Failure to do so will have far reaching consequences. U.S. troops are deployed across the globe in operations to combat ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other extremists. U.S. troops will certainly face new deployments in the coming years. That requires translators and other local employees. What happens if they decide they can’t trust the United States to honor its commitments?

The United States made a plethora of promises to Afghanistan and its people over the last two decades. Unfortunately, many of those promises were unrealistic from the moment they were made and impossible to deliver. Granting visas to Afghans who risked their lives to work for the U.S. government is one promise the United States can and must honor.

Again, that was more than two years ago. The number of Afghans seeking visas has only grown since, according to the State Department Office of Inspector General.

Of course, this discussion only pertains to the Afghans who qualify for the SIV program for working with the U.S. government. An even larger pool who worked with non-governmental agencies, media organizations, or the Afghan government and military are still in Afghanistan or in humanitarian parole limbo in the United States.

Nothing will change what has happened in Afghanistan or with visa programs to this point. But Congress and the Biden administration can shape the fate of hundreds of thousands of Afghans going forward.

Lastly, if you are in the D.C. area, please attend my book kickoff event at the National Press Club August 17 at 6:30 pm. Get your tickets here. Also, please encourage friends, colleagues, and strangers you meet at the gym or grocery store to buy my book and attend the event. Thanks!

T-minus nine days and counting

If you haven’t already ordered a copy of Passport Stamps, here’s some incentive to purchase it during preorder period that ends August 15. Copies ordered and printed prior to that date are the true first printing and contain minor typos that will be corrected in copies printed (and eBooks) after August 15. So, you know you’ve got the original deal if your version says “Dorian Grey” and not “Dorian Gray,” for example. Somehow, during the pre-production process the Gray turned Grey, and that’s the way it is in the first batch.

There are some additional minor typos that we’ve caught in the last few weeks as I have been pulling excerpts to prepare for book talks and for other publications. So, hurry up and order your unique, original printing copy now! Preordered copies are beginning to ship so keep an eye on your mail as the book might be arriving before the 15th.

You can purchase through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and my publisher Madville Publishing.

And the book will arrive much faster than a real passport these days!

Here’s the latest rundown of upcoming events

August 9: I am doing a web conversation with the New England chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Conversation is at 7pm and registration is through their Facebook page.

August 17: I will be doing a Headliners Book Event at the National Press Club. This is my official kickoff event, and if you are in the DC area, I beg you to attend! If you aren’t in the DC area, tell all your friends who do live here that you will never speak to them again if they do not attend! It is a ticketed event, $5 for Press Club members, $10 for non-members. Register here.

August 21: I will be on “The Source” on Texas Public Radio in the morning and then at The Twig bookstore in San Antonio that evening.

August 27: I’m back in DC at the coolest venue in the city, the Mansion on O St. If you’ve been before, you know it’s a fascinating place. If you haven’t been, this is the perfect opportunity. Buy a ticket and come for the book talk and stay to roam the mansion in search of secret doors and rooms.

In September I’ll be doing events in Massachusetts and Las Vegas, and possibly elsewhere. Stay tuned.

If you haven’t had a chance to listen, I was on NPR 1A on July 25 along with journalist Jane Ferguson who also has a memoir out about her experiences in conflict journalism. You can listen here.

Also, I was on the show again last Friday as a late substitution for the international news roundup. We discussed Ukraine and Russia, Niger, Afghanistan, Haiti, and I outed myself as an “American soccer curmudgeon,” but at least I have been following the tart cherry juice hullabaloo.

You can also read an excerpt from the chapter about my reporting trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the website current.org. It does require a registration, but it’s free.

Keep an eye out for a piece in The Atlantic adapted from a couple of chapters about reporting trips to Afghanistan.

And a reminder to please go to Amazon and Goodreads and say nice things about the book once you have finished it. Reviews help boost placement on sites and drive sales, so please help generate buzz. This whole thing does indeed take a village, so your social media posts and sharing to online groups all make a difference.

Now, to thank you for your patience in reading through this marketing message to this point, here’s a taste of what’s in the book. This snippet is from the first chapter when I was boarding a plane from Khartoum to Darfur:

I walked out onto the tarmac and approached the white-and-red Nova 737. Once I got about 50 feet from the aircraft, I had second thoughts. I could see that the plane was spent. It looked hand-painted, and there were chips and cracks all over the body.

I haltingly walked up the steps. I contemplated pulling the plug, but I had come too far to turn back just because I was about to fly on a plane that should have been grounded a decade prior.

Inside the seats were filthy, and the fabric worn, torn, and shot. Seats and overhead bins were taped and tied. It smelled like a shoe. I took my seat and tried to remember if my tetanus shot was current. I looked up and saw that the signs were written in English and Chinese. What that told me was that the plane had belonged to a Chinese airline and had been flown to the point it no longer passed Chinese standards, and then the Chinese govern­ment dumped it on Sudan.

I was the only western-looking person on the plane—all the diplomats and NGO workers were far too smart (or prohibited by their security regulations) to fly Nova. As the plane taxied to the runway and took off, I did my best to ignore the strange sounds and smells.

OK, and here’s another snippet from my first embed in Iraq in 2008 when I tagged along with a U.S. provincial reconstruction team attending a district council meeting in Baghdad:

We entered the compound through a concrete archway and stepped into the conference room. The council consisted of about 20 well-fed Iraqi men in their 50s and 60s, mostly wearing either short- or long-sleeve dress shirts with the top button open and no ties. They sat at a long, narrow conference table and the PRT members in their pixelated fatigues sat on the periphery.

The council members then discussed the conditions of things like electricity, water, and sewage in their neighborhoods and what needed attention. Whenever someone discussed a problem they could not fix, the committee turned to the American soldiers. The Iraqis asked the soldiers for $50,000 electric generators or more mundane things like office furniture and wheelbarrows. Sitting through the meeting, I got the feeling that the Iraqis viewed the soldiers as a giant ATM that could spit out money and merchan­dise at will.

The PRTs obliged to the greatest extent possible since the ethos at the time was that if Iraqis had better public services, then the population would support the government and be less inclined to join or support militants. It was the phase of the war when the heavy fighting had ended, and the focus was on “holding and building” or buying security through investments in governance and services.

That had been going on since the outset of the war, but the approach in the early years was much more haphazard. That period generated all the examples of the United States building expensive projects or clinics that were going unused by the Iraqis because they did not fit the community needs. By the time I arrived, the spending was smaller in scale and theoretically based on input from the Iraqis. Not only did I finally get to Iraq after all the intense fighting had ended, but I also missed the era of the epic boondoggles. Instead of seeing medical clinics filled with all sorts of unused equipment, I was watching a U.S. Army colonel confirm to an Iraqi bureaucrat that the requested wheelbarrows were on the way. Heady stuff...

Thanks again for your support, for being a Substack member, for buying the book, and for helping get the word out! I hope to see you soon at one of my events.

If you are in the DC area, please attend my Headliners Book Event at the National Press Club, Aug 17, 6:30 pm. Register here, and share widely! Also, please buy my book, which comes out Aug 15!

It’s been nearly two years since the fall of Kabul, and since then the Taliban has been unambiguous in its approach to governance. Any hopes people had of a kinder, gentler Taliban in its second go around have long been dashed.

The Taliban is as hardline, oppressive, intolerant, and ruthless as they were when they governed from 1996-2001, if not more so. Early rhetoric that women would fare better today than during Taliban 1.0 was nothing more than talk.

Since taking over, the Taliban has undone all that the international community did in 20 years to advance the rights, status, and opportunities for women in Afghanistan.

Here’s the state of play in Afghanistan today based on information from the U.S. Institute of Peace and the United Nations.

Women are banned from: attending universities; working for international non-governmental organizations; working for the United Nations; working in certain professions, such as serving as flight attendants; obtaining a driver’s license; running bakeries in Kabul.

Furthermore, women working in the media or medical sector must cover their faces. They are required to have an escort to travel long distances in Afghanistan or to leave the country. Some provinces have even more restrictions preventing women from going to restaurants or health centers.

The overall humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate.

According to mid-year UNICEF reporting posted in July, the number of Afghans in need of humanitarian assistance increased to 29.2 million in May compared to 28.3 million in January. And there has been a 31 percent increase in the number of children suffering from severe wasting in the first half of 2023 compared to the same period last year.

There are regular reports of the Taliban committing human rights abuses and executions. Former members of the Afghan security forces and others who cooperated with the international community are targeted and in danger.

Any hope of an internal resistance movement rising up and taking on the Taliban is gone. The only significant challenge to the Taliban is from ISIS-K—or ISIL-K as the United Nations calls the Afghanistan-based faction of the terrorist group. And the terrorism picture in Afghanistan is not good, according to the June 1, 2023 Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team report to the UN Security Council.

There are indications that al-Qaida is rebuilding operational capability, that [the Pakistani Taliban] TTP is launching attacks into Pakistan with support from the Taliban, that groups of foreign terrorist fighters are projecting threat across Afghanistan’s borders and that the operations of ISIL-K are becoming more sophisticated and lethal (if not more numerous).

The report estimates there are 30 to 60 core al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan and some 400 fighters. ISIS-K has 4,000 to 6,000 fighters, including family members, and that includes Afghans and people from Azerbaijan, Iran, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Turkey, Central Asian countries, and a small number of Syrians.

The report continued:

While the Taliban publicly insists there are no foreign terrorist groups in Afghanistan other than ISIL-K, Member States reported approximately 20 groups operating in the country, enjoying freedom of movement under the Taliban’s protection and the General Directorate of Intelligence’s oversight. Member States assessed these groups as a serious threat to the region.

Of course, the Taliban was not in compliance with the 2020 deal it signed with the Trump administration regarding its obligations that it “will not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qaeda, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.”

President Biden had every right under the flimsy agreement to declare the Taliban was not in compliance, and therefore the United States did not have to withdraw its troops as stipulated under the agreement. But there’s no point relitigating that now.

Bottom line, terrorists are in Afghanistan, some with the knowledge, consent, and support of the Taliban. The so-called “over-the-horizon” approach to counterterrorism has not been successful in keeping terrorists out of Afghanistan or seeing it as a haven from which to operate.

So, to sum up we have a brutal regime that resembles U.S. ally Saudi Arabia—oops, quiet part out loud—a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions, and a growing terrorism problem.

What’s the solution?

Anyone?

Bueller?

There is no shortage of opinions and arguments coming from the international affairs community. The point of paralysis basically comes down to the concern that measures to support the Afghan people—providing more humanitarian and economic assistance and unfreezing Afghan assets—and counterterrorism cooperation would reward and enrich the Taliban, confer legitimacy on a despicable regime, and potentially benefit some terrorist groups.

Because of that quandary, the United States has continued with a Cuba-style approach—sanctions and a hard line against the regime that demands significant political reforms/concessions before there is any relief. Of course, that policy—largely driven by a small community of Cuban exiles in the United States—has accomplished little more than to transfer pain onto the Cuban people.

And in the last two years, the Taliban has only become more hardline and abusive toward the Afghan population, and it has allowed the terrorism problem to grow despite international sanctions and the refusal of most of the world to recognize the regime. So, the current approach doesn’t seem to be achieving objectives.

In the meantime, the international community has struggled to meet the aid demands in Afghanistan and avoid enriching the Taliban at the same time. Unfortunately, as is the case in Syria and other humanitarian crises, it’s impossible to deliver large amounts of aid without some of it being siphoned off or otherwise taxed by members of the regime that’s causing the humanitarian crisis, hence some of the resistance to pump more aid into Afghanistan.

Many in the humanitarian community argue the solution is to deal with the regime in the interests of saving lives and alleviating suffering of the nearly 30 million people—75 percent of the population—in need of assistance.

The International Crisis Group’s Graeme Smith (a friend from my time in Afghanistan) and Delaney Simon voiced the moral argument in Foreign Affairs back in December.

More sanctions will not change the minds of Taliban leaders, who for decades endured not only financial restrictions but also bombardment and night raids. In fact, sanctions give the most conservative Taliban leaders what they want: freedom from the foreign influences they fear are sources of corruption and moral decay. 

He called for greater economic engagement with Afghanistan and investment in development, in particular completing infrastructure projects that the international community sank billions into during the conflict.

Donor countries do not need to normalize relations with the Taliban or refrain from criticizing their governance or human rights record, but they will need to set aside their reluctance to deal with a Taliban-controlled state. The rich countries that sent armed forces to Afghanistan in pursuit of their own security interests should feel a sense of duty about helping repair the country—and recognize that it is in their interest to do so, not least to contain security threats.

In a recent article in the National Interest, Dylan Motin (who I do not know), proposed a realist foreign policy argument.

Engaging with Kabul could improve America’s position against its rivals, primarily China. A U.S.-sympathetic Afghanistan will encourage China to bolster its defenses in the areas bordering Afghanistan. This additional military burden would be relatively light for Beijing, but it is a low-hanging fruit and an inexpensive win for Washington.

…

If Washington can help build a strong and stable Afghanistan, Pakistan will have to maintain significant forces to defend its western border. Islamabad will have fewer capabilities to challenge India in its east.

…

If the United States wants to reach an agreement with Iran to freeze its nuclear and missile programs and scale down its regional ambitions, a friendly Afghanistan would become a bargaining chip and additional leverage to pressure Tehran.

While those points are rational, I think two of his three recommendations are beyond reason and are non-starters. Unfreezing Afghanistan’s assets in the interests of boosting the economy is consistent with what many experts have been advocating, but his calls to provide military assistance to the Taliban and establish normal diplomatic relations? Not going to happen.

There’s not a lot of appetite for softening U.S. policy toward the Taliban among powerful people on the Hill, as demonstrated in a July 21 letter from Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Since taking power, the Taliban have only worsened their behavior despite U.S. engagement. Today, the Taliban continues to take Americans hostage, disrupt humanitarian assistance efforts, appoint al-Qaeda officials to government positions, and enforce increasingly draconian rules on women and girls, such as barring them from receiving an education above the sixth grade. The U.S. must lead the international community in demanding reforms, not normalizing the Taliban’s regime.

And authors (including a former deputy chief of mission in Kabul) of a recent op-ed in The Hill also advocated a continued hard line.

We must do everything possible to keep and strengthen the biggest international policy tool we have: targeted, worldwide, U.N.-administered sanctions against Taliban leaders, imposed on the grounds that their actions are a threat to international peace and security.

Again, sanctions haven’t accomplished anything positive in Afghanistan, just as sanctions against Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia haven’t changed the behaviors of those regimes. The Taliban hasn’t reached a point where it needs sanctions relief to the point it’s willing to make concessions.

So, it’s likely going to be a while before there is consensus on how to move forward with Afghanistan. That means muddling along with the humanitarian response, which has only grown more complicated with the ban on women working for international organizations and the war in Ukraine, which is competing for resources and driving up food prices.

In terms of counterterrorism, options are limited.

Seth Jones with the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in April 2022 one of the few rational, actionable strategies I have seen for how to address the terrorism threat in Afghanistan.

He rules out partnering with the Taliban on fighting ISIS-K—even though we know there has been some cooperation on that front—because it would involve providing more arms and capabilities to the Taliban that it would then share with al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups the Taliban supports.

The current “over-the-horizon” approach has been inadequate. Other than the strike against al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul, the strategy hasn’t stopped the flow of terrorists into Afghanistan and the overall growing problem.

Jones argues for having the CIA partner with local forces/groups in Afghanistan as it has in the past to gather intel. Second, he calls for negotiating with countries in the region to provide bases for U.S. assets. This has been one of the challenges of over-the-horizon operations is the fact that the current U.S. bases in the broader region are too far to facilitate regular overflight of Afghanistan and quick and frequent operations.

Third, Jones calls for more investment in over-the-horizon assets like the MQ-9B drone to conduct more robust counterterrorism operations.

Essentially, what Jones is calling for is a scaled-down version of U.S. counterterrorism approaches in some African and other Middle Eastern states. Unfortunately, the track record on those operations is mixed with terrorism continuing to grow in many places, and U.S. partner forces using weapons and training to carry out coups like the one taking place in Niger.

However, Jones isn’t advocating for training and equipping forces in Afghanistan, which would be a dangerous move.

So, here we are. Almost two years after the fall of Kabul and there are no good options for Afghanistan. This is why I expect in the coming weeks there will be much written that is backward looking—articles criticizing policy decisions in Afghanistan and partisan blame games about who failed. Republicans will blame Biden for a disastrous withdrawal. Democrats will blame Trump for signing a terrible withdrawal agreement.

It's easy to cast shade on 20 years of failed policies and operations. It’s a lot harder to solve a major humanitarian and security crisis. I think an incremental approach that combines Jones’s counterterrorism recommendations with Smith and Simon’s humanitarian proposals is the best that can be hoped for right now.

As The Washington Post reports, Russia is continuing to pound Ukraine with missiles, causing civilian casualties and destroying historic and cultural sites. Russia has been shelling Odessa for days in response to Ukraine damaging the bridge between Russian annexed Crimea and Russia.

And there’s another Washington Post report this weekend that discusses an unfortunate side effect of war, and something that I saw the impacts of in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and South Sudan: unexploded ordnance and explosive remnants of war.

Unexploded ordnance, or UXO, is pretty much what it sounds like: grenades, bombs, mortars, or other munitions that did not detonate when initially fired or deployed but still could. Explosive remnants of war, or ERW, includes UXO and live munitions left behind in a war zone.

And neither of those categories includes mines or improvised explosive devices, which Russia has employed on a large scale in Ukraine, and Ukraine has employed to a lesser extent.

Thanks to Vladimir Putin, Ukraine is now the world’s most explosives-contaminated country. A recent report from the European think tank GLOBSEC lays out the extent of the danger in Ukraine.

About 30% of Ukraine’s territory (174 000 sq.km) has been exposed to intense combat operations. This area requires survey and clearance from the vast amounts of explosive ordnance left by the invaders. Ukraine is consequently the largest mined territory in the world surpassing such former frontrunners as Afghanistan and Syria.

Efforts to demine Ukraine and clear all the various explosives from the ground will take decades and cost $37 billion just over the next 10 years, according to the World Bank as cited in the GLOBSEC report.

Of course, the problem in Ukraine did not start in February 2022. Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine and Crimea created a severe crisis. According to the report, this was the situation prior to the 2022 war:

The UN ranked the East of the country to be one of the most mine-contaminated regions in the world and ranked Ukraine fifth in the world for civilian casualties caused by mines and among the top three for anti-vehicle mine incidents.

…

Of course, the worst thing about the pre-Feb 2022 demining was that all those efforts comprising over 7 years of work have been wasted as this territory has been re-contaminated after the advance of Russian armed forces in the area since February 2022.

And the situation has only become more dangerous and difficult, the report states:

Also, the nature of challenges in demining is different to the pre-Feb 2022 situation for the following reasons:-(1) much heavier and longer fighting; (2) the range and dispersal of the explosive ordnance is much greater7; (3) the size of potentially contaminated territories is 10 times larger.

According to a recent Washington Post report, “Between the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 and July 2023, the United Nations has recorded 298 civilian deaths from explosive remnants of war, 22 of them children, and 632 civilian injuries.”

The problem will only grow as the fighting drags on and Russia continues its indiscriminate shelling. And now Ukraine is compounding the problem as it employs cluster munitions, which are notorious for littering the ground with dud bomblets. While the percentage of duds is small—ideally less than 2 percent—the number of pieces of UXO adds up in real terms as more cluster munitions are deployed.

The human cost of this problem will only continue to add up. Most of the casualties in Ukraine today are caused by active conflict and a small percentage are caused by ERW or mines. But based on the experiences of places like Afghanistan, the casualties from ERW will continue for years.

I saw the consequences constantly in my time in Afghanistan. During one of my first embeds in 2009, I was at Combat Outpost Herrera in Paktiya province not too far from the border with Pakistan. Here’s a deleted snippet from an early draft of my book.

As I was sitting on the steps to a lookout post on the corner of the base typing away, a sergeant came around one of the buildings and yelled, “Hey reporter!” He told me that the Afghan Border Police had just arrived with a truck full of weaponry they had found.

I grabbed my gear and ran over to see a green Toyota pickup truck with a pile of rusty, dirt-covered mortars in the back. Soldiers laid out a tarp and placed the 49 mortars on the tarp. The U.S. soldiers were claiming it was a sign of progress that the Afghan soldiers brought them to the Americans to dispose of rather than try to use them or discard them in a way that could be dangerous for the locals or even fall into the wrong hands.

The soldiers said the mortars had likely been in the ground since the late ‘80s, but they were still dangerous and were an example of how much stuff was lying in the ground all over the country.

There were several nearby explosions during the few days I spent at that base. While at least one was determined to be a rocket or mortar fired at the base, soldiers speculated that others could have been Afghans stepping on or otherwise accidentally detonating ERW.

In July 2012, I reported a story about the ongoing challenges of demining Afghanistan. I visited a family of Kuchis—Afghan nomads—that had experienced several tragedies near a NATO firing range that had originally been a Soviet range. It was obviously littered with UXO, and the Kuchis grazed their animals near the range and some collected scrap metal to sell.

Numerous Kuchis were maimed or killed by UXO there. That was an example of one of the challenges in the country, according to demining experts. Many Afghans were so poor they knowingly took risks by walking around contaminated areas.

Here’s an excerpt from my book talking about that story:

I interviewed a father and son, both of whom had been maimed by explosives in the range. The main problem was that the area was not completely fenced off and not well marked. People would graze their animals, as the father had done, and cross into the range. The father lost his leg when he stepped on a mine.

Months after that, the 16-year-old son was roaming around the area picking up scrap metal to sell. He picked up a grenade that blew off both of his arms.

I could understand the injury to the father, but I was baffled by what happened to the son. I asked the son, “Your father lost his leg and another relative was killed in the range, why were you in an area that had explosives and why did you pick up a strange piece of metal? Didn’t you think it was too dangerous?”

His response was worded in a specific way that gave me my introduction to Afghan empirical logic. He said, “If I had known it was going to blow my arms off, I would not have touched it for a million dollars.”

I sat there as the response sank in. I asked the question again in a slightly different way. I was trying to tease out why the inju­ries and deaths to his family didn’t make him think twice and not pick up strange things in a firing range. But he answered the same way. What he was saying was that if he had known the specific object he picked up was going to maim him, he would not have picked up that specific item. However, the broader danger did not register to him that anything in the area was potentially danger­ous, and he shouldn’t touch anything metallic, and frankly should not have been there to begin with.

What was even more shocking to me was the fact that the father said that after the he lost his leg, he did not warn his son to avoid the area or to be careful. That interview was a microcosm of how profound the challenge of demining Afghanistan and protecting civilians was.

Demining experts told me a big part of the problem was raising awareness and teaching Afghans about the dangers. Then, there was the gap between the need for demining and the available resources—trained personnel, equipment, money—which was enormous and a decades-long challenge under the best conditions.

In 2013, I reported a story about the lack of resources for Afghans who had lost limbs or suffered other injuries from conflict and ERW. A metaphor for the problem was that one of the civil society organizations that helped disabled Afghans was on the second floor of a building complex and to get to the office you had to climb an unsteady, open-rise metal staircase that was challenging enough for people who were not on crutches or missing limbs.

A Red Cross facility in Kabul was fabricating 2,000 prosthetic limbs a year, which was a small portion of the need. While many of the patients had been injured in combat with the Soviets and needed new prosthetics, the Red Cross was frequently seeing new patients who had been injured by ERW. Of course, they were only seeing those who had survived their encounters.

A November 2021 report “30 Years of Impact: An Evaluation of the Mine Action Programme of Afghanistan” said that as of August 2021, the program “had cleared over 81% of land known to be contaminated by legacy landmines and explosive remnants of war in the country,” which was the good news. The next paragraph contained the cautionary news:

In 2021, MAPA finds itself at a critical juncture. It is not on track to meet the targets committed to as part of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention obligations. Funding for the mine action sector in Afghanistan has been decreasing steadily since 2011, dropping from $113 million to $32 million by 2020. The emergence of new threats, such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), requires constant capacity building in a sector that is always at risk of brain drain. Finally, the takeover of the Taliban in the summer of 2021 threatens funding streams, as many donors are reluctant to engage with the new regime, whether directly or indirectly - even as it simultaneously opens a window of opportunity in terms of access to previously inaccessible areas, and more secure operating conditions.

And as bad as the problem is now in Ukraine, it will only get worse as Putin continues his devastating folly.

The leaders of Iraq and Syria met in Damascus today as the region continues to mend fences with war criminal Bashar al-Assad. This is the latest example of governments in the Middle East choosing pragmatism over principle.

Preorder Passport Stamps today!

The Arab League reinstated Syria’s member status in May after a 12-year timeout because of Assad’s human rights violations against the Syrian people in the wake of the Arab Spring.

It was always a longshot that Assad would be held accountable for his crimes, but odds have diminished further as Arab nations have been reestablishing diplomatic and economic ties with Syria. Basically, their calculus has been that it doesn’t look like Assad is going anywhere, so it’s time to focus on mutual political, security, economic interests, and drugs.

One of the major concerns in the region is stopping the production in Syria of the amphetamine-like drug Captagon, which has been proliferating in the region and enriching the Syrian regime despite its denials. So, containing the drug trade is one of the reasons countries are normalizing relations with Syria.

Thus, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s visit to Damascus doesn’t come as much surprise.According to the Associated Press:

The two leaders told reporters that they discussed fighting drugs, the return of Syrian refugees and the imperative of lifting Western sanctions imposed in Syria. They also talked about Israel’s strikes on the war-torn country and water shortages in the Euphrates River that cuts through both countries because of projects in Turkey.

…

Al-Sudani's office said in a statement that talks revolved around ways of expanding cooperation in the fields of trade, economy, transportation, tourism, how to combat climate change and collaboration to fight terrorism.

…

“We are interested in working through official and government channels to solve the issue of refugees and guarantee a safe return for them as soon as the situation becomes stable in places where they reside,” al-Sudani said. Iraq is hosting about 250,000 Syrian refugees.

Deepening ties between Baghdad and Damascus will benefit Tehran and make things more difficult for Washington. The United States’ counter-ISIS mission in Syria runs through Iraq. Assad has long wanted U.S. troops out of Syria, although it hasn’t been a top priority given that would mean having to take responsibility for containing ISIS in the eastern portion of the country controlled by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces—a non-state entity.

So, can Assad pressure Iraq to put more conditions on the U.S. military presence in Iraq that could force the United States to pull out of Syria? Probably not anytime soon, but certainly Iran and Syria are looking for any way to pressure Iraq.

Iraq continues to struggle, and the country can’t afford to alienate the United States, which continues to provide hundreds of millions of dollars of security, humanitarian, and other assistance to Iraq.

And according to a piece in the New York Times today, the Iraqi government is cracking down on social media in an effort to reduce criticism of the government that exploded in 2019 with massive demonstrations against government corruption.

Human rights and democracy advocates say that to prevent any recurrence of the upheaval that occurred four years ago, the government seeks to limit independent voices in the public square, using lawsuits, detentions, online harassment, threats and occasionally kidnapping or assassination. Often it is unclear exactly which acts violate public order and morality, according to the U.S. State Department’s most recent report on human rights, as well as a report by Human Rights Watch and other free speech and human rights organizations.

It has now been two decades since the United States invaded and toppled Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Since then, the country has been plagued by political infighting and stagnation. It’s a fragile state that has experienced substantial political and economic turmoil over the last four years in particular.

However, none of this comes as much of a surprise. In April 2009, I took my second reporting trip to Iraq. The security situation was relatively calm, and U.S. forces were focused on training Iraqi forces so U.S. troops could hand things over and leave at the end of 2011.

I produced two stories from that 2009 trip. One looked at the efforts to train the Iraqi security forces, and the other explored how poorly the country was doing in building/rebuilding the electricity infrastructure and providing power to the people.

Both efforts were fraught and plagued by corruption and political infighting.

The following is a draft of a book chapter I wrote about that trip. I ended up cutting the chapter during editing, and I used a few bits of it in the final manuscript. By the way, we are now one month away from the official release of the book, so hurry up and preorder your copy through my author site. Free subscribers can read a portion of the deleted chapter, and paid subscribers get the whole thing. Membership has its privileges!

I went through the usual embed mortgage application process and also a visa application since I would be flying in and out on a commercial/contractor flight. No more military air nonsense.

Since I was going to do unembedded reporting, I needed a fixer, driver, and security person. I reached out to contacts at the Washington Post Baghdad bureau. They informed me that the bureau had recently downsized and passed along contact information for a former driver and security guy. With those two positions secured, I continued my hunt for a fixer, and a couple of days before my scheduled departure to Iraq, and after a lot of calls, emails, and referrals, I found my guy.

With all the appropriate papers and stamps in hand, I boarded the United contractor shuttle from Dulles to Dubai and settled into my business class seat courtesy of my platinum-status upgrade. United had just started renovating their planes and it would still be a while before their 777s had the new lie-flat seats rather than the early 90s-era Barcaloungers that were far better than economy, but still sucked to sleep in during a 13-hour flight.

I arrived in Dubai and went to the Dnata—the Dubai National Air Travel Agency—desk to buy a ticket to Baghdad. Since Jupiter Airlines, the sketchy contractor airline I was going to fly into Baghdad, wasn’t a traditional airline in the international booking system, I could not purchase a ticket in the United States prior to my trip. However, the Dnata agent told me I had to purchase my ticket the next morning before my desired flight. It made me a little nervous to cut it that close and show up to the airport without a ticket in hand.

Anyhow, I checked into my hotel in Dubai, showered, and met friends for dinner at Al Mallah, my favorite local-style Lebanese restaurant in Dubai. After a little barhopping, I returned to my hotel for a drink at the hooker bar. It was fairly dead, and only one woman tried to hit me up for business. I declined.

The next morning, I got up stupidly early and arrived at Dubai airport’s Terminal 2—aka the Terminal of Lost Souls—at 5 a.m. to make sure I had plenty of time to buy my ticket and deal with any curveballs in the process. I stood in line for 30 minutes. I reached the counter, bought a ticket, and felt like all was well in the world. I breezed through security and then looked for a gate showing a sign for my flight. I didn’t see one, so I checked with an agent who was of course loosening up to throw curveballs.

The agent said that I had an “open ticket” and therefore he wouldn’t check me in for the flight. I asked numerous questions, and the agent provided numerous answers, but the questions and answers did not mesh. Thus, I did not understand what the problem was, but the agent kept saying he could not give me a seat. After some additional back and forth, a solution was presented to me: pay an additional $100 for a business-class ticket and a guaranteed seat. I submitted to the extortion and was assigned a seat. Of course, there wasn’t a business class on the unbranded white plane, but I had a seat that got me to Baghdad.

By that point, the commercial flights were no longer doing the crazy corkscrew approaches into Baghdad. The plane circled a lot, but then came in at a fairly reasonable angle and speed.

After an hour twiddling my thumbs at baggage claim, my giant black duffel emerged among all the other giant black duffels belonging to the international people of mystery who were still roaming around the country. I exited the terminal and met the taxi driver that my guys had sent in to take me out to the last checkpoint where civilian cars were allowed to park.

We drove out and found my team. We stuffed my gear into the trunk of the 80s Mercedes and rolled along the highway into the city. There was a much larger presence of Iraqi forces on the streets than during my visit eight-months prior. There was more traffic as well.

We pulled through the security checkpoint at the Hamra Hotel, and I checked into my “suite.”

The room was spacious and looked authentically 1974. It had two twin bed/couches, a dining room table, refrigerator, and kitchenette with hot plates. On the wall was an odd painting of what looked like a few dozen 18th century ships congregating around some European port city. It was about as non-Iraqi of a piece of art as you could get.

After running through my plans with my team, I grabbed a sandwich in the hotel restaurant and then took a nap. That night I walked around the corner from the hotel to a party, once again at the Washington Post house. And once again I consumed a coronary-inducing quantity of lamb chops.

This party was far more subdued than the one the previous summer, in part because the country was calming down and media organizations had been downsizing and consolidating their offices. In fact, NPR had moved into the Washington Post house. Journalists told me that it had become more difficult to get Iraq stories published or on air and that it was frustrating to see the audience losing interest. Just because violence was way down did not mean that there weren’t important things happening (or in the case of improving the economy and political stability, not happening) that the global public needed to know about.

In 2009, Iraq 1.0 was quieting down, and the writing was on the wall that news organizations were going to be shuttering their bureaus. The fact that many people had already left and that journalists still in Baghdad were confronting downsizing sucked some of the energy out of parties like the one I was attending that night. At least one thing was the same: my usual feelings of envy and inadequacy around the full-time correspondents from the grown-up news agencies. Even though the story was drying up, I was still jealous of the Baghdad-based tribe and the lives they had.

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One of the inevitable consequences of writing a book (that you can preorder here) is ending up with a lot of material that doesn’t make the final cut. In my case, my first draft was more than double the length of a typical book. Candidly, my final draft and what is being published is on the long side for a first book from someone who isn’t a celebrity or household name. I’m grateful to Madville Publishing for indulging me.

Still, I have a lot of material that I have been gradually putting out on Substack. In some cases, I’ve published whole chapters, in other cases just vignettes.

I’m trying something a little different with this post. I took a first draft of a chapter and excised everything that ended up in the book. What’s left is the following. I have added some stitching in italics to glue together the chunks.

This is the chapter about my first international reporting trip in 2007. Technically, it’s my third foreign story as I reported a story from Mali in 2003 and Iceland in 2006 (sadly both stories have aged off the internet), but these were essentially freelance pieces I did while on vacations.

My trip to Serbia, Kosovo, and Russia was a deliberate reporting trip and while I got through the trip in one piece, I was a bumbling idiot through much of it and lucky I didn’t get myself into serious trouble. Enjoy.

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For my first reporting trip, I of course wanted to go someplace heady despite my very limited experience traveling to heady places. My parents used to love telling the story of my first time on ice skates as a kid. My skates were splayed out to the sides as I fought to stand up, and I asked when I could start jumping barrels. In other words, I have a history of getting ahead of myself.

We were producing a program on the chilling relations between Russia and the United States, and I wanted to go somewhere where there was tension and danger that could serve as a vivid example of Russia’s increasing assertiveness in the world. I wanted that place to be somewhere that would “impress” people—to show that I was hardcore and could handle serious shit.

After speaking with several Russia experts and some former grad school classmates, I settled on Serbia and Kosovo. It was a clear example of where Russia and the United States were at odds: Russia was backing Serbia, which opposed the impending independence of Kosovo, and the United States, which eight years prior had bombed the crap out of Serbia to protect Kosovo, supported independence for the ethnic-Albanian territory.

While it wasn’t an active conflict, it wasn’t exactly Sesame Street either as Kosovo was on the verge of declaring independence and there were concerns that could spark violence. Plus, Kosovo was still quite rough around the edges with plenty of criminal and mafia activity. Ultimately, it fit the bill for me—it was journalistically sound, a clear example of a clash between U.S. and Russian foreign policy, and it would help me build street cred by reporting from a rough neighborhood.

At the same time, I would be touching down there years after the height of conflict that the real war correspondents had covered. I was late to the party and for journalists, going to Kosovo at that time was no big deal, even if the average person thought it was a big deal. Still, I had to start somewhere.

I commenced my pre-trip research and contact building. A friend who had spent time in that region (doing mysterious things that I figured it was best not to ask about) turned me onto a number of sources, and also pointed me to a perfect vehicle for my story: the bridge in Mitrovica.

Mitrovica at the time was a divided city in Kosovo (well, it still is). The Ibar river splits the city between north and south. The north is Serbian despite the fact that the entire city is within Kosovo. The south is Albanian. Mitrovica was a hot spot during the 1999 Kosovo war and most of the Serbs living south of the river fled to the north. NATO Kosovo Force (KFOR) peacekeepers deployed to Mitrovica along with UN police. Deadly ethnic clashes continued to break out from time to time after the war.

After Kosovo declared independence, things heated up as there was a significant Serbian population in the northern part of Kosovo, and the Serbs did not recognize Kosovo as an independent nation. It was all rather predictable, and could have been avoided had everyone agreed to draw the borders such that the Serbs in Kosovo would not end up as an ethnic minority in an independent Kosovo. It’s all complicated and fascinating, and I can’t do it justice here, so let’s move on.

Mitrovica, and specifically the bridge, would be the initial setting and metaphor for my report. To this day, people refer to the bridge as one that divides, rather than connects, two communities. Serbs backed by Russia on one side, and Albanians backed by the United States on the other. Journalistic poetry.

I booked my flight, reserved a room at a cheap hotel in Belgrade, and scheduled some interviews. With that, and without doing some additional planning and research that I should have, I set off on my adventure.

As soon as I cleared immigration and customs in Belgrade—which went far smoother than I anticipated—I realized I had not completed one of the most important parts of pre-trip research: figuring out the local taxi system. Every country has its quirks when it comes to airport taxis. There are few things worse than walking out of an airport and not having any idea how to avoid being taken for a ride by an unscrupulous taxi driver—is that redundant?

In some countries there are no discernible regulations and drivers swarm arriving passengers and charge whatever they can get away with. Other countries have official licensed taxis that use meters and might simultaneously have rogue or unregulated taxis, which can be better or worse than the licensed taxis. And some countries have only licensed taxis, but drivers can still find ways to cut corners and rip off passengers. Some countries have taxi drivers who might take you on a ride from which you never return. Therefore, one of the most important pieces of knowledge when traveling internationally is the local taxi system, in particular the rules and conventions at airports.

As I came out into the arrival hall, I saw a number of men with “Taxi” badges awaiting fresh meat. Several drooling drivers approached me, and I waved them off as I stalled for time to assess the situation. One driver followed at a distance as I wandered around the arrival hall looking for an ATM. I found one and took out a stack of Serbian dinars as I continued to look for clues as to how to procure a scam-free ride.

Since it was my first time traveling alone outside of places like the UK or France where you can generally count on the rule of law and consistent practices, I didn’t have the appropriate knowledge or the confidence and swagger necessary to ward off those looking to take advantage of a clueless foreigner. I didn’t feel in danger. If anything, I felt somewhat embarrassed and ashamed for being clueless in the first moments of my first international reporting trip.

More taxi men approached me, and I dismissed them all and walked outside to gather more intelligence. I saw a bus schedule and tried to make sense of it as a possible alternative to get into the city. As I struggled over the schedule, a taxi driver approached and started talking to me. I played it cool like I knew what I was doing. The gruff 50-something man with buzzed gray hair spoke solid English and he seemed to have a low Travis Bickle quotient. We negotiated a bit over the rate, and I decided to take a chance with him.

The conversation during the taxi ride is in the book.

We arrived at the Union Hotel. I paid the driver the agreed price and he handed me his card. I survived my first taxi ride as an international journalist. I entered the lobby and could tell the hotel was going to have “charm” but might not have hot water or any furnishings that were purchased after I was born. Such was my lot working for a low-budget program that could barely afford to send me anywhere.

The desk staff checked me in and gave me my room key and TV remote—detail noted, I was in a place where TV remotes were a prized commodity. I stepped into one of the most primitive elevators I’d ever seen. It wasn’t like a cool New York City lift with the metal gate and the control lever that looks like something off an 1800s steamship operated by a guy dressed as Captain Obvious. It was, shall we say, more socialist looking. You opened the outer door manually, stepped in, and either closed the inner doors, or not. It didn’t matter as the elevator would go with the inner doors open, and you could watch each floor pass by until it stopped, and you pushed open the outer door to exit. If nothing else, it seemed like it would be easy to escape the elevator in the event of a power outage, but I could picture American lawyers salivating over the personal injury potential.

I double checked that I still had all my limbs and wandered down the dark hallway. The floor felt like my foot might fall through at any moment, and the trim looked like that hyper-flammable stuff that Sears sold everyone for their basements in the 1970s.

I entered my room, and it was as expected. Everything was 30 years past its expiration date but, it would do—it had a bed, something resembling a shower, a grime-covered rotary phone, and the door lock worked.

Book content here.

That night I went out for dinner and drinks with a grad school classmate. We dined at Dacha, a traditional Serbian restaurant and then went to Absinthe—one of the trendier bars in Belgrade, apparently modeled after a bar in New York I’d never seen. My classmate left, but I stayed to people watch—well, women watch.

However, the women did not seem to be interested in watching me, so around 1 a.m. I left with the intention of taking a cab back to my lovely hotel room and its ancient TV—I had left the remote in the room, which I hoped was the right thing to do. As I was about to hop into a taxi, I noticed a giant stone church bathed in bright light on top of a nearby hill. I decided to hike up for a closer look.

I walked around the towering Cathedral of St. Sava, and in the not-too distance, I heard The Doors—I was assuming it was a recording and not the actual band, but there were still those rumors that Jim wasn’t really dead. I traced the source to a bar across the street and I wandered in. It was the smallest bar I’d seen anywhere to that point—about the square footage of a Manhattan studio apartment (if you counted the closet and pantry). It was dark and the music way too loud. Electronic dartboards flashed away on the far wall.

Stuff, stuff, stuff in the book. People I met at the bar and stayed out all night with dropped me back at my hotel as the sun was rising.

I was suspicious of the elevator and my coordination and climbed the creaky stairs to my room. I closed the door, placed the half empty bottle of beer I was still carrying on the night table and by 6:30 a.m. I was asleep. Of course, it was only 12:30 a.m. as far as my body was concerned, so it wasn’t that outrageous to be turning in so late.

Not surprisingly, I woke up a little later than I wanted to, and I immediately hopped into the shower, drenched the bathroom with the hand-held shower head, got dressed, and wandered out to the pedestrian street and Kalemegdan Park to do “man on the street” interviews.

A bunch of stuff takes place. The next morning, I take a bus to Mitrovica in the Kosovo region and spend the day there bumbling around before taking a taxi to Pristina for the night. I checked into the Grand Hotel Pristina.

I dropped my bags and went out looking for the bars I was told would be full of UN people. I asked the woman at the front desk—who of course looked like Layla—where I could find the Phoenix Bar and the Bamboo lounge. She said she had never heard of them, but the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) headquarters was just behind the hotel, so I should check there.

I walked out and passed the UNMIK building, and right across from it was the Phoenix Bar—go figure. It was a classic English-style pub, and I promptly ordered a Guinness and scoped out the room. It was quiet, but I heard one group of people speaking English. I wandered over to the burly, dark men and barged in. They immediately accused me of being a spy. I explained that I was a journalist, and they were clearly having none of it. They wanted to know why I looked like I was from Scandinavia, and they accused me of speaking with different, and non-American accents.

I stuck with my journalist story and proceeded to ask them questions about what was going on in Kosovo. They were all security workers from Trinidad, and they felt things were pretty calm. They weren’t sensing any buildup of tension and didn’t think there would be anything like the conflict in 1999, but they acknowledged that things could get hairy.

We talked a little longer and I realized I wasn’t going to get any useful contacts or interviews. I excused myself, telling the security guys I had a busy day of spying ahead and needed some rest. Why not tweak them on the way out?

The next morning, I walked out to a row of taxis in front of the hotel. I asked if someone could take me to the Russian chancery office. Two cabbies talked for a moment and indicated they knew where I wanted to go. I hopped into one of the cabs. The driver wandered through progressively smaller streets on a hillside and stopped at a dead end by the U.S. embassy. I got out and told the armed guard—who was rapidly approaching me with a concerned look on his face—that I had asked the driver to take me to the Russian chancery. They spoke in German for a few minutes, which baffled me, and the cabbie finally understood.

We pulled up at another dead end where Russian security guards immediately gave me the hairy eyeball. I argued with the driver for a minute about the fare since he went the wrong way, and then a security guard escorted me inside.

The building had a small lobby with a magnetometer. The security guy of course spoke no English and seemed to be telling me to empty all my pockets and leave all my equipment at the desk. He indicated for me to place my cell phone on the counter by the glass window behind which two more guards sat. I kept watching to see if he was going to don rubber gloves, at which point I was going to run for the exit.

He then started to wave me inside, and I tried to communicate that I needed my audio gear. I wasn’t sure for a minute he was going to let me take anything inside, but through a series of awkward hand gestures I got across that I needed my microphone, headphones, and recorder, and he let me take them into Andrei Dronov’s office.

I Interviewed Andrei, which I have written about in the book and on Substack previously since the conversation was a foreshadowing of the war in Ukraine. After the interview I returned to Mitrovica and walked around doing interview and exploring on the north, or Serbian, side of the city.

I hiked back down the hill to get something to eat before taking the bus back to Belgrade. I crossed the bridge to the little kebab shack on the Albanian side. I ordered a sandwich, and the owner invited me to sit in the “garden” behind the stand. It consisted of a small plastic table, a couple of chairs, and an umbrella. Directly behind was a railing, and on the other side was a hedge covered in razor wire.

As I sat waiting for my food, a Kosovo Police Force officer sat down, and we chatted. He was Albanian. He proceeded to spew venom about the Serbs. He had a visceral hatred of them and what they had done to the Kosovar Albanians. Then, his Serbian co-officer joined him. The Albanian officer’s demeanor flipped 180 degrees. He was all polite and buddy-buddy with his Serbian colleague. That summed it all up for me.

After my sandwich, I walked over to the row of buses on the north side and waited for the 5 p.m. bus. By 5:20, I realized was no 5 p.m. bus to Belgrade. I couldn’t determine whether I had misread the schedule—likely—or whether the scheduled bus simply didn’t show—equally likely.

I found a way back to Belgrade and describe the anxiety-inducing experience in the book. I spent one more day in Belgrade and then traveled to Moscow.

I made it through the airport without incident and after a two-hour delay, boarded the flight to Moscow. It was my first, and to date only, time flying Aeroflot. It was everything I expected it to be. The plane was a wide-body jet and the interior felt and looked like the inside of a 1974 Lincoln Continental. It was probably the height of luxury when it was built with its wide seats and garish trim, but it just looked outdated and kind of sad.

The flight was uneventful. Immigration was less so. The woman behind the desk heavily scrutinized my passport and visa and ultimately decided that the picture in my passport was not of me. She walked off with my passport to find a supervisor. I stood at the counter awkwardly awaiting my fate and kind of hoping to get hauled off into a back room for interrogation. That would provide a more badass story to tell about my reporting trip to Russia. Keep in mind, this was before Russia started aggressively cracking down on and detaining Americans, particularly journalists. I certainly would not be so blithe today about the notion of being detained in Russia.

However, it would not come to pass. The woman came back with a supervisor who looked at me, looked at my passport, and then looked at the woman with an expression that said, “Why did you waste my time?” She stamped me in, and I proceeded through baggage claim and customs and met my host, another grad-school classmate.

On the surprisingly long drive from the airport into the city we stopped at a traditional Russian restaurant to escape the traffic and down some borscht and vodka. From there, we continued onto his luxury apartment and drank more vodka before calling it a night.

The next day I woke up feeling drained—we didn’t have that much vodka, so I was pretty certain it was still the Serbian fish that was swimming around my insides. Another dose of Cipro and we headed downtown. My host dropped me off at Moscow University so I could interview students while he went off to a meeting. First, he came inside with me to the student cafe to inform employees who I was and to get permission before he left me on my own.

I spoke with a number of students about their view of Russia in the world and Russian foreign policy. I don’t know why it surprised me, but it did, that most of the students strongly supported Putin’s push to make Russia a player in the world again. These kids came of age after the fall of the Iron Curtain and knew nothing first-hand about Soviet Russia and the Cold War. Yet, they all felt that Russia had been humiliated and kicked while it was down in the ‘90s and early aughts and that it was time for Russia to become a strong, proud country again and they fully supported anything Putin did to make Russia a global power.

None of them expressed any opinions about the domestic economy, their job prospects, or any such parochial concerns, they just wanted Russia to sit at the adult table again. Again, I don’t know why that surprised me, but I felt those students were far more nationalistic and concerned with their country’s image in the world than I and my peers were when we were in college.

Granted, I was in college when the wall fell. After growing up in the Reagan era with the ever-present threat of nuclear war, we were freed from any such existential angst and America’s place in the world was secure as we entered adulthood. We Gen X’ers had the luxury of being more individualistic and focused on our lives and futures. Still, the sense of Russian grandeur exhibited by the students stuck with me.

Eventually, I started getting dirty looks from staff in the facility and I realized I had worn out my welcome. I packed up my gear and wandered outside to wait for Sergey. He picked me up and chauffeured me through ludicrous Moscow traffic to the Carnegie Moscow Center so I could interview Dimitri Trenin, the deputy director. He argued that Russia had a rather nebulous, arrogant, and ambitious foreign policy and that it was likely to become more of an eye-poker to the West in the coming years. I was impressed, though, that a high-profile Russian analyst was able to be as candid and critical of Russian politics and foreign policy as he was. Of course, our conversation took place before Putin critics started to develop an affinity for “accidentally” coming into contact with poisons and toxins.

The remainder of my interviews in Moscow all foretold the current state of play with Russia. Across the board, analysts, journalists, and citizens I spoke with all felt that Putin was going to bring Russia back and although it would never become an equal power to the United States on the world stage, Russia would constrain the United States and restrict its dominance. No one argued that Russia would offer the world any kind of positive vision or that it would become any kind of force for good in the world.

After finishing my work for the day, Sergey and I got ready to explore the club scene, which at that point was already world famous for its extravagance and decadence. I should mention that I was still feeling the effects of the Danube fish, so I was not exactly in full-on party mode, but there wasn’t a chance I was going to skip the Moscow scene.

I can’t remember the name of the place we ultimately chose. We arrived at the venue a little before midnight and got into a snaking line outside a large door flanked by a couple of ginormous bouncers straight out of central casting with their black shirts, bulging arms, and picture-perfect scowls.

At midnight, one of the men pulled out a cordless drill and unscrewed six large screws that were holding the door in place. We walked in through the door into a long hallway before emerging into what was in effect a small stadium. The place had the size and shape of a small college arena that held at least a thousand people. There were tiers of seating and standing spaces along the oval room and in the center was a floor area with bars at either end. Jutting out from the sides and up from the floor were six little crow’s nests for dancers, and there was a large catwalk platform that protruded from one end of the oval and hovered about 30 feet above the floor like an Olympic diving platform.

Sergey and I went to one of the bars and I ordered a martini. This was a club in Moscow after all, so of course I had to order a vodka drink. Except, the bartender had no idea what I was talking about. I explained through Sergey that I wanted a vodka martini. The bartender picked up a bottle of Martini vermouth and Sergey explained that to the bartender a “martini” meant a glass of Martini. I was truly baffled that a bartender in one of the largest clubs in Moscow had apparently never heard of the classic cocktail, and so I settled for a vodka on the rocks. I believe the price of a mid-shelf vodka was about $30, which was easily double the going rate in D.C. at the time.

Everything was over the top. In addition to the ridiculously expensive drinks, the music was ear splitting, the lights and video screens pulsing, the female dancers—everything you would expect among the gilded class in Moscow.

After about an hour, the show started on the catwalk. A trio of supermodel-looking women clad in perfunctory black leather bikinis and thigh-high boots lip synced and pole danced with their microphone stands to Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll.” Vegas Elvis, assisted by two more supermodels in Vegas Elvis bikinis took their turn gyrating on the platform. On and on it went with bikini-clad women grinding away on the platform.

While I was transfixed by Russia’s finest on the stage, much of the crowd was not paying attention. The young, well dressed, and clearly well-heeled attendees were engaged in drink and conversation. Interestingly, the place didn’t have the “being seen” dynamic so prominent in high-end clubs in other places at the time. People seemed more casual and engaged in socializing rather than strutting and otherwise showing off their wealth and status. There were no cliched scenes of small tables of mafia thugs surrounded by mostly naked women prostrating themselves at the power and wealth of the men. I concluded that the club was not exclusive enough for that demographic and was instead oriented to Russia’s new upper/upper middle class who just wanted to have fun.

Finally, the fatigue of fighting the microorganisms I imported from Serbia caught up with me, and at 4am we left the still thronging and throbbing club. All fantasies of impressing supermodels with my new status as a globe-trotting foreign correspondent faded with the music as we exited the club with nothing more than ringing ears and smoke-infused clothes.

The next day I awoke still feeling a little fishy and went about conducting my final interviews and doing the obligatory tours of Red Square and the Kremlin to cross them off the bucket list. The following day, feeling slightly better, I returned to Washington. Of course, I had the authentic experience of a sudden snowstorm hitting Moscow and delaying my flight just enough to miss my connection in London, resulting in an overnight at a Heathrow motel and a mad scramble at the airport the following day to get my Russian vodka onto the flight.

The first few days back in D.C. I felt fine, but then the Danube fish made an encore appearance. I could go into dramatic and colorful detail with four-part harmony, but I will spare you and simply state that it reached the point where I had no choice but to go to the ER. Fortunately, the cocktail of antibiotics they gave me finally wrestled the Danube fish into submission and I could proceed with writing my story and plotting my next, and more extreme, adventure.

The intestinal distress wasn’t the only thing that lingered after I returned home. The images of all the beautiful women who looked like my ex haunted me. I felt alone and conflicted when I was around my rebound girlfriend. She was a wonderful person but was going to end up as relationship roadkill somewhere down the line. There was no way I could give myself to someone when I couldn’t stop thinking about her predecessor. My trip showed me that I hadn’t even begun to heal.