Jogging on the streets and up the hills of the Afghan capital was not something I wanted to do – not least because I dislike running, but it also wasn’t culturally appropriate. Getting fit proved a challenge for me in Kabul. I found it was diffi...
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It’s a very odd experience being interviewed instead of conducting the interview, but I have enjoyed them all so far. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was surprised that a seasoned journalist who had interviewed me was fascinated by the lif...
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This article is published in the World Politics Review, April 13 2015 By Frida Ghitis and Heidi Kingstone When Afghanistan’s new president, Ashraf Ghani, met with U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House in late March, he suggested that “o...
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I’ve been thinking about some of the strange and interesting experiences that I had in Kabul, a place where many people had graduated from contracting in Iraq to contracting in Afghanistan. One ordinary night, someone I had recently met, asked if...
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The factory simply gleamed, there was a surgical theatre spotlessness that made it sparkle with cleanliness, hygiene and efficiency, which perhaps would not have been that surprising had the location not been in northern Afghanistan. The factory ...
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The Human Rights Watch Film Festival has kicked off in London and on Saturday night I went to see What Tomorrow Brings, a documentary by Beth Murphy about a remarkable teacher in Afghanistan and the students in her school for girls. The struggle f...
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“You are listening to 98.1 Arman FM, Radio of the Hearts. This is The Night of the Lovers.” Love is in the air. The media’s success in Afghanistan has been one of the country’s positive success stories, and as the title above suggests even in th...
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I am delighted to be featured as the lead piece on this month’s Visual Verse. To paraphrase Visual Verse, they are both collaboration, celebration and challenge – every month, an image is selected by Visual Verse and writers are invited to submit ...
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Carl Djerassi changed the world. Rarely is that kind of hyperbole a statement of fact, but in this case, it’s true. Known as the Father of The Pill, he was the chemist who, in 1951 synthesised norethindrone, the key component in the birth control ...
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It was a scorching hot June afternoon in a Baghdad suburb. A group of people sat in the shady garden, speaking rapidly in Arabic, catching up on almost two decades of gossip. It was 2003, just months after the invasion and I was staying in the u...
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Dispatches from the Kabul Café 
Genocide – Personal Stories, Big Questions 