Living and working in Kabul was often intense, sometimes complicated, frequently frustrating, always interesting, and at the best of times incredibly rewarding. There were periods when I never wanted to leave, and times when `i felt `I needed to ...
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For some reason I often found myself either on Chicken Street or nearby, and it always mesmerized me. It was not dissimilar to a modern day version of the ancient Silk Road with all its glorious goods. There were sheepskin coats, tacky souvenirs, ...
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Echoing streets in night-time Kabul are generally only peopled by guards at the ‘Ring of Steel’, a series of checkpoints around the capital. Despite this there was a lively nightlife. It was early spring and I decided to have a small birthday cele...
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I always liked to think of Debbie as the queen of Kabul, and when she had her café her personality drew in the crowds. She would sit at her usual table, working on her computer, surveying the scene, always smiling and talking, always charismatic, ...
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In less than 18 months world attention will cease its already waning interest in Afghanistan as the 2014 deadline looms. Nato forces are in the process of handing the reins over to Afghan security forces in this period known as Transition. Once ag...
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Tirana, Albania – Mention that you have decided to visit the birthplace of King Zog and Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, who shut the country off from the rest of the world for four decades, and people simply ask, “Why?” Yet Albania, on the wester...
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Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was helped to the podium, a frailer man now than when he brought Glasnost and Perestroika to the world almost thirty years ago. One of the 20th century's most seminal figures delivered a fairly bleak keynote ...
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At the same time as I was given Shadow Lives [The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror] by Victoria Brittain to review, I was in the process of reading the Man Booker prizewinning novel Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. Brittain's book is abo...
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Recently, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and President Asif Ali Zadari of Pakistan were in the UK to discuss the future of Afghanistan post 2014, when the bulk of the international forces withdraw. What form the end state takes is the key i...
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I wonder if everyone who goes to Kabul for the first time keeps a diary. I know I did. In Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit, Toby Ralph writes about one of the most fascinating and frustrating countries in the world. He spent two weeks there as an ...
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Dispatches from the Kabul Café 
Genocide – Personal Stories, Big Questions 