The day we hosted the Taliban in NYC
9/11 was 33 months in the future when SAJA hosted the Taliban's first major event with journalists.
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We are back to our weekly cadence with this newsletter and want to thank you for your support. Your subscribing, sharing, reading, tweeting, etc, make it worth the effort (please continue doing so!). This 9/11 week, I wanted to share an essay I wrote about hosting the Taliban in NYC at an event in 1999.
It was a winter’s day in 1999 and the Taliban were coming to dinner. Well, two representatives of the Taliban were coming to Maharaja Restaurant near the United Nations for a talk. Back then, I was running SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association, a group of hundreds of journalists of South Asian origin across the US and Canada. SAJA had invited Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, the ambassador to the UN and N Zadran, first secretary, to one of its monthly gatherings.
We certainly knew of serious problems with the Taliban’s fundamentalist regime, especially their severe suppression of women and girls. They had banned music when they took over in 1996, destroying cassette tapes and stringing the insides on trees. Their destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was still 26 months away, and 9/11 was 33 months in the future.
I believed the benefits of listening to – and questioning – the Taliban directly outweighed the dangers of giving them a platform like ours. They had promised to respond to all questions. They asked that women be seated in a separate section (we refused, as you can see in the photo below) and that the bar be closed while Mujahid spoke (this we agreed to; the alcohol flowed before and after).
Read what happened at the gathering in my essay for Scroll.in, along with a report by the late, great journalist Arthur Pais.
Thinking of Afghanistan, for a change
Afghanistan was a monumental shift in how war is covered by the news media. Fought entirely in the modern communications era, it’s the first war we’ve had the opportunity to see up close from start to finish. But, for the last decade or so, it’s been out of sight and out of mind for a good portion of America. A big reason for that has been the war’s increasing absence from the headlines.
That all changed last month.
Of course, right-wing media are having yet another amnesia-fueled breakdown — yet again they lie, provide nothing in the way of historical context, and certainly can’t be asked to truthfully report on anything. Seeing Paul Bremer and Paul Wolfowitz given column space to be as dead wrong as they were two decades ago is bad enough (no, I won’t link to either piece, except like this), but the droning on about how simply continuing the Forever War is the best and only thing we can do is too much.
Not one outlet on this list is worth your (or anyone else’s) time, but here we are, back in the same morass we know so well. This is especially obnoxious given how much *most* of America agrees on Afghanistan and the military’s presence there (via The Washington Post):
While right-wing “coverage” and commentary has been as expected, mainstream coverage has been less-than-stellar as well, and we all deserve (and need) better. Stories like this that just leave out so much of what went wrong in the early stages of the invasion and all of the civilian lives lost at the hands of western militaries, just don’t do it for me. Stories like this that plainly get things wrong about the reasons given for the invasion don’t do anyone any good. Mainstream, widely-followed reporters tweeting things like this is not good.
There is a lot of this, and this piece by Eric Levitz does a good job of getting at the point — an inherent pro-establishment bias from the news media (in the general sense) does not serve the public well. I’m not a “view from nowhere” type when it comes to journalism, but I am a believer in the long memory of documentation. The war in Afghanistan has been long, has cost American taxpayers two trillion dollars, and — for the last 10 years or so — has been something that’s happening “over there.” It’s easy (and right) to fault Americans’ short attention spans, but there’s more to it than that.
The “narrative” is set in newsrooms, whether we like or not, and, whether they will admit or not, agenda-setting theory is real, and it matters more every day. Josh Sternberg (@joshsternberg) has been all over this for more than a decade (!) — here’s a post from 2009, and one from 2020, both are relevant, informative, and full of links to further reading.
Coverage of the atrocities, heartbreak, and desperation in Afghanistan over the last two weeks has been like whiplash. Our troops have been there for two decades, 2,300 U.S. service members have died, and hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed or displaced. At the very least, these sorts of things need to have a place in ALL the coverage of the pullout.
One of the best pieces since the pullout was written two days after the pullout: “The Afghanistan debacle lasted two decades. The media spent two hours deciding who to blame.” Thank you, Margaret Sullivan (@sulliview).
Meanwhile: Yikes:
- Sree
Read Something
Love it or hate it, Joe Rogan has one of the most influential voices in modern media. His audience is huge and what he says matters to them — and when he gets things wrong it has potentially serious consequences. When he gets things really wrong on Covid19 vaccines, rest assured it will have an impact. Now, of course, he got Covid19.
Out of Stock? Get Used to It
By Robert S. Anthony
Each week, veteran tech journalist Robert S. Anthony shares a tech tip you don’t want to miss. Follow him @newyorkbob.
The fall shopping rush is on in the U.S., but don’t be surprised if your local electronics store is well-stocked with “out-of-stock” signs. A global computer chip shortage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic shows no signs of abating—and that’s bad news for students looking to refresh their gadgets this fall.
Aside from well-known chips like the powerful main processors built by Intel and AMD, computers need all sorts of simpler, but essential chips like microcontrollers and it’s these support chips that have been impossible to find. It’s like opening a build-it-yourself furniture kit and finding all the major parts in perfect condition—but the screws are missing.
Due to the pandemic, higher demand for mobile electronics combined with mangled supply chains from chip manufacturers to product makers have resulted in product shortages and higher prices.
Some budget-priced gadgets have been especially hard to find because some companies are saving the few chips they have for premium products with higher profit margins and letting their less-expensive ones go out of stock.
The path out of this chip shortage isn’t easy. A new semiconductor factory, sometimes called a “fab,” takes years and billions of dollars to build due to the precise engineering involved. Intel has already announced chip manufacturing expansions in Arizona and New Mexico, but the extra capacity won’t come online for years.
So, what can a consumer do this fall? Be patient. Shop outlet stores like the ones offered by Lenovo, Dell, Acer and Apple. Why? Because last year’s models may still be much better than what you have now—and they’re at discounted prices. Of course, eBay is a good source of used gadgets—if you shop carefully.
If a simple upgrade like an external hard drive for extra data storage or a USB webcam to take over for the dim, low-resolution one built into your laptop can get you through the next few months—this might be a good time to postpone that major gear upgrade. Just don’t tell your electronics store manager I said so. [Watch Sree’s video interview about the supply-chain crisis below]
#PeopleToFollow
Over the last decade-plus, Azmat Khan (@azmatzahra) has produced so many pieces of thoughtful, impactful journalism that it’s impossible to know where to start. Between her written work, her PBS Frontline productions — so much of it focused on South Asia — and everything else, she’s the perfect new hire at Columbia Journalism School (where I spent 21 years as a student, professor and associate dean - but not at the same time). We need more people like Azmat teaching the next generation of journalists how to do the job the right way.
Watch Something
As our tech columnist, Bob Anthony (@newyorkbob) reports above, the global supply chain is in crisis. On my weekly pandemic show last week, Roopa Unnikrishnan (@roopaonline), business strategist and my better half, interviewed WSJ’s Chris Mims (@mims), author of “Arriving Today.” Check out the interview (and his book) - I learned a lot and you will, too.
Odds & Ends
🗞 TUNE IN: Next #NYTReadalong is Sunday, Sept. 19, 8:30-10 am on my social channels, with Johnette Howard, who co-authored Billie Jean King’s new bestselling autobiography. Meanwhile, see recent episodes: Peter Marks, Washington Post chief drama critic #WaPoReadalong; Sarah Maslin Nir, NYT reporter and author; Tina Kelley, poet and former NYT reporter.
The NYTReadalong is sponsored by Muck Rack. Interested in sponsorship opportunities? Email sree@digimentors.group and neil@digimentors.group.
The Readalong is followed, on Sundays at 11 am-noon ET, by a medical show I’m co-executive producing with surgeons Sujana Chandrasekhar, M.D. (@DrSujanaENT), and Marina Kurian, M.D. (@MarinaKurian), called She’s On Call (watch live or later).
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