Charles Glass is a writer, journalist and, broadcaster, who has written on conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for the past fifty years. Subscribe to receive details of new books, articles and upcoming events.
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LATEST ARTICLE Imperial graveyardThe sufferings of Afghanistan, and of those who invade it Afghans may wonder why foreigners repeatedly invade their country before, invariably, scrambling for the exit. In 1842, the massacre of a retreating British army that had conquered the country four years earlier should have prevented Britain from trying – and failing – twice more, in 1878 and 1919. Next came the Soviet Union. Its triumphant conquest of 1979 ended ten years later in humiliation. The “exceptionalism” of the US proved less than exceptional in 2021, when its armed forces, having lingered for a record two decades, departed in such a hurry that they left thousands of their local collaborators behind. Despite the expenditure of $1 trillion and the loss of 2,311 American and an estimated 95,000 Afghan lives, America’s long-term impact was as negligible as Britain’s and Russia’s. Soon, it will be China’s turn. If Xi Jinping goes for it, my money is on the Afghans. Jon Lee Anderson, whose excellent New Yorker frontline dispatches are collected in To Lose a War, sympathizes with the Afghans’ predicament. They owe their woes not only to foreigners, but to homegrown warriors: In a forty-five-year period, they have lived through a decades-long Russian military occupation followed by a police state dictatorship followed by a bloody civil war followed by a six-year Taliban tyranny followed by twenty years of a western-leaning quasi-democracy, only to revert to Taliban control. On Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 2001, a month into the American invasion, Anderson watched B-52 bombers clear the way for the Northern Alliance’s mujahidin fighters to advance on Taliban outposts in the Panjshir Valley, one bomb sending “a giant brown-grey cloud of dust and dirt cascading down the mountainside and eventually covering it like an avalanche”. The aerial onslaught killed hundreds of Taliban fighters and forced survivors to surrender. As Taliban combatants surrendered to the mujahidin, Anderson observed: The mujahideen are an unruly, noisy rabble much of the time, but the Taliban fighters appear poised, watchful, and reserved … The mujahideen appear to be in awe of them, and with good reason. Until the United States began making airstrikes, the mujahideen were consistently defeated by the Taliban on the battlefield. The Northern Alliance’s objective was Kabul, which it had ruled recklessly for four years until the Taliban ejected it in 1996. Driving south from the Panjshir at night, Anderson caught his first glimpse of the capital: “There was light everywhere. Glowing squares… |
Charles Glass
Charles Glass is a writer, journalist and, broadcaster, who has written on conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for the past fifty years. Subscribe to receive details of new books, articles and upcoming events.
LATEST ARTICLE Letter from Beirut: A Stubborn Indifference to War This city keeps you on your toes, as long as you hang on to them. When you walk across a one-way street, look both ways. No driver—on a motorcycle or in an SUV—hesitates to charge the wrong way up a road clearly signed for traffic to go in the opposite direction. When two cars meet head-on, the driver going the wrong way shouts abuse at the innocent one obeying the rules. Welcome to Beirut. This insouciant behavior reflects the...
OUT NOW Over nearly a half century, David Hirst was The Guardian newspaper’s indispensable voice from the Middle East A landmark collection of David Hirst's finest reporting THE PEN AND THE OLIVE BRANCH Reporting the Middle East DAVID HIRSTEdited by JANICK GOLD and CHARLES GLASSIntroduction by JONATHAN DIMBLEBY read more > PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY NEW TO WATCH In a series of interviews with leading historians on the History of Resistance, Charles Glass and his history students at the American...
LATEST ARTICLE 1970s Postcard showing the two bays of Zaytouni and Saint Georges Beirut, Now and Then On Wednesday , 8 April, Israel expanded its kill zone beyond what had been known as the ‘safe’ areas north of Beirut’s suburban south. I talked to a doctor at the American University Hospital who told me his emergency room was treating four hundred patients wounded in the bombing. Four had died. I passed the hospital, where families outside were waiting for the medical staff’s reports. By the...