advertisement

Who's winning (in Afghanistan)?

"No matter how many times I’ve visited the country, or been embedded with U.S. forces, or covered the lives of ordinary Afghans caught up in the almost 6-year-old war, I still cringe when asked – and I’m ALWAYS asked when I get back – ‘How’s things in Afghanistan?’ Invariably I pause for a few seconds, hoping to find the magic answer as I collect my thoughts. But there is no silver bullet: 'Good,' I venture. 'And bad.' " -- NBC's Jim Maceda writes in our sister blog, World Blog

Read his complete entry

Discuss (1 comments)  Email this | Link to this

Back in the U.S.S.R.?

NBC's Jim Maceda was in Russia recently -- his report on the trip will air tonight, offering a glimpse into what life has become under the country's leader Vladimir Putin. Here, Jim vlogs about how the "new" Russia compares to the old, and how life has changed since he was last there.
Watch the vlog

Discuss (1 comments)  Email this | Link to this

Notes from 'Jihadistan'

Editor's Note (5:51 p.m. ET, Monday, Nov. 13): This piece was promoted as airing tonight, Monday, but has been bumped from the rundown. It will, however, air later this week.

I guess Sen. John Warner, R-Va., summed it up when he said, in reaction to the sea change in Washington, that it’s an appropriate time to review U.S. military strategy in Iraq, and ‘we mustn’t forget Afghanistan.’ With so much focus, and so many resources spent on Iraq, many Americans, it seems, have forgotten the war in Afghanistan. And they’ve forgotten – at least according to some counter-insurgency experts – that we’ve been losing the war there. The Taliban is back, stronger than ever, while U.S. and NATO soldiers are dying at an unprecedented rate.

To assess the situation in the remote, rugged country where the 'War on Terror' began, we’re launching a three-part special series. "The Haven" airs Monday - the 5th anniversary of the fall of Kabul, effectively ending the Taliban’s 5-year regime.  But, five years after the collapse of al-Qaida’s sanctuary, another haven has cropped up, every bit as lawless and threatening. "Jihadistan" as some call it -  an expanse of merciless land the size of Texas - stretches across Southern and Eastern Afghanistan, and over the border into the fearsome tribal belt inside Pakistan. There, in areas like Waziristan, the Taliban has free reign. We see armed fighters control the streets. Al-Qaida-linked fugitives like Mohammad Faquir – a good friend of al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al Zawahiri – boast brazenly to our cameras about future attacks on U.S. and Pakistani forces. Teachers are assassinated, girls’ schools are burned. Edicts that ban clean-shaven faces or impose tax collection for holy war are on the rise. It is like old Taliban days.

"You’ve got not just jihadis," explains one of our Afghanistan experts. "You’ve got drug dealers, you’ve got warlords, you’ve got criminals of every description. But certainly this belt is probably one of the biggest challenges the U.S. has to face in trying to stabilize Afghanistan."

CONTINUED »

Discuss (0 comments)  Email this | Link to this

Embedded with the 10th Mtn. Division

Editor's note: The broadcast aired a story Friday night by Jim Maceda about his week embedded with the Army's 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan. Click here to read or watch it. After getting that story on air, Jim called to offer his additional thoughts on what was obviously an exhausting assignment.

Afghanistan is an intriguing assignment -- here is the world’s superpower, trying to win over the people of one of the world’s poorest, almost medieval countries, because they both share a common enemy: al-Qaida and its Taliban surrogates. American soldiers are dying here -- now more than 220. Billions of dollars ($12B to date) have been spent on reconstruction.

Covering this war has never been easy. And it’s only getting harder. Nowhere else is a reporter’s strength quite as sapped by the elements -- the almost impenetrable mountains and valleys, and the stalking presence of disease or infection. You spend as much time cleaning yourself and everything you touch as you do reporting the story.

I’ve been embedding with U.S. forces since long before it was called embedding. Since 1983, with U.S. Marines in Beirut, many of whom were killed in a truck bomb by a group called Hezbollah few had even heard of. On a scale of 1 to 10, the Afghanistan embed rates little more than a 2. Coming in at a 1, my embed with Chechen rebels outside Grozny, where my cameraman Kyle Eppler, and I literally “embedded” -- sleeping on the living room floor next to the local Chechen commander’s terror cell.

CONTINUED »

Discuss (18 comments)  Email this | Link to this

When the story finds you

We didn't know what to expect as we drove into Luton, about 30 miles north of London. We knew the industrial town was ethnically mixed, with about 45,000 South Asian Muslims, some 30% of the population. We also knew it was where one of the July 7, 2005 suicide bombers had lived. The four bombers began their fateful day at the Luton train station, before heading into London, killing 56. Now we were looking for Muslims, and non-Muslims, to tell us, frankly, what life was like SINCE the attack, and almost two years to the day after the Madrid train bombings. Our story was meant to kick off a special series on the "Faces of Islam in Europe," but things were not going well.

CONTINUED »

Discuss (16 comments)  Email this | Link to this

Reflections from Pakistan

The first deliveries of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of international relief are beginning to reach Pakistan's remote villages, if only just. On the op-ed pages, Pakistan's intellectuals are debating why so much devastation could befall a country known to straddle one of the Earth's main fault lines. The trickle of relief agents has become a steady stream of visits by UN, Western and Asian dignitaries, all seeking to be seen waving their organization's flag high over the miserable ruins.

It's called 'Week Two.' The breaking story is out of the news rundowns, and the world's media starts to reassess its presence. Many journalists, including this reporter, headed home. But quite a few of us, it seems, are still scratching our collective heads, sensing we've just covered something unique-even those of us who 'do' disasters for a living--but not yet able to nail down what made it so.

Hence, this blog posting.

CONTINUED »

Discuss (3 comments)  Email this | Link to this