Talk To The Taliban

James Fergusson’s work as a foreign correspondent has given him unique access to the Taliban. His first encounter was in 1996 in Pakistan. The following year he reported from Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, covering that city's fall to the Taliban. In 1998 he became the first western journalist in many years to interview the fugitive warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

From 1999 to 2001 he worked in Sarajevo as a press spokesman for OHR, the organisation charged with implementing the Dayton, Ohio peace accord that ended Bosnia's savage civil war in 1995. His first book, "Kandahar Cockney", told the story of Mir, his Pashtun fixer-interpreter whom he befriended in Mazar and helped gain political asylum in London. The contacts he made through Mir informed his second book "A Million Bullets", an account of Nato's campaign in Helmand in 2006.

In his latest book, Taliban, he charts the extraordinary rise of the world's most notorious religious movement, and argues that the West's bid to win Afghan 'hearts and minds' is doomed to fail if we persist with the current military strategy. Why do politicians persist in claiming that only a beefed-up military presence can prevent the return of al-Qaeda, when all the signs are that it actually recruits support for them? Should we, instead, be talking to the Taliban? What might a negotiated settlement entail, and what are the implications for Afghans and for the West?

Chair: Sean Plunket.

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