LAHORE, May 4: Noted Canadian journalist Kathy Gannon launched her book ‘I is for infidel’ at a local hotel on Thursday.

Known around the world for her dispatches for the Associated Press from a beleaguered Kabul for 18 years, Ms Gannon served as a correspondent for the news agency in both Pakistan and Afghanistan between 1986 and 2005. She also covered the 1998 Pakistan nuclear tests, for which she was awarded.

On Thursday evening, Gannon gave a brief overview of her reporting assignments and the dangers and thrills involved over her prolonged stints in Afghanistan during the period. She also read excerpts from her book.

She said she had gone to Afghanistan in 1986 with “dreams of being a foreign correspondent there”, expecting that she might move on to something else soon afterwards. But those were eventful years. She stayed on for 18 long years, becoming in the process one of the most knowledgeable western journalists to observe the crises that followed one another: from the collapse of the Soviet occupation to the years of anarchic tribalism, to the rise and fall of the Taliban, and the ongoing ‘war on terror’.

Gannon has an interesting story to tell, blow by blow, as it unfurled before her own eyes. She watched Afghanistan go from being the battleground for a proxy superpower conflict to a forgotten backwaters, where local politics ran unchecked and indigenous institutions died a slow death, with human misery touching horrid dimensions. Then came Al Qaeda, the US-led Nato invasion of Afghanistan and the installation of the Karzai regime amid continuation of America’s global ‘war on terror’.

Throughout the time, Gannon has been an observer who made friends across the troubled country that allowed her to see the world through the Afghans’ eyes. “Mine is a portrait of a nation that was abused and discarded by the West, used as an incubator for breeding extremism and hugely misunderstood by most outsiders,” she said.

Gannon’s next destination is Iran, as the impasse on that country’s alleged nuclear weapons programme continues, and new battle lines are being drawn between the US and its allies and the Islamic republic. —Staff Reporter