My Life with the Taliban is the autobiography of Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former senior member of Afghanistan's Taliban. Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, foreign researchers and writers based in Kandahar, translated Zaeef's story from Pashto, and they discuss his account of joining the jihad against the Soviets, then banning together with former mujahidin to form the Taliban, which assumed power in 1994. The book is rare look at the communities that built the Taliban and at what motivates men like Zaeef to fight.

Alex von Strickland will be speaking with New York Times reporter David Ronde; Michael Semple, fellow at the Carr Center for Human Policy at Harvard; and Barnett Rubin, senior adviser to Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke
Febuary 18, at 6:30 p.m.
The NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute
20 Cooper Square, 7th Floor Commons
RSVP: andrea.rosenberg@nyu.edu
More information here.