For six days Globe and Mail readers have been given an unprecedented look at the Taliban in the series Talking to the Taliban, by Graeme Smith.
"Understanding the insurgents is a basic part of reporting on the Afghan war, but it's a remarkably difficult task," Mr. Smith writes in his introduction to the extensive online piece. "I've had several meetings with individual Taliban since I started covering Afghanistan, but personal contacts with the insurgents are growing more dangerous because they have started kidnapping journalists.
"So we decided to try an unscientific survey."
What resulted was videos of 42 Taliban foot soldiers who were interviewed by a researcher able to get into places that would be off-limits for anybody without strong connections to the insurgency. Those interviews were circulated privately among Mr. Smith's sources in Kandahar and Kabul to gather opinions about the authenticity of the material and reaction to the Taliban statements.
Globe and Mail correspondent Graeme Smith (Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail)
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The result: Stories about tribal wars, the poppy trade, the role Pakistan plays in the insurgency and how the concept of suicide bombing is changing within the Taliban ranks, have stirred debate and discussion, both for and against.
How did you feel about the series? Is there something more you'd like to learn about the Taliban?
We're pleased that Graeme Smith is joining us online today from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. ET to answer your questions and comments about his series and Afghanistan.
Mr. Smith joined The Globe in 2001 and was a national reporter in Winnipeg before becoming a foreign correspondent and moving to Moscow. He has been The Globe's main reporter in Afghanistan since 2004.
In 2003, he won the Edward Goff Penny Memorial award, which is given to the best young journalists under the age of 25. He also was part of a team that won a Canadian Association of Journalists award for investigative journalism in 1999.
Mr. Smith is presently nominated for two National Newspaper Awards, including one for foreign reporting.
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Christine Diemert, globeandmail.com: Graeme, thanks for joining us online today to answer questions from readers. You've been covering Afghanistan for several years, so when you started to work on this huge project did you already have some sense of what you'd find? Were there some things you learned through the interviews that you found surprising?
Graeme Smith: Having spent a couple of years in southern Afghanistan, I had an intuitive sense of what we would likely find. But it was the same exercise, in some senses, as the big project on Afghan detainees that we undertook last year: bridging the gap between what is "widely suspected" and what can be proven. For example, I figured we might find a connection between the insurgency and two activities by the international community — air strikes and poppy eradication — but nobody had attempted to quantify it. (Or, at least, nobody who quantified the effect had published their results publicly.)
Our little survey was terribly unscientific, but at least now when there's a conversation about poppy eradication, for instance, somebody can say, well, when a Canadian newspaper called The Globe and Mail surveyed 42 Taliban in Kandahar, they found the vast majority of them involved in the opium industry and half of them suffered eradication by the government's counter-narcotics teams. That's a deeply unsurprising result if you're familiar with the insurgency, but also very important in terms of the policy dialogue on Afghanistan.
Dave of the North from Yellowknife writes: Do you not hold the religion of Islam and religious indoctrination of a people from birth to hate is not only responsible for what is happening now, but will not, cannot change for the foreseeable future? And the only way to address the issue at all is by shining the light of public exposure on it, by publishing the cartoons and calling ridiculous beliefs that hold the murder of a fellow human being as a value for what they are?
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