Owen Bennett-Jones

Thursday

Owen Bennett-Jones

Malala’s voice is defiant — but how much can she change Pakistan? 

From our UK edition

In 2012 a Taleban gunman, infuriated by Malala Yousafzai’s frequent television appearances insisting that girls had a right to education, shot her in the face. She survived and is now an inspirational symbol both of defiance and of the love of learning. As you might hope in a memoir by a 16- year-old, full acknowledgment is given to parental influence and particularly to the role of her father. Ziauddin Yousafzai is himself a long-standing champion of girls’ education who, until the Taleban forced the family into exile in Birmingham, ran girls’ schools in the famously beautiful Swat valley in northern Pakistan. And yet, as his daughter reveals, his life so nearly took a different path.

Thursday

Owen Bennett-Jones

Narcoland, by Anabel Hernandez – review

From our UK edition

It is by now surely beyond doubt that those governments committed to fighting the war on drugs — and on paper that’s all of them — face a total rout. To understand the scale of the defeat, all you need to know is that Barack Obama and David Cameron have both been unable to deny that they were once users. The US spends more than a billion dollars a year on international narcotics control and as a result, as a US official in Colombia once told me, has forced up the price of a gram of cocaine in New York by just a few dollars. That must have put drugs beyond the reach of a few potential consumers. But it seems a very modest achievement for a government programme that has enjoyed such sustained, cross-party support for decades.

Thursday

Owen Bennett-Jones

To Move the World, by Jeffrey Sachs – review

From our UK edition

Jeffrey Sachs is the world’s best-connected development economist. An academic with highly developed communication skills, he has always managed to secure access to policy makers and to offer them advice. His record is controversial. Back in the 1990s he worked on Russia’s transition from a command to a capitalist economy. He advocated the approach that Yeltsin adopted — shock therapy. The result was pensioners on the streets selling off furniture, jewellery and even their clothes to raise cash for food. Whilst there were many other factors at play, it now seems obvious that China’s transition to capitalism was better handled. China didn’t take Sachs’s advice.

Thursday

Owen Bennett-Jones

‘Ask Forgiveness Not Permission’, by Howard Leedham – review

From our UK edition

At the start of 2004 Howard Leedham, a former British special forces officer who had taken up US citizenship, addressed the raw Pashtun recruits he had made into a US-backed militia capable of operating on the Pakistan-Afghan border, surely one of the world’s most hostile environments. He told them about Lawrence of Arabia’s famous cross-desert assault on the port of Aqabar: ‘We are like Lawrence of Arabia,’ he said.‘Now let’s find our Aqabar.’ You might think that the US military high command would have identified a target before deploying a military force to attack it. But in the aftermath of 9/11 the normal rules did not apply.