Canada-based journalist Kathy Gannon's book "I is for Infidel: 18 years in Afghanistan" was launched at a local hotel here on Tuesday. Kathy Gannon is an international correspondent of the Associated Press (AP). She has been AP correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1986 to 2005.
Since collapse of the Soviet occupation to the years of anarchic tribalism, to the creation and rise of the Taleban, to the hijacking of power by al Qaeda, Gannon stayed with the story of Afghanistan and its people.
She watched the country going from being the battleground for a proxy superpower conflict to a forgotten backwater where vicious local politics ran unchecked and the essential structure of the country decayed.
With the collapse of respect for law - apart from the law of the gun - went due process, education, a public role for women, the economy and the last vestiges of the interest form the international community. At the end, Afghanistan had become so damaged and vulnerable a country that it became the refuge for a truly evil man whose designs would bring global ignominy and another round of superpower conflict to its mountains and plains.
Durin this time, Gannon has been an intimate observer whose personal friends throughout the country have allowed her to seethe world through Afghan eyes. She brings this brilliant and affectionate insight to provide a gripping portrait of a nation that was abused and idly discarded by the West, used as an incubator for religious extremism by its neighbours and hugely, fatally misunderstood almost everyone.
Speaking on the launching ceremony, Kathy Gannon said that still the situation in Afghanistan is very poor and the people are facing many problems, including security, law and order, corruption, etc.
Regarding any attack on Iran, she said that any such attempt would create instability in the whole region. Canada Honorary Consul General Bahram D. Avari also spoke on the occasion.