Rajiv Chandrasekaran, award-winning author and senior correspondent for the Washington Post, will present the lecture, “The Longest War: A Front-line View of the U.S. Mission in Afghanistan” at 4 p.m. Feb. 15 in the International Institute, Room 1636.
Chandrasekaran will draw on three years of reporting on the conflict to explain why it has been so difficult to achieve peace in Afghanistan, illustrating the progress and peril of President Barack Obama’s decision to embrace a counterinsurgency strategy and double the number of U.S. troops there.
Chandrasekaran will describe the gains that have been achieved because of the surge, but also will argue that those improvements remain fragile and reversible because America’s war strategy remains out of sync with the realities of Afghanistan.
From April 2003-October 2004, Chandrasekaran was the Washington Post’s bureau chief in Baghdad, where he was responsible for covering the occupation of Iraq and supervising a team of correspondents. He is the author of “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” an award-winning, best-selling book about the troubled American effort to reconstruct Iraq. The 2010 film “The Green Zone,” starring Matt Damon, was based on the book and will be shown at 7 p.m. Feb. 15 in the same location at the International Institute.
This lecture is part of the semester-long series “Afghanistan 2011: Connections, Communities, Crises.” Directed by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, the series is cosponsored with International Institute and other U-M units.
