Christina Lamb - a real journalist

Christina Lamb is an outstanding exception to the norm in a trade dominated by lazy, cowardly drones. Her account (here) of an ambush she was caught up with in Afghanistan when embedded with 3 Para in 2006 will feature in any future anthology of war reporting.  

Worth remembering that the no less admirable Ambrose Evans-Pritchard was one of the few reporters (and the only Brit) who bothered to go into Nicaragua to interview the Contras, and became persona non grata in Washington by exposing the crimes committed by the Clinton regime (interview here).

No journalist has lived the modern Great Game more fully than Christina; twice expelled from Pakistan by the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), she was in the motorcade when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, and she really knows what she writes about. Her article on Pakistan in the News Review section of today's pay-walled Sunday Times is very well worth paying for.

Although whatever sub-editor chose to title it "Whacking Pakistan", with a picture of Cameron hitting a cricket ball, deserves to be put in the stocks and pelted with rotten fruit.

The spur for the article is the publishing by Wikileaks of a compendium of over 91,000 classified US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The media have focused on the reports that highlight the ambiguous - not to say duplicitous - role of the ISI in the conflict, including contact between senior ISI officers and their Frankenstein's monster, the Taliban. 

In addition to a courage generally absent from the mutually masturbating Anglo-American press corps, Christina is also able to handle complexity with dispassionate intelligence. As she says, "After 23 years of reporting on Pakistan and the ISI, I know that nothing is quite what it seems. Is it really more dangerous to take on Pakistan than to keep pretending it is on side?" She concludes:

All I can say is that the last time the West wanted the ISI's help, against the Russians in the 1980s, and turned a blind eye to its other activities, Islamabad became a nuclear power. Others will argue it was when we cut them off in the 1990s that they sold the nuclear designs and centrifuges to North Korea, Libya and Iran.

Indeed - the ISI is the CIA's Frankenstein's monster, which now hates its maker almost as passionately as the Taliban hates the ISI. British casualties are just collateral damage in a vicious triangular fight that really does not concern them, and from which their as yet unwounded comrades should be extracted as soon as possible.