A video of this event is now available on Columbia’s YouTube channel.

Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist and writer. He is the author of five books,  including ‘Taliban’ (2000) which was translated into 26 languages and sold 1.5 million copies in English alone, and ‘Jihad – The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia’ (2002). ‘Taliban’ was updated and re-issued in 2010.  ‘Descent into Chaos; The United States and the disaster in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia’ (2008) has been translated into 16 languages. Both ‘Taliban’ and ‘Descent into Chaos’ are on course lists at over 200 universities and defense colleges around the world.  His latest book, “Pakistan on the Brink. The future of America, Pakistan and Afghanistan,” will be published in March 2012.

Foreign Policy magazine chose him as one of the world’s most important One Hundred Global Thinkers in 2009 and again in 2010. At the invitation of the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, he became the first journalist to address the UN General Assembly in New York in September 2002 and the first journalist to address NATO ambassadors in Brussels in September 2003.

David Rohde is a columnist for Reuters and The Atlantic Magazine. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he worked as a reporter for The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor and covered the conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Israel-Palestine and Bosnia. His column focuses on foreign affairs and the global middle class, from the shrinking American middle class to the burgeoning middle classes of China, India and other emerging market nations. He is the author, with Kristen Mulvihill, of A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides. Previously, Rohde served as The New York Times’ South Asia Bureau Co-Chief in New Delhi from 2002 to 2005 and as a metropolitan news reporter from 1996 to 2001. He was the Eastern Europe Correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor from 1994 to 1996 and a suburban correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1992 to 1993. In 2009, he was a member of an eight-reporter team from The New York Times that won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for its coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 1996, his stories for The Christian Science Monitor helped expose the mass executions of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica and won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. A series of stories he wrote for The New York Times on his seven-month captivity with the Taliban won the 2010 Michael Kelly, George Polk and ASNE awards. It was also a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. Rohde grew up in New England and received his B.A. from Brown University.

The event will be moderated by Scott Smith, Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Mr. Smith was a Special Assistant to Kai Ede, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Afghanistan, from 2009-2010. He is also the author of Afghanistan’s Troubled Transition (First Forum Press, 2011).