Just found this announcement for an upcoming Harvard University seminar in my inbox
Is Afghanistan Lost?
A panel discussion on Afghanistan: Development, Human Rights and Security
Date: December 8, 2008
Time: 1:30-3:00pm
Location:
Malkin Penthouse, 4th Floor
Littauer Building
Harvard Kennedy School
79 John F. Kennedy St.
Cambridge, MA. 02138
Moderator:
Samantha Power, Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership
and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School
Panelists:
Steve Coll, President, New America Foundation, author of Ghost Wars:
The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the
Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, which won a Pulitzer Prize in
2005 and The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century
Mark Garlasco, Senior Military Analyst, Human Rights Watch
Maleeha Lodhi, Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics,
former Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S.
Barnett Rubin, Director of Studies, Center for International Conflict,
New York University, author of The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State
Formation and Collapse in the International System and The Search for
Peace in Afghanistan: From Buffer State to Failed State
Sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Carr Center for
Human Rights Policy, the University Committee on Human Rights, Harvard
Law School Human Rights Program, and the Initiative on contemporary
state and society in the Islamic world.
More from
Dawn:
PARIS, Dec 4: France has invited a dozen states to a conference on Afghanistan on Dec 14 to enlist the support of neighbouring countries in a stepped-up effort for peace, officials said on Thursday.
“Apart from Afghanistan and its immediate neighbours (Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan), India and China have been invited as countries from the region,” said a French foreign ministry spokesman.
The United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, Kai Eide, has been invited to the informal ministerial meeting along with representatives of the United States, Britain and Russia, he said.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana was also due to attend the Paris talks, six months after a donors’ conference in France, which currently holds the EU presidency, raised $20 billion for reconstruction in Afghanistan.
French officials see Pakistan, alleged to be the staging ground for Taliban attacks, as key to stabilising Afghanistan, which remains mired in poverty and violence more than six years after US-led forces drove the extremist militia out of Kabul."