Ahmed Rashid Speaker & Booking Information

Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist based in Lahore was the Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, for 22 years until the magazine was recently closed down. He presently writes for the Daily Telegraph, London, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Review of Books, BBC Online, The Nation, Lahore and academic and foreign affairs journals. He appears regularly on international TV and radio such as CNN and BBC World Service. His earlier book Taliban: Islam, Oil and the new Great Game in Central Asia, ‘ was published by I.B.Tauris (2000) in London and Yale University Press in the U.S. and has been a world wide best seller. It has been translated into 26 languages and 1.5 million English language copies alone have been sold since September 11. For five weeks it was No.1 on The New York Times best-seller non-fiction list and numerous other best selling lists in Europe and the U.S.. Five years on the book is still a course book at over 200 U.S. universities and colleges. His latest book Jihad, The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia was published in February 2002 by Yale University Press and has been translated into 15 languages. In 2003 it was published in paperback by Penguin Books and has also become a course book for universities throughout the U.S., Europe and Japan. Rashid is a co-author of Islam and Central Asia: An enduring legacy or an evolving threat? edited by Roald Sagdeev and Susan Eisenhower, Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, Washington, September 2000. He is a co-author of Fundamentalism Reborn, Afghanistan and the Taliban, edited by William Maley, published by C. Hurst, 1998. His first book The Resurgence of Central Asia : Islam or Nationalism? about the break up of the Soviet Union was published by Zed Books, London and New York in 1994. In 2001 he was awarded the Nisar Osmani Award for Courage in Journalism, ‘ by the Human Rights Society of Pakistan. Taliban” won the British-Kuwait Society for Middle Eastern Studies’ book prize in 2001. In April 2002 he was given The Media Personality of the Year’ award by Britain’s Ethnic Multicultural Media Awards’ and in May he came joint second for The Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding story on South Asia, given by the South Asian Journalists Association of the U.S. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Eurasia Net of the Soros Foundation, a scholar of the Davos World Economic Forum and a consultant for Human Rights Watch. In 2004 he was appointed to the Board of Advisers to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva for a period of four years. He has addressed numerous universities, think tanks and international meetings around the world. In November 2002 at the invitation of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, he became the first journalist to address the U.N. General Assembly on the commemoration of the signing of the Bonn agreement on Afghanistan. In September 2003 he addressed NATO Ambassadors in Brussels on the situation in Afghanistan. In January 2002 he established the Open Media Fund for Afghanistan” (OMFA), which gives cash grants to newly starting independent print media in Afghanistan. So far it has distributed over $300, 000 to over two dozen newspaper and magazine start ups all over Afghanistan publishing in Dari, Pushto and Uzbek. OMFA is a U.S. registered charity and is managed by the Soros Foundation in New York and the Foundation for Civil Society and Culture in Kabul. OMFA has received contributions from Time-Warner, the Soros Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Rockefeller Foundation, Dow Jones, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and other European media outlets. It has an eight member Board of Trustees. Ahmed Rashid was born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan in 1948 and was educated at Malvern College England, Government College Lahore and at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University. He lives in Lahore with his wife and two children.