Steve Coll

Globe and Mail reporter Graeme Smith had this to say during a panel discussion convened by This Magazine to discuss a decade of international intervention in Afghanistan:

Steve Coll, The New Yorker‘s main writer on the mess in South Asia, lists the very bad things that could happen if NATO and affiliated troops pack up and go home too early from Afghanistan. This is essentially the position Colleague Coyne defended last week in our town hall in Halifax: That if you think it’s bad now, just imagine how much worse it could get. Everyone who watched the show last week will know that’s not where I am these days, but Coll, whose spectacular book Ghost Wars is an indispensable history of the wreckage of the last 30 years in Afghanistan and Pakistan, must be reckoned a good guesser on what next year’s wreckage could look like.