Will give my new Flip Camera a spin down south - have been impressed with the quality so far, even in dark lighting. Taking my Canon Powershot G9 back with me, too. Have been agonising over what books to take - trying to find the balance between books that I'll only read once, those friends in Kabul have requested that I bring, and those that I ought to read for my PhD and other research projects...
The Shortlist James Fergusson - A Million Bullets Joel Hafvenstein - Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier Patrick Cockburn - Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq Sean McGlynn - By Sword and Fire Fawaz Gerges - The Far Enemy: Why Jihad when Global Marc Sageman - Understanding Terror Networks Marc Sageman - Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the 21st Century Faisal Devji - Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity Vali Nasr - The Shia Revival Gilles Dorronsoro - Revolution Unending Crews/Tarzi - The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan Peter Mandaville - Global Political Islam Linked to books you might not have heard of...Will finish off my single concession to fiction - Edward Docx's novel Self Help - on the way to Kabul while catching up with a pile of newspaper clippings and unread RSS feeds.
Make sure to take a read of the NY Times write-up of a public dispute between two academics specialising in 'terrorism' - click here and here for the source material for the story). One the one side Marc Sageman, who argues for a decentralised al-Qaeda, with very little top-down structure, and on the other side Bruce Hoffman argues that the leadership structures are very much alive and well. Supplement a read of those with pieces by Peter Bergen/Paul Cruickshank and Lawrence Wright on internal debates among Islamists (esp so-called global jihadis).
alex, the link to the second bit of source material on foreign affairs is dead - if it can be found elsewhere would you mind pointing me in the right direction? cheers, mike.