Panel to focus on 'The Longest War'
A panel discussion featuring two people who have lived and worked in some of the world's most volatile locations is scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 9, at Skidmore.
Amil Khan and Andrew Exumwill discuss "The Longest War: Insurgency and Civil War in Afghanistan and Pakistan" at 8 p.m. Tuesday in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Admission is free and open to the public.
Sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Special Programs, the discussion is the latest in Skidmore's ongoing series of "Greenberg Middle East Scholar-in-Residence" events. Sumita Pahwa in Skidmore's Government Department arranged the event.
Amil Khan
Amil Khan has spent years as a reporter exploring the roots of conflict and Islamism in the Middle East and South Asia. He has covered conflict and elections in Gaza and Iraq and anti-American sentiment in Egypt, interviewed al-Qaeda fighters returning from Iraq in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon and embedded with rebels in Darfur to document war crimes. He also spent three months with Islamist radicals in the UK, followed by two months living undercover for a BBC documentary investigating racial abuse in poor housing projects.
Khan's most recent project is the Radical Middle Way, a British-government funded initiative in Pakistan aimed at challenging the religious legitimacy of extremists. His forthcoming book The Long Struggle brings together his reporting experience with his academic interest in the evolution of the ideology of extremism. He is a commentator for various leading newspapers and blogs on extremism and counterinsurgency at the Abu Muqawama blog.
Andrew Exum
Andrew Exum is a fellow with the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington, D.C., who focuses on counterinsurgency and U.S. policy. He brings the perspective of a soldier and an academic to his study of the military and political tensions between the United States and the countries of the Arabic-speaking world and Central Asia.
Exum served on the frontlines of the U.S. missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading a platoon of light infantry in Afghanistan in 2002 and a platoon of Army Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, respectively. Most recently, he served as an advisor on the CENTCOM Assessment Team as an advisor on the Levant and also served as a special advisor to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's Initial Assessment Team. He has written about his experience in the army in This Man's Army: A Soldier's Story from the Frontlines of the War on Terror (Gotham, 2004) and has published opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.
Exum studied classics and English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a master's degree in Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut. He is a doctoral candidate in the Department of War Studies at King's College, London, and recently submitted a dissertation on Hezbollah. Proficient in Arabic and French, Exum is the founder of the influential counterinsurgency blog Abu Muqawama.