Drinking Tea with the Taliban

Nicholas Schmidle was a tall, blond, 27-year-old-aspiring journalist when he traveled to Pakistan on a fellowship. Newly married and adventurous, he learned Urdu and set out on a two-year journey.

In his travels, he met radical jihadists and leaders, visited a Taliban camp in the Swat Valley and witnessed a public lashing. He watched a country in transition as President Musharraf's regime grasped for control, and a nation in turmoil after the assasination of Benazir Bhutto.

All this before he was swiftly kicked out for filing stories on the growing power of the Taliban in the Swat Valley and tribal and border regions. These are precisely the areas where the Pakistani military is now six weeks into a campaign against Taliban and Islamic jihadi forces.

Nicholas Schmidle tells his story in a new book, To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan. He joins us from The New America Foundation, where he is an American Strategy Fellow.

(Photo courtesy Al Jazeera English via Flickr/Creative Commons)