Small Wars Permitting: Dispatches from Foreign Lands

Small Wars Permitting: Dispatches from Foreign Lands

by Christina Lamb

Harper Press, HK$148

'Zimbabwe is the most heartbreaking story I have ever covered,' writes Christina Lamb in her compendium of articles marking her 20 years as a journalist. Which is saying a lot, considering she has reported from destinations where deprivation and depravity are the norm rather than the exception. In that country she interviews activists who have been tortured and girls raped as part of a 'systematic political cleansing of the population'. She also visits villages where no one is aged 20 to 50. Many have died of Aids or hunger; others have simply fled. Small Wars Permitting starts with Lamb's first 'big' article in a national newspaper: the wedding in 1987 of Benazir Bhutto to Asif Ali Zardari. 'Bhutto's biographer' - who was with her on her return to Pakistan last October and spattered with blood when their bus was bombed - writes that her acquaintance with the opposition leader killed late last year 'would decide my destiny'. After her introduction to Pakistan, Lamb could never go back to covering local news and so became a war junkie. Her focus is Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the stories in the book are part of a wider arc. Wherever Lamb is, she takes on the assignment of showing the human cost of conflict.