To discuss their experiences in afghanistan, syria and other conflict zones. First, at my far right is janine dye giovanni, since then shes reported on turmoil and conflict in the middle east and beyond. The morning they came for us, she chronical it is war in syria by using seven different perspectives she provides picture of a nation as experienced by its citizens. Among them a nun, doctor, and a student. Next to janine is cristina lamb, chief correspondent for the sunday times. Like janine, cristinas instruction began in late 1980s in pakistan and afghanistan. Her journalism has since taken her far and wide including assignments in brazil, south africa, similar back way and iraq but since the 9 11 attacks shes spent quite a bit of time in afghanistan. She wrote i am malala and her book highlight it is errors and miscalculations made by the United States and allies in the war in afghanistan. Our third author is kim barker whose book taliban about reporter in afghanistan and pakistan, served as the basis for the recent movie whiskey tango foxtrot starring tina fay. After joining the Chicago Tribune in 2001 she ended up going abroad and spent five years from 20042009 as the south asia bureau chief based in new delhi. Times review of her book called it both hilarious and heroin, two contrasting adjectives but also sum up the frequently mixed experience of war reporting. Moderating discussion by this impressive groups of panelists will be mary jordan, herself with a prizewinning journalist, mary was abroad for 14 years, tokyo, mexico city and london and currently covering the president ial campaign. [laughter] you need that foreign experience. [laughter] she told me as we were walking in that she just interviewed donald trump today so you might want to ask her about that. Anyway, we are sort of getting off track, arent we . [laughter] marys most recent book which she cowrote with her husband Kevin Sullivan also at the Washington Post is titled hope, memoir of survival in cleveland in chronical the kid napping and torment of two of the women held captive in a home in cleveland by eriel castro, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome me in joining our panel. [applause] i really feel like im having dinner at three fivestar restaurants tonight. We are sure going to have a fun time. [inaudible] its a testament to working. Its a testament to all the work that you have done. Im very proud to be up here. So i want to ask first before we get into other things, how did this happen . You know, other kids grow up and they want to run facebook. [laughter] why did you wanting to [inaudible] yeah, well i never wanted to be a journalists, i was an am deck emand i was doing my masters degree when in compared literature in russian and French Literature which is completely different and i wanted to be a professor and write novels possibly and literary criticism and one day i saw photograph of israeli soldier burying a palestinian teenager alive and the article was called human rights lawyer who was a jewish holocaust survivor. I flew to israel. She took me under her wing and i feel like i went to a door that never i could never go back again and i basically couldnt finish my ph. D. You have an obligation and i was just taunted as injustice and i could as a journalist have some kind of impact by doing this and then the war in bosnia came and that was a whole other that opened a whole other scenario for my colleagues and i. [inaudible] cristina, so did you grow up knowing that you were going to end up 28 years, for 28 years you had been in afghanistan and pakistan. Quite amazing. No, i mean, i never set out to be war correspondent. I always we wanted to write. I loved writing and i wanted to have adventures but basically i became a war correspondent as a result of an invitation to a wedding and what happened was i started after i left the university i worked as an intern at the Financial Times in london. One day i was supposed to be going to lunch and last minute he couldnt go and he said why dont you go to this lunch so i went to the lunch, sat next to somebody who was general for the Pakistan Party and he asked me if i would like to interview who was living in london at the time. Of course, i said, yes. And the day that i went to interview her was the day that she announced engagement. It was full of flowers and we got very well. Particularly men, i think. She then went back to pakistan. I went to work as a trainee for a British Company and was doing kind of shows and things like that. When they came home from work and there was absolutely beautiful gold and striped invitation on my door mat and, of course, i went and it was just amazing. It was like something out of arabian nights. If youve ever been to south asian wedding, they go for a long time and colorful and eat evening after the ceremony events, discussion about how to take pakistan and all of her colleagues were people that had been teargassed and tortured and the most interesting was finding my way home after losing train in london. I was fascinated and came back to london and said that i was going to live in pakistan and everybody i went to talk to, we are not interested in pakistan. General has been there for years, nothing is going to change but we are interested in afghanistan because the russians are there, so why dont you go and cover that, so being 21 at the time i agreed and the last story i ever did was a man who looks like it was Going Forward when it was going backwards. I dont think it was great lost to british tv. We will go back to israeli because you went onto many places but kim, tell us how you your story is equally different from these two about how you got in. I always knew i wanted to be a journalist, ever since i took journalism class and i thought what a great con, you know, the whole idea that i could get a class and pull my friends out of class and ask questions and write about it, it just seemed like to greatest job in the world. So i never thought about being a foreign correspondent, though, we didnt travel anywhere. My parents, i grew up not the richest person in the world and we never went to canada or mexico, we always stayed local to wyoming and montana, after 9 11 happened though, i was at the Chicago Tribune and other people volunteering to go and you would see like the desks sort of empty out and this person would go try it and i kind of felt, not that i wanted to be a war correspondent but that i wanted to see if i could cover the biggest story of the world. And i didnt know that i would end up following in love with it and staying for so long, but i did i did actually volunteer for going overseas when i heard they were going to try to send women overseas because we hadnt tried out a lot of women. I went out with a female friend and we we wanted to cover 9 11, we count it had number of men sent out and the number of women and it was 11 men and one woman. So i wanted to prove that a woman could do it. I was trying to figure out how to distinguish from female reporters when i heard they were looking to send more women overseas. And i dont speak any foreign languages, i hadnt even been to europe but i went in with the biggest argument i had which was i introduced myself and i said hello, im kim barker, im a metro reporter, im single and im childless and therefore im expandable. Yeah. I did say that. [laughter] he laughed and he said i will two anywhere you want to send me and he was just like get ready to go to pakistan and i called my parents and said im going to pakistan. They said, no youre not, why on earth would anybody send you to pakistan. Turns out they were wrong and i went four months later. When i get posted to tokyo i called my mother and it was a big deal. At the time in the 90s, oh no, what did you do wrong at work. [laughter] let me read you something that kim wrote in her book and youll get a flavor for how she writes. Afghanistan felt more like home than anywhere else in the region. I knew why, afghanistan sounded, seemed familiar, it had jagged blue and purple mountains and bearded men with pickup trucks with guns and hate for the government. [laughter] it was like montana. Just on different drugs. [laughter] so lets go back to you for a second, kim, and, you know, it is at one point shes talking in the book, the phone rings, the taliban calls at the wrong time, how do you balance kind of beheadings request standup comedy . [laughter] this is on cspan and you just asked me the hardest question i have ever gotten. I mean, i think any journalist, its just like when youre a police officer, an emergency room doctor, you know, anybody who has to go through trauma, anybody who grows up in afghanistan or pakistan, you use dark comedy to deal with horrible things. Just because youre in a war zone, just because people are being killed doesnt mean that you stop living your life and that people stop having the small moments and laughter, i think, is a healer and a way to bring people together. And i guess its also because my dad brought me up watching mash, we didnt go to church every week, we had to watch mash. I hate that show. You know, this war actually lasted a couple of years and the show lasted 25, you know. But, you know, and its also like i read the first one of i really loved and i was just i sort of like, i think, you know absorbed the whole idea of dark comedy being a good way to talk about war and talk about whats happened over there and i think there used to be a tradition over that, you know, until there was no more draft and then like once the draft stopped its this whole idea that now that everybody doesnt know somebody that goes to war, you cant make jokes, you cant talk about how people really live over there. Its all this sort of reverence for the idea of war and that everybody is fighting all of the time and its just not factual. I thought you did a brilliant job, through humor you could picture you there and yet you were giving us so much information and i think thats why the reviews have been through the roofs so congratulations. Of course, the movie that was just made, so whats tina fay like . Shes serious. I think im actually funnier. Just kidding. [laughter] tina is incredibly generous. I didnt spend a lot of time before they ended up filming the movie. The ones that like to take a character and make it their own. You dont want to spend any time with that person. We just had a long lunch which i remember complaining about high heels really, we complained a lot about high heels and she told me a story that i told was really funny and i was proud of me i couldnt remember what the story was, i told something that told tina fay laugh but i dont know what it was. When i was onset she was kind to my and she and during the whole process every single time that she was on a late night show she would mention my name and my book, the original title by name and so i think my publisher was thinking that the movie that has hear face on the cover would end up eclipsing the taliban shuffle but because she mentioned it so much taliban shuffle started selling in amazon. I cant say enough things about her. Shes been generous to me and very much a supporter of women and i really benefited from that. Well, lets go back, you know, there used to be that there were not that many car correspondents that were female. But right now the Washington Post actually has quite a few and a lot of people do too and Melissa Rubin just won and lets talk about how being a woman in the war zone affects reporting . Well, when i started 25 years ago there were very, very few women and the women that were in the field, in my case in the middle east werent very friendly to other women. I think it was because it was so competitive, it was so male, it was so driven that there was a great sense of competition. I think now its radically changed but i do think ive been asked this question over and over again, do men and women report in different ways, i think its very individual. What i do im a human rights reporter. I go into the field and spend a long time with people or on a certain story, i dont im a terrible scoop reporter or sensationalized reporter. But i need to spend a long time and i think that we are talking articlier about the war on bosnia, bosnia was the watershed moment that changed reporting in our in our generation, i think, it was basically our generation vietnam and it was the time when a small group of us were very, very committed to affecting policy and we felt that we were not going to let this genocide happen on our watch and we stuck it out, we lived surge siege with the people, we were sniped, we were stafferred, we didnt have food, we didnt have water. Yet we did something that we were proud of, inch that was in the war and covered the war feels like it changed their lives forever and style of reporting. We feel committed. Thats why i want to drive syria home right now. Its a slowmotion genocide. The world must Pay Attention to it. Now i live in paris and coming to america for the past two weeks on this book tour, im really amazed by how little attention is getting, that, you know, its there are people being slaughtered, the hospital where i work, the only pediatrician was killed. The first responders, the bravest people in the world, we are not the bravest people in the world. They go out and dig people out of the rubble, five of them were killed, the gynecologist who deliver it is babies was killed. Yes, el, i think europe traditionally theres more interest well, this is an Election Year for america and i do understand that but i think syria seems to remote but so did bosnia and then there was a genocide of 8,000 men and boys and we said that it would never happen again and its happening now. She spends a lot of time with different people and you kind of cant really horrible things that happened. But back to the question, cristina, if you want to pick it up about do women bring something to correspondents specially war zones that you wouldnt get otherwise. Theres been lots of talk about women or different at the peacemaking table are they different or do they bring something, is there a reason we need diversity in the war correspondent. Women and men report quite differently on war. I think male tend to focus much more on the actual fighting with bang, bang, if youd like. I covered war for 28 years but i can tell the difference between incoming and outcoming but i cant really tell you what kind of weapons are being fired where. What i focus on are the people behind lines, the people that are living the war because actually when you see war on tv, when you see syria or places on tv, it likes like everything is fighting, when you actually go to the countries there are millions of people still living their lives trying to educate they their children and those tend to be the women. Women focus on that more and i spent most of my career in the middle east and a lot of countries its impossible for male reporters to go into the womens corridors so actually im getting access to both sides in a way that a lot of my male colleagues are not. My husband Kevin Sullivan spent a lot of time in war countries. He was saying that in some places the coffee shop the women or on one side and the men on the other and he felt cut off from a lot of the women. So its clearlien upside specially in muslim countries to report there. What are the downsides, are there downsides, kim . You know, you get this question all of the time. Identify never reported as a man so its difficult for me to sort of [laughter] i feel somehow you could. Youve got to be really careful with what youre doing, you know, and theres been books like emergency sex. Yeah, right. [laughter] so and you really couldnt live like that as a woman because i know theres a follow up but i dont know what to do with the emergency part of this. No, no, its a book. I thought it was something no, nothing actually that happens. Its a book that came out that wrote a lot about this. What i was saying a woman over there, you had to be protective of reputation, you always had to be careful who you were going out with and what time you were coming home because you were working with afghans a lot of the time and therefore i felt like you had obligation to refute the idea of being this western loose woman and that would come up and it comes up for all of us where you think youre being friendly and then you start getting phone calls in the middle of the night and you cant turn phones off and theyre calling ramadan, its 4 00 in the morning and its like i love you and youre like, thanks but i need some sleep, you couldnt turn your phone off and so irritations like that, irritations of being grabbed in public, you know, i write a lot about the fact that i mean, im tall, 510 and i punched a lot of guys and i would start punching them and that was dangerous. He was the guy that would get in trouble for that and found out you know, grabbing happened equally in india and pakistan so i dont like it how did they react to the punch . They didnt like it. [laughter] they ran away. Yeah. Okay. Then there was all this stuff with, you know, its funni funny i had the guys on twitter, this is really unprofessional because all of the hitting on you stuff was probably off the record, it was off the record. I dont think youre allowed to be off the record when youre hitting on somebody, i dont, do i dont. I think thats on the record and felt like writing about that sort of stuff shows the level of, you know, im going to pretend to be the sort of very religious man in public but behind the scenes i think this is okay to behave this way with women. [inaudible] thats the moment. I mean, everyone always says the difference between men and women, i always resented when they tried to say women cover orphanages and hospitals because ive done a lot of front war stuff too. I have done a lot of military work. But the moment that really changes for me personally was when i had a child and that just drew the line completely because i know my male colleagues have children and some of them use to say now youre entering the club where youre going to read bedtime stories by Satellite Phone but this is a risk saying this but for women its very different because we carry the child and we give birth an extraordinary bond and i will never forget when my son was six months old my old paper the times which is not the most sensible to women, my editor deliberate rattily sent me back to iraq where i had been living for two years covering sudan and the invasion and the war and i was still Breast Feeding and i didnt wanting to, they used the clause in my contract to send me, we have a war reporter that we go to war. I said theres no where that says im a war reporter. Im a correspondent, im a senior correspondent, send me to paris or brussels or something and i went my foreign desk was quite a macho little scene and the g