James Fergusson

Talking to the Taliban: What a negotiated settlement might mean for the US and the world

Islam v The West

U, Europe and the future of NATO

Lessons of Bosnia: The role of democracy in post-conflict countries

James Fergusson is an award-winning journalist and author, he is a specialist in the greatest ideological conflict of our times: the so-called “Clash of Civilisations” between Islam and the West.

James has written about and reported from both Afghanistan and Pakistan for over 14 years. He is a noted expert on the Taliban, and has met with numerous senior figures in the Afghan insurgency including the notorious Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the US State Department’s “Specially Designated Global Terrorists”, and who currently has a bounty of $25m on his head.

As President Obama searches for an end to the war in Afghanistan, what prospect is there for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban? James argues that the West can achieve what it most wants from its mission in Afghanistan: security from attack by Al Qaida. But for this to work, the West must first radically alter the way it views the Taliban – a movement, he believes, that remains poorly understood even after nine years of Western engagement in the region.

The same is true of Islam itself. With 1.57bn adherents, Islam is not just the second largest religion on the planet after Christianity (which has 2.2bn adherents) – it is also the fastest growing. Indeed, some analysts predict that Muslims will outnumber Christians by 2023. In an ever more crowded world, the West has little choice now but to come to an accommodation with Islam: an accommodation that can only begin with dialogue based on greater mutual understanding and respect. What happens in Afghanistan in the coming months therefore goes to the heart of one of the central challenges of our era.

James was educated at Eton College and at Brasenose College, Oxford, and is a direct contemporary of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron.

His career in journalism began at The Independent, a liberal broadsheet newspaper that shook up the old Fleet St establishment when it launched in the 1980s, and for which he still writes. In 1992 at the age of 26 he was appointed Features Editor of The European, Robert Maxwell’s innovative but ultimately ill-fated foreign news journal; he subsequently became a free-lance foreign correspondent, covering regions as diverse as Europe, the Caribbean, North Africa and Central Asia.

From 1999 to 2001 he lived in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where he worked as press spokesman for the Office of the High Representative, the body charged with implementing the Dayton, Ohio Peace Accord that ended the Yugoslav civil war in 1995.

From 2001 to 2003 he worked for the London-based corporate intelligence agency, Hakluyt. He subsequently returned to journalism, and to writing books.

His first book, Kandahar Cockney, told the story of his Pashtun fixer-interpreter whom he helped gain political asylum in London. His last book, A Million Bullets, an account of the Nato campaign in Helmand, southern Afghanistan in 2006, was the British Army’s Military Book of the Year 2009, and has been designated as required reading for trainee officers. His new book, Taliban – The True Story of the World’s Most Feared Guerrilla Fighters, was published in 2010.