Christina Lamb a British journalist who is currently a Foreign Correspondent for The Sunday Times, graduated from University College, Oxford (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. She has won the Foreign Correspondent of the Year award four times.
She is a self-motivated woman who is brilliant and creative in her job and sees journalism and writing as her passion. In a biased, cruel and policy-driven media industry, Mrs. Lamb has created a name for herself as she has numerously hit the fault lines in distressed and underdeveloped nations.
Lamb’s writing is “brilliant in human details” according to The Spectator. Lamb’s writing is indulging; her minute details hit the reader emotionally while she bases her arguments on firsthand experiences that are factual but deductive. Her perception cannot be generalized, as the same events are seen by other much related people in a completely different way.
Ms. Lamb seems to go a long way, even putting her life in danger, to get her news. Ms. Lamb has made travels to Pakistan and Afghanistan since the Afghan-Russian war and has written a lot of material on her visits.
After deporting Ms. Lamb the second time, The PPF reported, “… Ms. Lamb was debarred from (her activities and) asked to leave Pakistan a couple of months ago, after she had allegedly tried to obtain a fake air ticket in the name of Osama Bin Laden from Quetta to Islamabad.” Such activity can be surely staged as a very big terrorist event if done in any western country.
According to The Telegraph, “The Telegraph understands, however, that the pair was deported because Ms Lamb was investigating the involvement of members of the ISI in supplying arms to the Taliban. Christina was simply carrying out her duties as a journalist to the extraordinarily high standards with which readers of the Telegraph will already be familiar.”
Ms. Lamb certainly is not the kind of person that could even be in a thousand kilometers radius of Taliban without proper security, while the Telegraph is arguing that she was unfolding the inside story of an institution that even the best of the local journalists cannot.
In Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, Ms. Lamb could move around freely, maybe shop her own groceries, but Quetta is a disputed region with terrorist organizations like the TTP and the BLA; it is altogether a different demographic scene, where strong, specific ethnic backgrounds are required to even move in the region and beyond.
Reviewing “The sewing circles of Herat: my Afghan years”, Dr Tariq Rahman said, “Personally, I find one major omission in the book. It does not touch upon the misery which the ordinary Afghans suffered because of the American invasion of Afghanistan. She need not have taken a political stand on the issue, but her job as a reporter of the human conditions made it incumbent upon her to record the sufferings of the people under this attack.”
Ms. Lamb points out in her book “Waiting For Allah”, “The more the country strives for what its religious scholars see as true Islam, the less equipped it becomes for running a twentieth century state.” In her post ‘Who murdered Benazir Bhutto?’, again, she made the case on Musharraf, the Army and even mentions a secret ISI rigging cell based in a house in Islamabad. Thus it becomes clear that Ms. Lamb has been spewing a lot of contempt against the basic ideology of the people of Pakistan and its prime institution – the Army – and it’s Intelligence Service, so much so that she has been under ISI surveillance as a suspect who could be using her identity to interfere with the matters of the state.
In this backdrop, it is easy to assimilate that spewing tonnes of hatred against Pakistan Army, the ISI, the ideology of the nation and the respect of its founding father might have been a long time ambition of Ms. Lamb that has become possible as she took the cover behind innocent Malala in her most recent work – ‘I am Malala’. For a detail review, see ‘I am Malala’.
Compiled by Wali Shahzad
