Special Screening: 'America and the Taliban'

America and the Taliban tells the story of how America's 20-year investment in Afghanistan culminated in a stunning Taliban seizure of Kabul on August 15, 2021. Drawing on decades of on the ground reporting, and scores of interviews with Taliban, Afghan government and U.S. officials, this series is an investigation of American blunders and missteps as well as Taliban intransigence and cunning.

Join us for a special preview screening of the series’ concluding hour, followed by a conversation with series' producer and chief correspondent Martin Smith, former ambassador of Afghanistan to the United States Roya Rahmani, and Colonel Jason Dempsey, Executive Director of Columbia University's Center for Veteran Transition and Integration. The discussion will be moderated by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and the director of the Li Center for Global Journalism at Columbia University, Azmat Khan.

Speakers:

Jason Dempsey is one of the nation’s leading experts on military demographics and civilian-military relations. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and earned his doctorate in political science from Columbia University. Between tours to Afghanistan in 2009 and 2012, Jason spent two years in the White House, where he initially served as the First Lady’s White House Fellow and was put on point to take the broad concept of military family support and turn it into Joining Forces, the First Lady and Dr. Biden’s comprehensive national initiative to mobilize all sectors of society to support our service members and their families. He served for two deployments to Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain and the 101st Airborne Divisions. 

Azmat Khan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose work grapples with the human costs of war. She is an investigative reporter with the New York Times and New York Times Magazine, a Carnegie Fellow, and the Birch Assistant Professor at Columbia Journalism School, where she is also the director of the Li Center for Global Journalism. Khan is writing a book for Random House investigating America's air wars. Her investigations have prompted widespread policy impact and won more than a dozen awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, two National Magazine Awards, two Overseas Press Club awards, the Polk Award, and the Hillman Prize.

Ambassador Roya Rahmani is a senior advisor at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center. She also serves as a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, as well as a senior fellow for international security at the New America Foundation. She is a former Afghan diplomat with nearly two decades of experience working with governments, nongovernmental organizations, and multilateral institutions. Rahmani was the first woman to serve as Afghan ambassador to the United States, first Afghan woman ambassador to Indonesia, and served as the first director general for regional cooperation at the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Martin Smith is an award-winning reporter and producer for FRONTLINE who has covered the world: from revolution in Central America and the fall of communism in Russia, to the rise of Al Qaeda and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the inside story of the global financial meltdown. He was among the first journalists to investigate Col. Oliver North’s clandestine Contra arms network and one of the first western reporters to investigate the emergence of Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network. Smith has won every major award in broadcast television, including four duPont Columbia Gold Batons, five Peabody Awards, and eight Emmys. In 2014 he received the John Chancellor Award, presented by Columbia University to a reporter with courage and integrity for cumulative professional accomplishments.

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