Education
Steele was educated at King"s College, Cambridge (Bachelor) and Yale University (Master of Arts).
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- Works
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- Works
book
Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground
( This excellent book is a painfully honest account of s...)
This excellent book is a painfully honest account of successive unwinnable wars. It is the text book Mr. Obama and others will need if Afghanistan is ever to be left to find its own peace and prosperity.” Jon Snow, Channel 4 News (UK) Jonathan Steele, an award-winning journalist and commentator, has covered the country since his first visit there as a reporter in 1981. He tracked the Soviet occupation and the communist regime of Najibullah, which held the Western-backed resistance at bay for three years after the Soviets left. He covered the arrival of the Taliban to power in Kabul in 1996, and their retreat from Kandahar under the weight of U.S. bombing in 2001. Most recently Steele has reported from the epicenter of the Taliban resurgence in Helmand. Ghosts of Afghanistan turns a spotlight on the numerous myths about Afghanistan that have bedeviled foreign policy-makers and driven them to repeat earlier mistakes. Steele has conducted numerous interviews with ordinary Afghans, two of the country's Communist presidents, senior Soviet occupation officials, as well as Taliban leaders, Western diplomats, NATO advisers, and United Nations negotiators. Comparing the challenges facing the Obama administration as it seeks to find an exit strategy with those the Kremlin faced in the 1980s, Steele cautions that military victory will elude the West just as it eluded the Kremlin. Showing how and why Soviet efforts to negotiate an end to the war came to nothing, he explains how negotiations today could put a stop to the tragedies of civil war and foreign intervention that have afflicted Afghanistan for three decades.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1619020572/?tag=2022091-20
Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq
( As the dreadful reality of the coalition's defeat in Ir...)
As the dreadful reality of the coalition's defeat in Iraq begins to sink in, one question dominates Washington and London: Why? In this controversial new book, Jonathan Steele provides a stark and arresting answer: Bush and Blair were defeated from the day they decided to occupy the country. Steele describes the centuries of humiliation that have scarred the Iraqi national psyche, creating a powerful and deeply felt nationalism and spreading cultural landmines along the road to winning Baghdad. Steele shows for the first time how the invasion and occupation were perceived by ordinary Iraqis, whose feelings and experiences were completely ignored by Western policymakers. The result of such arrogance, Steele demonstrates, was a failure that will forever resonate with such dark chapters of American and British history as the Vietnam War and the Suez Canal crisis. Blending vivid reportage, informed analysis, and sweeping historical narrative, Defeat is the definitive post-mortem on this pivotal catastrophe.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1582434034/?tag=2022091-20
Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground by Jonathan Steele (2012-10-16)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01K2J11ZQ/?tag=2022091-20
Jonathan Steele
Edit ProfileCareer
He has reported on Afghanistan, Russia, Iraq, and scores of other countries. He was Washington Bureau Chief for the Guardian from 1975 to 1979, Moscow Bureau Chief from 1988 to 1994, Foreign News Editor between 1979 and 1982 and Chief Foreign Correspondent for The Guardian between 1982 and 1988 during which he reported on civil war in El Salvador and Nicaragua as well as the United States invasion of Grenada in 1983. On return to London in 1994 after six years in Moscow, he covered the crisis in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 and the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
As Senior Foreign Correspondent he covered numerous stories in the Middle East after 2001.
He covered the United States/United Kingdom invasion of Iraq in 2003 and was regularly on assignment in Baghdad for the next three years. This resulted in January 2008 in his book Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq which was published by I.B. Tauris in the United Kingdom and Counterpoint in the United States. He covered the crisis in Syria after 2011, making numerous trips to Damascus.
He reported on the Israeli invasion of south Lebanon in July/August 2006. He has reported frequently from Afghanistan, starting with his first visit to Kabul in 1981 during the Soviet occupation.
He covered the Taliban take-over of the Afghan capital in 1996 as well as their collapse in 2001.
His book, Ghosts of Afghanistan: the Haunted Battleground analyses thirty years of Afghan history (Portobello Books, London 2011 and Counterpoint, San Francisco 2011). In between foreign assignments he worked as a columnist for the Guardian on international affairs Steele is a frequent broadcaster on the British Broadcasting Corporation and an occasional contributor to the London Review of Books.
Since March 2014 he has worked as Chief Reporter of the website Middle East Eye.
Achievements
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In 2006, Steele won a Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism Special Award in honor of his career contributions. He was named International Reporter of the Year in the British Press Awards in 1981 and again in 1991. He won the London Press Club"s Scoop of the Year Award in 1991 for being the only English-language reporter to reach the villa in the Crimea where Mikhail Gorbachev was held captive and interview the Soviet president during the brief coup in August that year. In 1998 he won Amnesty International"s foreign reporting award for his coverage of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. In 1998 he also won the James Cameron award.
Works
book
-
Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq
( As the dreadful reality of the coalition's defeat in Ir...)
-
Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground
( This excellent book is a painfully honest account of s...)
- Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground by Jonathan Steele (2012-10-16)
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Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq
Membership
He was a member of the Guardian team which analysed the Wikileaks documents on Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the cache of State Department cables.
