Inside a kidnapping
“I went to this interview too quickly,” New York Times reporter David Rohde admitted to a Harvard Kennedy School audience on Tuesday (Dec. 7), about his 2008 meeting with a Taliban commander in Afghanistan. His haste led to seven months and 10 days of captivity. Associates of a top Taliban commander kidnapped Rohde, an author and Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, along with two Afghan colleagues, as Rohde gathered information for a book. Their scheduled interview was a trap. Speaking at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, where he was once a fellow, Rohde was accompanied by his wife, Kristen Mulvihill. Together, they authored the 2010 book “A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides,” which examines the experience from his and her perspective. They married just two months before the kidnapping. Soon after he was kidnapped, Rohde was taken to Pakistan. He described his captors’ network as well-organized,...