Moscow 1993, Revisiting the Taliban, Curtis LeMay

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How We Got Here is back after a vacation hiatus. Journalist Otto Pohl journeys back to Moscow to find out who shot him during a demonstration in 1993. Veteran foreign correspondent Charles Sennott returns to Afghanistan and Pakistan on the trail of the Taliban. And Warren Kozak tells us about the legendary American General Curtis LeMay.

Pohl was a young photographer working for The New York Times when Russian President Boris Yeltsin abruptly dissolved parliament back in October 1993.  Pohl was shot by security forces while covering a demonstration outside Moscow’s central television tower. He tells us about his journey back to Russia to understand what happened all those years ago. (He wrote a piece about it for Men’s Journal this summer.)  Charles Sennott is another reporter going back to a story he reported long ago; he returns to Afghanistan and Pakistan on the trail of the Taliban.  You’ll hear Part 1 of Charlie’s series Inside the Taliban; as you’ll see it’s a very “how we got here” treatment of the subject. It’s familiar territory for Sennott, a long time foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe and now Executive Editor of GlobalPost.  Look for a full podcast of the series with additional commentary from Charlie very soon.  And in the final segment of this week’s episode we continue our exploration of the history of bombing with a look at a new biography of a key architect of  American air power strategy during WWII and beyond.