Bette Dam is a Dutch investigative journalist who made a career working in Afghanistan Syria and Iraq. She is currently a lecturer at the Sciences Po university in Paris on the subject of Afghanistan. She is also the author of A Man and a Motorcycle: How Hamid Karzai Came to Power.
<p>For twenty years the Taliban was the number one enemy of Western forces in Afghanistan. But it was an enemy that they knew little about and about whose founder and leader Mullah Omar they knew even less.</p><p>Armed with only a fuzzy blackandwhite photo of the man investigative journalist Bette Dam decided to track down the reclusive Taliban chief a decade back. But in the course of what had seemed an almost impossible job she got to know the Taliban inside out realized how dangerously misinformed the global forces fighting it were and made a startling discovery about the elusive Omar’s whereabouts.</p><p>The outcome of a fiveyearlong pursuit Looking for the Enemy is a woman journalist’s epic story that takes the reader deep into the dangerous mountains and warravaged valleys of Afghanistan as it throws up several unknowns about an organization that is now once again at the helm in one of the world’s most fragile states.</p>
