journalist
A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalis ...
. She was based in
Kabul
Kabul (; ps, , ; , ) is the capital and largest city of Afghanistan. Located in the eastern half of the country, it is also a municipality, forming part of the Kabul Province; it is administratively divided into #Districts, 22 municipal dist ...
,
Afghanistan
Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is borde ...
in 1999 as a
foreign correspondent
A correspondent or on-the-scene reporter is usually a journalist or commentator for a magazine, or an agent who contributes reports to a newspaper, or radio or television news, or another type of company, from a remote, often distant, locat ...
. On March 14, 2001, the
Taliban
The Taliban (; ps, طالبان, ṭālibān, lit=students or 'seekers'), which also refers to itself by its state (polity), state name, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a Deobandi Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalist, m ...
ordered her expelled. At that time, she was the only western reporter based full-time in Afghanistan. Her expulsion was seen as a reaction to her reports on the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan.
The
Committee to Protect Journalists
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is an American independent non-profit, non-governmental organization, based in New York City, New York, with correspondents around the world. CPJ promotes press freedom and defends the rights of jou ...
condemned the Taliban's expulsion of Clark. It said that since there is no independent domestic press in Afghanistan many Afghans relied on the short-wave broadcasts the BBC transmitted in
Dari
Dari (, , ), also known as Dari Persian (, ), is the variety of the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan. Dari is the term officially recognised and promoted since 1964 by the Afghan government for the Persian language,Lazard, G.Darī ...
and
Pashto
Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani ().
Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official langua ...
.
Clark continued to report on Afghanistan, from outside its borders, and returned to Kabul on 15 November 2001, after the Taliban retreat.
In September 2002, Clark was able to interview Wakil Muttawakil, the former Taliban Foreign Minister.
He told her that he had first heard rumors that
Al-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda (; , ) is an Islamic extremist organization composed of Salafist jihadists. Its members are mostly composed of Arabs, but also include other peoples. Al-Qaeda has mounted attacks on civilian and military targets in various countr ...
was planning a large sneak attack in the
continental United States
The contiguous United States (officially the conterminous United States) consists of the 48 adjoining U.S. states and the Federal District of the United States of America. The term excludes the only two non-contiguous states, Alaska and Hawaii ...
, and that he immediately took steps to warn the
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an executive department of the U.S. federal government responsible for the country's foreign policy and relations. Equivalent to the ministry of foreign affairs of other na ...
. Clark described this as a "massive failure of intelligence".
In May 2010, Clark left the BBC and joined the research group
Afghanistan Analysts Network
The Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN) is an independent non-profit policy research and analysis organization. Founded in 2009, it is registered as an association in Germany and Afghanistan, funded in large part by Scandinavian countries, and has ...