On September 11, 2001, Australian journalist Irris Makler was working as a freelance correspondent in Moscow. The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington focused attention on Afghanistan, and Makler was among the first journalists to make their way into the strife-torn country via its northern neighbour, Tajikistan.

Our Woman in Kabul documents the US invasion of Afghanistan, the routing of the Taliban and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Makler’s story covers the circumstances of daily life as a female correspondent in a country where women are virtually invisible, the discomforts and challenges of being part of a media feeding frenzy in a place without the infrastructure to support it, and the larger drama of a civil war suddenly escalating into an international conflict. During two decades of fighting, Afghanistan had lost an estimated ten per cent of its population to war, starvation and lack of medical resources. For those of us to whom the name bin Laden seemed to rise like a demonic projection from the underside of the US imagination, Makler’s book provides the background to an event that was formulating its inevitable trajectory in the barren mountains of Afghanistan.