This was a mental game as much as a physical challenge, designed to reinforce the fact that staying focused and motivated is absolutely critical to mission success and basic survival in war.

When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 after a searing, four-year civil war, they immediately instituted laws which fit their utopic vision of the time of Islam's founding more than 1,300 years earlier. Afghan women's lives offered the most visible sign of the imagined past to which Afghanistan's present was to be returned.

In Nigeria, along with its West African neighbor Ghana, women are now starting businesses in greater numbers than men.

We are so used to seeing women as victims of war to be pitied rather than survivors of war to be respected.

It is high time to declare an end to the breastfeeding dictatorship that is drowning women in guilt and worry just when they most need support: after the birth of a child.

War reporters are often seen as a wild bunch of thrill-seekers who wade into danger zones simply for the sake of the adrenalin high the settings inevitably provide. But this one-dimensional explanation leaves out the core of the story, which is that reporters go to these places because they feel the tug of responsibility.