Carlotta Gall has reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan for almost the entire duration of the American invasion and occupation, beginning shortly after 9/11. She knows just how much this war has cost the Afghan people, and how much damage can be traced to Pakistan and its duplicitous government and intelligence forces. Now that American troops are withdrawing, it is time to tell the full history of how we have been fighting the wrong enemy, in the...

Veteran defense analyst and Afghanistan expert David Isby provides an insightful and meticulously researched look at the current situation in Afghanistan, its history, and what he believes must be done so that the US-NATO coalition can succeed in one of the poorest countries in the world, rife with divisions that dwarf current schisms in Iraq, led by warlords who fight over control of the drug trade as much as they do over religion. After seven years...

Christopher Alexander, Canadian's former ambassador to Afghanistan, offers an inside look at Afghanistan recent history, and delivers a blueprint for transforming the troubled country into a viable nation. Alexander draws on expertise gained over five years on the ground in Afghanistan, chronicling the country's initial successes following the Afghan War, the setbacks it incurred thanks to a resurgent Taliban, and the tenuous stability that multilateral...

The Last Warlord tells the spellbinding story of the legendary Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, a larger-than-life figure who guided US Special Forces to victory over the Taliban after 9/11. Having gained unprecedented access to General Dostum and his family and subcommanders, as well as local chieftains, mullahs, elders, Taliban prisoners, and women's rights activists, scholar Brian Glyn Williams paints a fascinating portrait of this Northern...

"Through much of the twentieth century Afghanistan seemed to be a distant concern in the U.S. "Afghanistanism" used to be journalistic shorthand for stories about distant places that editors dismissed as irrelevant. Afghanistan's territory does include some remote, barely accessible regions, but it also includes ancient metropolises such as Balkh, Herat, Kabul, and Kandahar that through much of history were crossroads for commerce and the spread of...

Rashid examines the region and the corridors of power in Washington and Europe to see how the promised nation building in these countries has progressed. His conclusions are devastating: an unstable and nuclear-armed Pakistan, a renewed al Qaeda profiting from a booming opium trade, and a Taliban resurgence and reconquest. While Iraq continues to attract most of American media and military might, Rashid argues that Pakistan and Afghanistan are where...