A must read about Afghanistan: "The Lion's Grave" by Jon Lee Anderson
I know' we've just been told all about Afghanistan by Greg Mortenson in his local lecture, but if you want to get a feel for the gritty side of life in Afghanistan, check out "The Lion's Grave" by Jon Lee Anderson from the Carson library.
Anderson was a New Yorker staffer covering Afghanistan in the early stages of the war there. His dispatches (from the magazine) are lucid and if they suggest that maybe we haven't the slightest idea of what it is like there and what the people want and opposed to what we are giving them, don'et be surprised. It's a sad story of American ignorance and of a culture that might be OK no matter who was running things. Nobody has ever taken over in Afghan, not the Brits, not Alexander the Great.
As a onetime foreign correspondent, it was educational to read the correspondence Anderson had with his editors. Never did anyone I worked with ever able to simply ask for more money frequently to get the job done. I know I wouldn't have had the largess he enjoyed in cash funding.
That aside, he paints a picture much like that of Mortenson, and he spends a lot of time talking about the assassination of Massoud, the leader of the Northern Forces opposing the Taliban. His sources link that slaying to 9/11m attack on New York City.
You come away from this book wondering if anyone in Washington ever reads anything other than cooked intelligence reports. The additional 30,000 troops don't seem to fit into this book's Afghanistan.
---Sam Bauman