The military adventure that George W. Bush embarked on within months of his inauguration in 2001 was to eclipse everything else in his presidency. His name will forever be synonymous with the "war on terror." What started as a military response to al Qaeda's attacks in New York and Washington on 9/11, with the goal of neutralizing al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan, quickly fused with the neo-conservative agenda to dominate and reshape the Middle East. Al Qaeda's terrorism was answered by the terror of American military power, which has destroyed or blighted the lives of millions...

Beginning with the Communist Saur Revolution of 1978 and continuing through Gen. David Petraeus's 2010 appointment replacing Stanley McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, this book is an inside account of one of the most vicious conflicts fought between the two Cold War superpowers: the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979-89). Analyzing the behind-the-scenes decisions made in Moscow, Washington, and Kabul, former BBC correspondent Deepak Tripathi shows how that conflict transformed Afghanistan into a sanctuary for terrorism.

Explaining how Afghanistan descended into a civil...

Great powers have often found that military adventurism to force their will in distant lands comes with the risk of spending excessive military, economic, and moral capital to the extent that war is no longer sustainable. Written by a former BBC Afghanistan correspondent who set up the corporation’s bureau in Kabul in the early 1990s, this book draws both from scholarly knowledge as well as first-hand insights on how the Americans met that fate in Vietnam, and the Soviets and Americans in Afghanistan. America’s 1975 retreat from Vietnam was a consequential event, prompting US...