Afghanistan

When you fly over the icy peaks of the Hindu Kush, which march in serried ranks toward the Himalayas, dividing Central Asia from the Indian subcontinent, you get a sense of the scale of the problem: Osama bin Laden may be hiding somewhere out there. Wherever he is, bin Laden continues to give substantial ideological direction to jihadist movements around the globe -- and so American forces are scouring the Hindu Kush to find him.

The conventional wisdom now,… more

President Bush's May 2003 announcement aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations" had ended in Iraq has been replayed endlessly. What is less well remembered is just what the president claimed the United States had accomplished. "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001," he declared. The defeat of Saddam Hussein, he told the American people, was "a crucial advance in the campaign against terror." In fact,… more

IN A REMARKABLE SPEECH at the National Endowment for Democracy in November 2003, President Bush acknowledged 60 years of American error and announced a policy of encouraging democracy, not dictatorship, in the Muslim world. Whether this long overdue message is followed by an actual policy change or simply results from the short-term need to explain the Iraq war in the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) remains to be seen. But in any event, Bush neglected to mention… more

Robert D. Kaplan is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the bestselling author of seven previous books on travel and foreign affairs, translated into many languages, including Balkan Ghosts, The Arabists, The Ends of the Earth, and The Coming Anarchy.

The war in Afghanistan could become a defining event not just for the fight against terrorism but for NATO and US-European-Russian relations. Already the war has brought changes that just a few months ago would have been unimaginable. For the first time in its history, NATO has invoked Article 5 of the Washington treaty establishing the alliance -- not to defend Europe, as was originally envisioned, but to support a US war in a region far from the European theater.… more

Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden is an extraordinary, in-depth account of Osama bin Laden and his global network by CNN?s terrorism analyst, Peter L. Bergen. One of only a handful of western journalists to have met and interviewed bin Laden, Bergen has done an exhaustive job of researching the man and the Jihadist network of al-Qaeda-the prime suspects in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of September 11.

Over the… more

Selected reviews of Holy War, Inc. are featured below:

Toppling the Taliban will be easy. The Kremlin overthrew four Afghan governments in the 1970s, as a result of which it became embroiled in a decade-long war in Afghanistan that helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. That the Soviets failed to subdue Afghanistan doesn't mean that the United States will fail there, too. Ending Afghanistan's support of terrorism does not require the occupation of large tracts of its territory, the goal of the Soviets. Still, there are… more

This past April in Quetta, the bleached-gray, drought-stricken capital of the Pakistani border province of Baluchistan, I awoke to explosions and gunfire. In search… more