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pp. 186, ‘This gripping, intimately-observed history of Afghanistan from 1986 to the present – by the longest-serving Western journalist in the region – overturns our conventional and simplistic understandings In early 1986, Kathy Gannon sold pretty much everything she owned (which wasn’t ‘much) to pursue her dream of becoming a foreign correspondent. She had the world to choose from: she chose Afghanistan. She went to witness the final humiliation of a superpower in terminal decline as the Soviet Union was defeated by the mujahiden. What she didn’t know then was thet Afghanistan would remain her focus for the next eighteen years. Gannon, uniquely among Western journalist, witnessed Afghanistan’s tragic opera: the final collapse of communism followed by bitterly feuding warlords being driven from power by an Islamicist organization called the Taliban; the subsequent arrival of Arabs and exiles, among them Osama bin Laden; and the transformation of the country into the staging post for a global jihad. Gannon observed something else as well: the terrible, unforeseen consequences of Western intervention, the ongoing suffering of ordinary Afghans, and the ability of the most corrupt and depraved of the warlords to reinvent and reinsert themselves into successive governments.”