Book Recommendation:

by Zlatko Waterman

Posted to Poetry and Politics on 2004-05-30 10:14:00

Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, this book by the current managing editor of the Washington Post traces the evolution of the “non-involvement” ( read neglect) in Afghanistan by the US, bin Laden’s gradual ascendancy in the spehere of radical Islamists, and the CIA’s bumbling and general malfeasance.

Coll was The Post’s South Asia bureau chief between 1989 and 1992. He won a Pulitizer Prize in 1990.

His book is reviewed in the May 27th edition of The New York Review of Books, p. 19. “Ghost Wars” covers American and CIA involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as bin Laden’s career intensively and deals with developments in the Middle East between the years 1979 to September 10, 2001.


–Zlatko