Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2002 07:21:45 -0800 From: Michael Pugliese <debsian at pacbell.net> Subject: Fred Halliday review books on Afghanistan
The country that lost the cold war.
THE UN-GREAT GAME The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation & Collapse in the International System by Barnett R. Rubin (Yale University Press, 378 pp., $35)
The Search for Peace in Afghanistan:
>From Buffer State to Failed State
by Barnett R. Rubin
(Yale University Press, 190 pp., $25)
Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response by M. Hassan Kakar (University of California Press, 350 pp., $35)
Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal by Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison (Oxford University Press, 400 pp., $35)
"Nowhere have hopes for peace and order at the end of the Cold War been mocked more cruelly than in Afghanistan." Thus writes Barnett Rubin, one of the best analysts of modern Afghanistan and the author of two astringent studies of its recent conflicts. The story of modern Afghanistan must rank as one of the great tragedies of the cold war. With Vietnam and Korea, Angola and Mozambique, Afghanistan is one of those countries in which a combination of internal conflict and external intervention led to terrible war. Over a million people, as much as 10 percent of the population, died. Up to a third of the population was displaced as refugees. Most of the educated elite fled.
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