An excellent books, as are all of Rashid's works, I read it in two days and found it rich with detail and useful information about the region, personalities from the region and decisions made by all the players. ( )

An important book - the first to document the "war on terror", its successes (or in this case its failures) in Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. As Rashid chronicles, this area was woefully neglected at the expense of the Bush administration's Iraq adventure and this neglect is now coming back to haunt the world.

Rashid spares few in this work. There's plenty of blame to be apportioned. Of particular interest is the hash that the Musharraf regime made of its Taliban/Jihadi policy, trying to carry out a balancing act of cracking down on Al-Qaeda while supporting the Taliban and the Pakistani military's hand-reared Jihadi groups - a policy that blew up (pardon the macabre pun) in the military regime's faces in 2006-07.

Ahmed Rashid has been one of the foremost commentators on the Taliban for years. I find this an informative and important work, but at the same time somewhat limited. He is a good reporter, but as an analyst he sometimes doesn't seem to follow things through. For example he views the removal of Musharraf and the introduction of a democratic government as a key step in combating militant Islamism in Pakistan-Afghanistan. But he doesn't delve into the mechanics of how this would happen, particularly when, as he himself chronicles, the military establishment's involvement with Jihadi groups is so entrenched.

Furthermore he repeatedly stresses the need for Hamid Karzai to side with the reformers in the Afghan government against the warlords, but I suspect the division of reformer/warlord is not as clear-cut as he makes it out to be.

Despite these, and other misgivings, this is the best book on this particular subject matter out there and needs to be widely read and its contents and conclusions thoroughly debated. ( )