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A Reporter's Journey Through Three Decades of War in Afghanistan
Chelsea Green Publishing
August 2011
On Sale: August 3, 2011
445 pages
ISBN: 1603583424
EAN: 9781603583428
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Few reporters have covered Afghanistan as intrepidly and
humanely as Edward Girardet. Now, in a gripping, personal
account, Girardet delivers a story of that nation's
resistance fighters, foreign invaders, mercenaries, spies,
aid workers, Islamic extremists, and others who have defined
Afghanistan's last thirty years of war, chaos, and
strife. As a young foreign correspondent, Girardet arrived
in Afghanistan just three months prior to the Soviet
invasion in 1979. Over the next decades, he trekked hundreds
of miles across rugged mountains and deserts on clandestine
journeys following Afghan guerrillas in battle as they
smuggled French doctors into the country, and as they
combated each other as well as invaders. He witnessed the
world's greatest refugee exodus, the bitter Battle for Kabul
in the early 1990s, the rise of the Taliban, and, finally,
the US-led Western military and recovery effort that began
in 2001. Girardet's encounters with key figures -
including Ahmed Shah Massoud, the famed "Lion of Panjshir"
assassinated by al Qaeda two days before 9/11, Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, an Islamic extremist massively supported by the
Americans during the 1980s only to become one of today's
most ruthless anti-Western insurgents, and Osama bin Laden -
shed extraordinary light on the personalities who have
shaped the nation, and its current challenges, from
corruption and narcotics trafficking to selfish regional
interests. Killing the Cranes provides crucial
insights into why the West's current involvement has turned
into such a disaster, not only rekindling a new insurgency,
but squandering billions of dollars on a recovery process
that has shown scant success.
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