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By covering such a wide range of time, people and countries the author is able to tie together so much information to give you a full picture of how past actions led to today's current situation. This book is big, but it's worth it.
Took only 5 minutes. My own personal thoughts are not to be expressed as it would do no good anyway. I needed to check something today, so I pulled the book from my home Library and looked up Gorbachev.
To hold this 700 page book in you brain is just toomuch to expect. Buy the book and read it, piece wise, so as not to be overwhelmed by the material. You surely get insight in to the players in this theater.
Most of the reviews say what I was thinking. Sometimes one or two sentences contain so much information, you grasp the connection between what you have read from other sources. Keep it as a text book or reference source.
Going to the pages where he was to be found, I found the information I wanted to check. The book is detailed and full of information.
He has researched well the personalities involved within the US Government, particularly the CIA, and gives a coherent picture of how decisions were arrived. It is also quite obvious that the book was written in a hurry as the cadence of the story line varies tremendously. Read in combination with Ahmed Rahsid's "Descent into Chaos" (See review) , it forms a powerful duo.
It is a balanced book in its viewpoint but because the vast majority of the sources are English-based, I felt like I was reading only part of the story, though a very good one. Once again compared to other books like Robert Fisk's "The Great War for Civilization", I didn't get a sense of "profound" understanding of the subject matter. Having read this book right after finishing "Descent into Chaos", the difference in the depth of knowledge and details were quite obvious to me.
This is an outstanding book detailing the US involvement with Afghanistan. The only reason I didn't give 5 stars is because the story is a bit one-sided. Nonetheless, it is still excellent reading.
The main strengths of Coll's book is its thoroughness from the American point of view. If one is a student of CIA history, this is a good starting point.
Worthy of a purchase for sure. This should be read by anyone who wants to understand some of the problems in the middle east (much of it caused by the US).
You'll get lot's of that kind of thing. Really trivial in meaning for in how we ended up being attacked. In other words, he substitutes barely relevant circumstance for critically dealing with the fact that our support for Israel in all it's criminal features motivated 9/11 as payback. I'm sorry but a worthless book. for a quick primer on this. This is an establishment version of what ultimately led to 9/11.
The author treats that formative association hazily, giving it not a fraction of the details he devotes to expounding on how Clinton fooling around with Monica Lewinsky deverted his attention and cost him credibility in dealing with the threat from Al Qaeda. Who cares that Pervez Mushareff's daughter married a filmmaker. You can find out more about the causes of 9/11 from going to the web and looking up original sources. Much detail about the idiosyncrasies and personalities of american intelligence people, their careers, machinations inside Pakistani and Saudi intelligence, and Massoud in Afghanistan. I gave up on page 421. For one thing the book tries to gloss over that Palestine, the utter ugly inhumanness of the Israelis toward the Palestinians, is what drew bin Laden to Azzam (a Palestinian and founder of Hamas) his mentor.
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