Book cover of A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster

Book description

The key to understanding the calamitous Afghan war is the complex, ultimately failed relationship between the powerful, duplicitous Karzai family and the United States, brilliantly portrayed here by the formerKabul bureau chief for The Washington Post.

The United States went to Afghanistan on a simple mission: avenge the September 11…

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Why read it?

1 author picked A Kingdom of Their Own as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This one sticks the most of all the books I’ve read on U.S./Afghan relations. Whenever I visited former students serving in Afghanistan, I used to joke that I was there to listen to them vent and vent they did. Even those who most wanted to do right by Afghans felt perpetually thwarted by their higher-ups.

One reason I couldn’t get enough of Partlow’s account is that no matter how frustrated American and Coalition servicemembers were, they had nothing on Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s leader. Senior leaders on our side routinely pressured Karzai, persistently trying to get him to do very un-Afghan…

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