Afghanistan is one of the worlds poorest countries, cradled by mountains to the south and east, desert to the west, and the fractious tribal lands to the north. For much of its history it has been a land visited only by people on their way to somewhere else. Not, though, by Kathy Gannon. She arrived in 1986 with dreams of being a foreign correspondent, expecting that she might move on soon afterwards. She stayed eighteen years, becoming in that time the most knowledgeable Western journalist to observe the cataclysms that rocked the regionand after 2001 went on to convulse the world. From the collapse of the Soviet occupation to the years of anarchic tribalism, to the creation and rise of the Taliban, to the hijacking of power by al Qaeda, Gannon stayed with the story of Afghanistan and its people. She watched the country go from being the battleground for a proxy superpower conflict to a forgotten backwater where vicious local politics ran unchecked and the essential structure of the country decayed. With the collapse of respect for lawapart from the law of the gunwent due process, education, a public role for women, the economy, and the last vestiges of interest from the international community. At the end, Afghanistan had become so damaged and vulnerable a country that it became the refuge for a truly evil man whose designs would bring global ignominy and another round of superpower conflict to its mountains and plains.

Throughout this time Gannon has been an intimate observer whose personal friends throughout he country have allowed her to see the world through Afghan eyes. She brings this brilliant and affectionate insight to provide a gripping portrait of a nation that was abused and idly discarded by the West, used as an incubator for religious extremism by its neighbors, and hugely,fatally misunderstood by almost everyone.