"[T]his contemporary history of the country is strongest when it focuses on the ins and outs of reporting. Particularly compelling is her account of being the only Western journalist allowed into Kabul after 9/11… her firsthand knowledge of the region ultimately gives her interpretation of its recent history strong legitimacy." – Publishers Weekly

". . . in a brand-new book, "I Is for Infidel," Kathy Gannon offers a concise and bracing account of Afghanistan from a post-Sept. 11 perspective. . . Gannon finds plenty to criticize in the reconstruction efforts currently under way in Afghanistan, but her book is more important for the light it sheds on the country before Sept. 11, a subject the world didn't, and still doesn't, understand well enough. . . her passion for her subject is obvious. One hopes, as she clearly does, that explaining Afghanistan -- and the mistakes we have made and continue to make in dealing with it -- will help the country to one day put its troubles to bed." --The San Francisco Chronicle

"Well before we come across this anecdote in "I Is for Infidel," we have grown accustomed to Ms. Gannon's enterprising instincts and, not least, her eye for the telling detail. Her closely observed chronicle of Afghanistan's descent into chaos, and its attempts to rebound, is full of vivid incident and astute analysis. She conveys with particular skill the Afghans' sense of despair as the world abandoned them and their country slid into anarchy, only to be taken over by the Taliban and al Qaeda. ‘In hindsight,' writes Ms. Gannon, ‘it was a mistake [for the West] to support Zia and his Islamic fervor, which gave rise to extremist militants.' It was also a mistake to support Gen. Musharraf, whose military ‘is strangling Pakistan's civil society and protecting the religious right.'

So compelling is Ms. Gannon's case that by the end of the book, when she asserts almost in passing that Osama bin Laden may well be
 

 under the protection of the Pakistani military, it is easy to believe her. It is all a cautionary tale about alliances of convenience. But will anyone listen? ‘Afghanistan's tragedy,' Ms. Gannon observes in her epilogue, ‘is that to the world's powers, it has never really mattered--or mattered for long.' --The Wall Street Journal

 

In early 1986 Kathy Gannon sold pretty much everything she owned (which wasn't much) to pursue her dream of becoming a foreign correspondent. She had the world to choose from: she chose Afghanistan. She went to witness the final humiliation of a superpower in terminal decline as the Soviet Union was defeated by the mujahedeen. What she didn't know then was that Afghanistan would remain her focus for the next eighteen years. Gannon, uniquely among Western journalists, witnessed Afghanistan's tragic opera: the final collapse of communism followed by bitterly feuding warlords being driven from power by an Islamicist organization called the Taliban; the subsequent arrival of Arabs and exiles, among them Osama bin Laden; and the transformation of the country into the staging post for a global jihad.

Gannon observed something else as well: the terrible, unforeseen consequences of Western intervention, the ongoing suffering of ordinary Afghans, and the ability of the most corrupt and depraved of the warlords to reinvent and reinsert themselves into successive governments. I is for Infidel is the story of a country told by a writer with a uniquely intimate knowledge of its people and recent history. It will transform readers' understanding of Afghanistan, and inspire awe at the resilience of its people in the face of the monstrous warmongers we have to some extent created there.

^{A gripping, intimately-observed history of Afghanistan from 1986 to the present—by the longest-serving Western journalist in the region—overturns our conventional and simplistic understandings.}

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