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I Is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan

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The Taliban have been a hot topic for about a decade now. Googling "Taliban regime" shows 2,666,000 references and 5260 pages in Google books alone. Studies, investigations and personal accounts of living under the regime abound. Yet, very few outsiders could report from within the country during that period. Kathy Gannon, a veteran Canadian correspondent with AP in the region since 1986, was the only western journalist allowed to stay during the whole time. Her long-term and close association with Afghans of different political and religious persuasions have given her unique insights into the society that are conveyed in this lively and personal account.

Gannon debated with leaders and moderate members of the Taliban movement, with commanders of the Northern Alliance as well as Pakistanis, intimately involved in recent events. Her analyses and conclusions don't make for comfortable reading, yet they are essential to appreciating the complexities and dangers of the political developments in the region. For example, she exposes the naïveté and short sightedness of western governments. Rather than building on their influence, she contends, they abandoned the Afghani people several times. Once the Soviet Army had withdrawn, the US and its allies left warlords and mujahedeen commanders in control. Many Afghans saw their new regime as a reign of lawlessness and arbitrary terror. When the Taliban fought back, many Afghans initially welcomed them as protectors. Yet, the West, Gannon claims, ignored the moderate Taliban, who were eventually overwhelmed by the movement's fundamentalists. There were strong indications that bin Laden and Al Qaeda commanders consistently influenced the Taliban leadership also towards its role in a global jihad. Even after the defeat of the Taliban regime, western governments were not systematically supportive of re-emerging moderate forces in Afghanistan. This lack of engagement facilitated known criminal elements and brutal warlords to retake large parts of the country. In many Afghans' view only a strong and competent military presence of western allies could have overcome the political crises that continue to unfold, Gannon argues.

She presents solid evidence by way of examples. Several warlords, now participating in the government and supported by the US and its allies, were in fact close collaborators with first the Soviets, then the Taliban. They were also part of the group that welcomed Osama bin Laden into Afghanistan. For obvious reasons they had no interest later in handing him over. At the same time, under the disguise of exposing Taliban fighters, longstanding ethnic and political feuds are being violently settled, in particular against ethnic Pashtuns.

Gannon quotes extensively from her interviews with various leaders, conveying their positions directly and candidly. She depends on the insights of several contacts, who she has learned to trust over the years. The picture that emerges is highly complex defying simple interpretations and generalizations. Pakistan's role in Afghanistan is a case in point. Gannon is quite candid in describing the contradictory behaviour of political leadership and military in that country. While on the one hand supporting the US administration's "war on terror", there is continued support for the Taliban among Pakistani leaders. For example, Gannon provides disturbing insights into the role of the Pakistani Intelligence who seem to support the Pakistani jihadists and Al Qaeda in contradiction of official Pakistani positions.

Gannon's lively, engaging and personal style makes the reader forget how close to danger she often was during her travels. She does not question her reasons for being in the country despite the looming threats to her safety. While the immediacy of her reporting style had strengths, it also has weaknesses. She sometimes jumps the timelines and assumes context knowledge that may not be at hand for the less familiar with the region and its history. For all the information contained here, one can only hope that many will read this book to better understand the challenges we all face from the continued conflicts in the region. [Friederike Knabe]

In Kathy Gannon's Afghanistan, mistakes can get you killed. She probably made a few during nearly two decades in the country reporting for Associated Press on three regimes of repressive government. Yet there's an obvious savvyness revealed in I is for Infidel that explains why she's not only alive but remains the journalist other journalists seek out when they want to write about this volatile nexus of Asia.

Gannon has written a break-neck account of the violence, corruption and plain stupidity that has often defined Afghanistan since Soviet occupation. She takes no sides (unless you consider civilians caught in war a side) and is just as likely to point out the tragically blinkered view of American government as the obvious cruelty of the Taliban. Her criticisms and revelations make you wonder how she can feel safe in our War-On-Terrorism world.

The book is as compelling a read as there is on who the major players were in a geopolitical game that continues to use Afghanistan and its people as virtual colonials. It's almost too much to take in at once. Yet Gannon's access and insight provide treasures for anyone interested in this place and time.

I came away from reading this book more dismayed with the Bush administration's response to 9/11 than ever. If Kathy Gannon has got it right, and she certainly has the credentials: AP correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1986 to 2005; recipient of the International Women's Media Foundation Courage in Journalism award; and an Edward R. Murrow fellowship--if Gannon has got it right, the US basically fired enough rockets and dropped enough bombs in Afghanistan to chase the Taliban into the hills; and then instead of relying on US Special Forces to get the job done, the Bush administration let the warlords take over.

Actually it was worse than that. Gannon reports on several incidents where the US military allowed the Northern Alliance warlords to direct US rockets and bombs at personal enemies or people allied with rival warlords. They told the Americans these people were Taliban, and got them mowed down.

Well, war is hell, you say. What Gannon argues is that the US only made a half-hearted effort to get Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, leaving most of the work to the Northern Alliance of murderous warlords (Reagan's old Cold War "freedom fighters") whose main desire was to retake their territory from the Taliban and return to business as usual. Which they have.

From Gannon's tone and from the evidence she presents, the warlords are in some ways worse than the Taliban. Be that as it may, and both are pretty horrible, the fact remains that we killed a lot of people in Afghanistan but really did not do anything substantial in ending the terrorist threat. The main reason for that, according to my reading of Gannon, is that the Bush administration found no way to get to the real source of Al Qaeda terrorism which just moved inside Pakistan. Bush talked to Pervez Musharraf, the head of Pakistan's military government and got his assurance that he would support the US in its war on terrorism. That was it.

The problem for Bush was he had no plan to force the military government in Pakistan to hand over bin Laden and no plan to make Musharraf close down the madrassas religious schools that flourish to teach young men how to be terrorists and indoctrinate them into hating the West. Toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan was only one step in the war against terrorism, the easy part. The hard part remains: how to persuade Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and some other states from supporting terrorism. Bush had--and apparently still has--no idea how to do that. He couldn't invade Pakistan. Regime change there was too dangerous considering Pakistan's nukes and other considerations. He didn't dare go after the Saudi princes who are the source of the wealth of many of his top supporters. Instead he did a non-sequitur: he invaded Iraq.

What is most enlightening about this book is how it reveals the dismal failure of the Bush administration to meet the challenge of terrorism. But the book is also a vivid and fascinating reportage on personalities of the warlords and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the extremist Muslims in Pakistan, some of whom Gannon personally interviewed at great personal risk. She is one gutsy reporter and does the profession proud. She could easily have ended up on Al Jeerza television begging for her life. She was also lucky not to have been bombed or rocketed by the US military since she was in Kabul when the strikes began.

I have only one small fault with this book. She writes that the West ought "to take a critical look at itself and examine the apparent double standards at work that allow it to attack Iraq for possessing weapons of mass destruction but not North Korea, whose leader shares Saddam Hussein's megalomaniacal qualities; that permit it to rail against Iran about nuclear weapons but be silent about Israel's arsenal..." (p. 172)

Actually, if anything North Korea's Kim Jong Il is even worst that Saddam Hussein in what he has done to his people. However, it is one thing to attack a second-rate conventional force in the Middle East and quite another to attack a nation with nuclear weapons and a million-man army that has Seoul in virtual hostage. And as for the difference between Iran's incipient nuclear program and Israeli's established (although illegal) program, it is essential to understand that Iran is run by radical Islamic clerics who have expressed their hatred for the West and their desire to wipe Israel off the map. Israel is a democratic country with checks and balances whose leadership is interested in self-defense first and foremost--not to mention that as a practical matter there is nothing the West can do about Israel's arsenal.

Gannon believes the primary reason the Bush administration failed to put enough boots on the ground in Afghanistan and relied almost exclusively on the warlords to get Al Qaeda was because George W. and the neocons wanted to save the troops for the big splash in Iraq. In other words, Al Qaeda kills 3,000 Americans and in response you topple a dictator in another country. However that doesn't explain why it took the Bush administration so long to act. They knew immediately who had attacked America. Bush's response to the attacks on America amounts to a kind of bait and switch. Here are the murders, but we can't really get them, so we switch to a "shock and awe" demonstration of our military strength and our will to use it. That ought to work, or at least keep us in office.

If you want the appalling reality about Afghanistan and the war on terror not seen on the sanguine six o'clock news, I recommend that you read this book.

Kathy Gannon's new book is excellent. She does an incredible job of making hard to understand issues and the Afghan personalities behind them accessible to her reading audience. She sits with them, explains the connections to the audience to all the names that many Americans probably gloss over in a newspaper - if that newspaper even cares to delve into them at all. At the same time, she humanizes both Afghans - from her translaters to the people she meets who help her in various villages - to herself as well. Most tellingly, she recounts staying in touch with the family of an American woman who was kidnapped - letting them know that all is well - all while going about the business of covering the news while she herself is in just as much danger. Some say journalists exploit the sensational aspects of the news - but here is a perfect example of the human side and sensitivities needed to cover even the most dangerous war zones. I totally recommend this book for anyone interested in the ongoing war and rebuilding in Afghanistan.

I am deeply impressed by Kathy Gannon's dedication and bravery to tell the story of the Afghan people caught up in the terrors of war. I appreciate how Afghanistan resonates on a deep personal level for her, yet her point of view feels fair and objective. Her eighteen years covering Afghanistan as a journalist gives us so much information to comprehend the diverse factors leading up to the current situation. It helped me very much to get the background on Pakistan's relationship to the wars in Afghanistan. She broadened my understanding of the Taliban's rise to power without demonizing them. The incident at the end of the book where she secretly interviews a young suicide bomber is very sobering. The level of hatred directed towards the USA is frightening. This book definitelly needs to be read by a wide audience to help us find our way towards better understanding the Muslim world and perhaps towards a direction of peace.

While the book is well-written and easily read, the analysis leaves a lot to be desired. Not citing her sources, getting information second hand (sometimes even more distant), and with an inability to answer questions of substance, this book tended to be more frustrating than rewarding. Uninformed readers may get the impression that the Taliban is a group of innocent village folk led astray by sinister Pakistanis and Arab jihadists, more educated readers will know it's a lot more complex.

What's worse, Ms. Gannon's failure to give a full picture of many of the stories she covers, and her habit of criticizing actors, parties and institutions for both doing an action and not doing the same action makes the book extremely frustrating.

She repeats consistently through the narrative the evils of the Northern Alliance (rightly so) and condemns them for their connections with Al-Qaeda. And yet, she fails to stress that the leader of the Northern Alliance was in fact assassinated by two Al-Qaeda suicide bombers and that the Arab jihadists had thrown their lot in with the Pashtun Taliban and not the Tajik/Uzbek Northern Alliance.

Personal details of individual cases in Afghanistan are always needed and thus this book adds to our understanding of what it means to live in a country savaged by war for over thirty years. Unfortunately, her analysis gives us nothing more than hear-says and unanswered and undocumented to boot, narrative on a country in desperate need of stability.

I Is For Infidel offers a naive and narrow view of the fighting in Afghanistan. The author fails to consider the many shades of gray that historically have clouded the conflict, which is particularly surprising given her claim to have followed the issues closely for 18 years. Among Gannon's more unusual suggestions are that the current effort to rebuild Afghanistan could have happened without involving any former warlords/mujahidin leaders and that the country would have been better off if Taliban leader Mullah Omar had been able to implement his true plan. Interested readers would be much better off reading Steve Coll's Ghost Wars, Ahmed Rashid's Taliban, Robert Kaplan's Soldiers of God, and/or George Crile's Charlie Wilson's War.

As a contemporaneous account of events in Afghanistan as they unfolded from the mid 80s onwards, it is outstanding. Also, for sheer personal bravery, Kathy G deserves a gold star particularly for her decision to stay behind in Kabul in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 till the Talibs ejected her.

However, some of her suggestions and judgments towards the end of the book are arguably suspect. Suggesting that abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were treated differently to what may have happened if Saddam's minions committed them is a bit absurd. Also suggesting that US actions in deploying limited ground forces in the Afghan theater during Enduring Freedom ignores prevailing sentiment that railed about how the US was going to end up in a quagmire like Vietnam particularly given what happened to the Britsh during the two Afghan wars of the nineteenth century.

Gannon also unfortunately is far too pessimistic about Afghanistan and also washes (wishes?) away much of the good work that is still underway. For instance, the US has promised $900m just to train the police force and India has committed $500m for infrastucture development. The jury is still out on whether a coherent nation will emerge but it is far from clear that it is where it was prior to the US intervention of 2001.

The must-read book for anyone who truly wants to understand what is going on in Afghanistan right now. Kathy Gannon cuts through the murky information provided by the western press and gives us a crystal clear picture of a nation struggling to deal with the problems that have plagued it for centuries.

Natalie Rea, Executive Director, The International Legal Foundation.

Kathy Gannon's 'two decades of experience' count for much among her favorable reviewers. Too bad she did the vast bulk of her reporting from Pakistan, and relied heavily on Pakistani officials (and of course, 'independent' Afghan, humanitarian and diplomatic sources also firmly under the Pakistani spell) for her insight.

Contrary to the impression she leaves, Miss Gannon spent precious little time in Afghanistan. When she did, she was utterly dependent on Afghan assistants and interpreters. She never grasped how thick was the fog of war (and disinformation) on which she (thought she) was reporting.

Without understanding them at all, Miss Gannon utterly despises the mujahideen, who fought the Red Army to a standstill in the '80s and then overthrew Moscow's communist lackeys in Kabul in 1992. At that point the 'muj' suddenly found themselves forced to continue the civil war -- now, against proxies armed by an entente of all Afghanistan's militarily significant neighbors, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Iran.

One of the groups besieging the capital was a renegade mujahideen faction. One was a communist militia. The third was a collection of Kabuli Hazara street gangs, led by a Shiite cleric with assistance from a former communist general. Between them, they leveled much of the capital with indiscriminant shelling as they tried to fight their way in. When ultimately they failed, the Pakistanis armed the Taliban -- and arranged for wealthy Arabs including the Saudi regime to finance them. That, of course, ultimately did the trick.

Miss Gannon never really understood events in those terms, or anyway was careful not to let on. Indeed, in the early 1990s she was a ringleader of an informal western news blackout, regarding Pakistani Army arms convoys to the renegade fighters who were shelling Kabul and its defenders.

In fact, Miss Gannon -- who appears to have attained most of her understanding of events at Islamabad cocktail parties -- has always preferred to blame the victims. Therefore her account is a sweepingly inaccurate litany of slander, rumor, and at least one bloodcurdling account of atrocities -- the Afshar 'massacre'-- that never actually occurred.

The story she thought she was covering had heroes. But Miss Gannon pours her bitterest bile on them, the men who defended the capital from a parade of quislings, terrorists and would-be tyrants. These were the Panjsheri fighters led by Ahmad Shah Masood, the mujahideen leader who overthrew the communists and became defence minister. Her irrational, almost obsessive hatred for Masood, his followers and allies -- and her baseless slanders, sourced direct from his political enemies -- followed Masood into the mountains after his retreat from Kabul. As we see it lingers today, fouling bookshelves even after his death at the hands of Al Qaeda assassins two days before 9/11.

To promote her view, Miss Gannon sometimes relies on anonymous sources -- or would like to. Unfortunately, it is clear from tone and content that a key source was Sayed Es'Haq Gailani -- an exiled Pashtun feudal lord from Kandahar who was one of ISI's foremost tools in manipulating western reporters -- and others like him.

Meanwhile, she protects her own pet terrorists: completely misrepresenting, for example, the aforementioned Hazara gangs' ethnic-cleansing operation in southern and western Kabul, from June 1992 through January 1993. Not surprisingly, she goes easy on the Taliban too, portraying them as simple villagers misled by Pakistanis and Arabs.

It must have been hard for Miss Gannon even to admit that Pakistan link: She spent the 1990s (one of her 'two decades') covering up the relationship between the Pakistani army and the succession of Afghan terrorists who destroyed the capital and kept the country at war.

One of the noisiest bees in Miss Gannon's bonnet is her bizarre attempt to blame Masood and his allies for the rise of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. There is no question that Masood did his best to forestall Arab support for his enemies, by trying to convince them that his government -- not Pakistan-backed terrorists -- deserved their support. To that end, it is and has always been common knowledge that representatives of wealthy Arab governments and bunyads - foundations -- occasionally visited Kabul. There is also no question that Masood and his allies were aware of bin Ladin's arrival in eastern Afghanistan in 1996.

Gannon, however, chooses to ignore or misrepresent key points: Masood's writ didn't run in Nangrahar; OBL was invited there by local authorities, their relationship with Kabul was nominal at best, and Masood couldn't have kept him out if he had wanted to. More to the point, Masood never enlisted Arab fighters to help him take on his civil war foes. The Taliban, on the other hand, became utterly dependent on them.

One hopes this book will be translated into Persian and Pashto, and circulated widely in Afghanistan. Masood's memory is widely loved, and keenly respected even among his erstwhile enemies. Afghans (unlike many western hacks, diplomats and do-gooders) aren't stupid. They will swiftly appraise this confused litany of slander at its true worth.