Understanding Afghanistan and why it matters

It has been said that Afghanistan has been the graveyard of empires. Certainly, in modern times, the Soviet Union paid a heavy price for it’s adventurism in Afghanistan. More recently American lives and billions dollars have been shed in the service of what may really be local, provincial political interests, inside that country. Today, ten years after 9/11, what do we really know about this country, its real link to international terror, and its role in the larger regional and geopolitical issues shaping this volatile region? For thirty years few have know this place better than journalist Edward Girardet. Now he has distilled and shared much of that knowledge into his new work Killing the Cranes: A Reporter's Journey Through Three Decades of War in Afghanistan.b> My conversation with Edward Girardet: var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-6296941-2"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}