• ISBN13: 9780956844903
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: Politics and Current AffairsHistory
• Publisher: Pluto
• Publisher Imprint: Pluto
• Publication Date: January 1, 2011
• Pages: 368
• Original Price: GBP 20.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 898 grams
• BISAC Subject(s): Intelligence & Espionage

October 7, 2011 marked the tenth anniversary of the start of the Afghan war, and this explosive book exposes how the West lost it's chance to rout the Taliban and stabilize Afghanistan.
In late 2001, a group of Afghan tribal leaders met to plan how to topple the Taliban. Within weeks, the plan was in tatters, thwarted by the West and its leader, Abdul Haq, assassinated by the Taliban. Lucy Morgan Edwards's investigation into Haq's tragic mission led her to Taliban Ministers, warlords, spies, and two American Republican brothers who financed Haq's venture.
Based on the author's own experience of the war in Afghanistan, this book reveals how a solution to the war was lost and why it matters today.

Lucy Morgan Edwards is a former Political Advisor to the EU Ambassador in Kabul with responsibility for civil military affairs, narcotics and security sector reform. During her seven years in the region she worked for the UN in Kandahar at the height of the Taliban regime (supervising community and urban water supply projects), was an election monitor and a correspondent for the Economist and Daily Telegraph and the initial researcher for the International Crisis Group on Transitional Justice Issues. She also spent many months in Jalalabad, Eastern Afghanistan, with a leading tribal family (that of Abdul Haq and Haji Abdul Qadir), whereby she developed an insight into the post-9/11 political situation in the dis-enfranchised Pashtun areas of the East. Her final job was Country Expert to the EU Monitors of the 2005 Afghan Parliamentary Elections. She has written several academic papers on the post-9/11 Afghan intervention and state-building process, including "State-building in Afghanistan - a case showing the Limits?" for the International Review of the Red Cross special issue on "Conflict in Afghanistan" and "Defence, Diplomacy and Development - '3D': Rhetoric or reality?" for the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. She is author of The Afghan Solution: The Inside Story of Abdul Haq, the CIA and How Western Hubris Lost Afghanistan, and shehas presented papers on Afghanistan at Chatham House, the Royal Society of Asia Affairs, and the Frontline club in London. She currently lives in Geneva.