Afghanistan and Empires, a New Perspective

Christopher Caryl, wriitng in Foreign Policy, has a nice review of Thomas Barfield's new history of Afghanistan. In it Barfield persuasively challenges the conventional view of Afghanistan as the "Graveyard of Empires". He shows that until the Eighteenth Century Afghanistan had successfully been incorporated into a number of empires and had even spawned some spectacular ones. The Soviet defeat in the region, due largely to American support for the Afghan resistance, represented a break with rather than a continuation of the region's history.

Read the review here.