Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad

In this powerful book, David B. Edwards traces the lives of three recent Afghan leaders in Afghanistan's history—Nur Muhammad Taraki, Samiullah Safi, and Qazi Amin Waqad—to explain how the promise of progress and prosperity that animated Afghanistan in the 1960s crumbled and became the present tragedy of discord, destruction, and despair. Before Taliban builds on the foundation that Edwards laid in his previous book, Heroes of the Age, in which he examines the lives of three significant fig...