Kirjahaku

In Afghanistan is the story of a young man, searching for adventure and self-discovery in war-torn Afghanistan during the time of the Soviet invasion. It is also a portrait of an exotic land and people desperately struggling for survival during that war, as they are today. In 1981, with a letter and some financial backing from The New York Times, Van Dyk, bearded and dressed as an Afghan, sneaked into Afghanistan , then off-limits to foreigners, and lived in the ruggedly-beautiful mountains and desert of this country with the Mujahideen, the men then fighting the Soviet Union. “My spine tingled like a boy’s. I felt the sensation of adventure…The Turbans of ten laughing young men, armed to the teeth, flapped in the wind…I would not have traded this moment for all the money in the world. It was suicidal, magnificent, and I knew we’d be all right.” But it was close. He lived through Soviet ground and helicopter attacks, saw death and suffering, but also laughter. He had much to learn about Islam, tribal traditions and the holy war the guerrillas were waging. He was accused of being a Soviet spy, but ultimately won the trust of his Afghan guides. He saw a strong, courageous, often frightened people fighting to protect the only thing they knew--their homes, their families, their way of life. The author, a former runner, a fledgling politician and writer, who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family in a small town in the Northwest, also went looking for something deep among these men who shouted “God is Great” and went into battle against the Red Army. His story is about the people he met and his journey.

Without Borders: The Haqqani Network and the Road to Kabul is the untold story of the origins, political awakening, and rise of what the United States and its allies call the Haqqani Network, and what the Haqqani family calls the Haqqani Mujahideen. The author lived with the Haqqanis as a young reporter for the New York Times in the 1980s, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, when they were America's allies in the Afghan-Soviet war. After 9/11, the network became America's enemy. This book tells the exciting story of how the author began to try to find the Haqqanis again, and, later, his quest to understand their influence in the greater Middle East. This is the story of the rise of an ideology and movement born in the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258, which resurfaced in Arabia and India in the 18th Century, lived on in the anti-Christian, anti-British, anti-European, and anti-Russian colonial movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, and in modern times evolved, with American help, into the Haqqani Mujahideen and their allies and followers around the world.