The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley. Hopkirk’s classic history of that time is awash with tales of extraordinary derring-do-a reminder that Afghanistan’s strategic importance to the great powers is nothing new. And so Central Asia became the battleground for a “great game”, played out between daring young officers from both sides, as well as local khans. Afghanistan, it thought, was the window through which the jewel might be pilfered. In the 19th century India was the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown, and Russia coveted it.

Francesc Vendrell, a diplomat formerly with the UN and the EU, predicted a gloomy scenario: “Having failed dismally to make the Afghan people our allies, we will inevitably abandon them to a combination of Taliban in the south and the warlords in the north, and (having somehow redefined success) we will go home convinced that it is the Afghan people who have failed us.” Mr Steele finds uncanny echoes between the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and the ISAF’s intervention. This is not just because of the many people who have died in its wars, but because “the spectres of past mistakes” complicated decision-making by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a multinational peacekeeping mission. “Ghosts of Afghanistan” is a good title for this fine modern history by Mr Steele, a British journalist. Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground. Outsiders have failed to grasp the “highly local, personal and non-ideological nature of internal conflict” in the region, Mr Martin argues, and it has often undermined the West’s peacekeeping and nation-building aims. Hurst £25Ī former British Army officer combines his military experience with reams of interviews to produce a modern history of Helmand province, in southern Afghanistan. An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict, 1978-2012.

Ghost Wars by Steve Coll