The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

The Taliban had arrived not to rebuild a country they did not remember, but to rebuild their refugee camps on a larger scale.

Poppy cultivation had become an agribusiness and the dealers for the Afghan drug barons now had technical advisers who were visiting Nangarhar to advise on the crop and the product, paying in advance, and so concerned about the health of their workers that they had given them face-masks to wear in the opium factories. Some said they even offered he

I smiled back the rictus of false friendship.

The Saudi royal family had promised sharia laws while at the same time allowing the United States ‘to Westernise Saudi Arabia and drain the economy’. He blamed the Saudi regime for spending $25 billion in support of Saddam Hussein in the Iran – Iraq war and a further $60 billion in support of the Western armies in the 1991 war against Iraq, ‘buying

were less an attempt at religious revival than a continuation of life in the vast dirt camps in which so many millions of Afghans had gathered on the borders of their country when the Soviets invaded sixteen years before.

On the open market in Jalalabad, the farmers were receiving a mere $140 for seven kilos of hashish, just over $250 for seven kilos of opium – around the same price they would have received for grain. So the UN provided wheat seeds for those farmers who transferred from drug production, on the grounds that they would make the same profits in the Jal

President Clinton’s ‘anti-terrorism’ conference at the Egyptian coastal town of Sharm el-Sheikh was regarded by Arabs as a humiliation.

but the first Soviet special forces troops entered Kabul before Christmas of 1979 when they – or their Afghan satellites – killed the incumbent communist President Hafizullah Amin and established Babrak Karmal as their puppet in Kabul. Osama bin Laden had moved fast.

Howard K. Smith, who fled Nazi Germany on the last train from Berlin before Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941; James Cameron, whose iconic 1946 report from the Bikini atom tests was perhaps the most literary and philosophical article ever published in a newspaper.