Afghan Solution

The Inside Story of Abdul Haq, the CIA and How Western Hubris Lost Afghanistn

Lucy Morgan Edwards

Published in time for the tenth anniversary of the Afghan war, this explosive book exposes how the West lost its chance to rout the Taliban and stabilise Afghanistan.

In late 2001, a group of Afghan tribal leaders met to plan how to topple the Taliban. Within weeks the plan was in tatters, thwarted by the West, and the group’s leader, Abdul Haq, assassinated by the Taliban. Lucy Morgan Edwards’s investigation into Haq’s tragic mission led her to Taliban ministers, warlords, spies and two American Republican brothers who financed Haq’s venture.

Based on the author’s own experience of the war in Afghanistan, this book reveals how a solution to the war was lost and why it matters today.

Contents

Chapter 1 The ‘Peace versus Justice’ Strategy
Chapter 2 Reigniting Fundamentalism
Chapter 3 The Poetess of Jalalabad
Chapter 4 ‘I’d Rather be a Lion for a Day, than a Jackal all my Life’
Chapter 5 A ‘Cataclysmic Event for the West’
Chapter 6 The ‘Lion of Kabul’
Chapter 7 ‘These Days, We Don’t know who the Enemy is’.
Chapter 8 ‘Afghanistan will be the World’s Largest Poppy Field’
Chapter 9 ‘First you call us Freedom Fighters,
now Warlords’
Chapter 10 Playing the al-Qaeda Card
Chapter 11 ‘No-one Could Hold a Candle to him’–the Hurdles
Faced by a Private US Effort to Support Abdul Haq
(Part I)
Chapter 12 A Perspective on British Post-September 11 Strategy
and Intelligence–The UK Haq Effort (Part I)
Chapter 13 ‘He Would have Begun a Revolution, That’s Why They
Killed him so Fast’ -
A Taliban Interior Minister Speaks
Chapter 14 ‘Camp Followers’ in Kabul
Chapter 15 The King’s Group and ‘Rome’
Chapter 16 From Jihadi Commanders to Taliban
Chapter 17 Return to Kandahar
Chapter 18 Governance and Traditional Structures
Chapter 19 A Further Perspective on British Post-September 11
Intelligence–The UK Haq Effort (Part II)
Chapter 20 When did the US Really Choose Karzai?–A Private US
effort to Support Abdul Haq (Part II)
Chapter 21 Abdul Haq and CIA Strategy in Afghanistan
Chapter 22 Conclusions and Ways Forward

About the Author

Lucy Morgan Edwards arrived in Afghanistan as an aid worker at the height of the Taliban regime. She was an election monitor at the 2002 emergency Loya Jirga (Grand Council) and then a freelance journalist, writing for the Economist and Daily Telegraph. From 2004 to 2005 she was Political Advisor to the EU Ambassador in Kabul. She is now based in Geneva.