Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

Today, most Westerners still see the war in Afghanistan as a contest between democracy and Islamist fanaticism. That war is real; but it sits atop an older struggle, between Kabul and the countryside, between order and chaos, between a modernist impulse to join the world and the pull of an older Afghanistan: a tribal universe of village republics permeated by Islam.

Now, Tamim Ansary draws on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, and Western and Afghan sources to explain history from the inside out, and to illuminate the long, internal struggle that the outside world has never fully understood. It is the story of a nation struggling to take form, a nation undermined by its own demons while, every 40 to 60 years, a great power crashes in and disrupts whatever progress has been made. Told in conversational, storytelling style, and focusing on key events and personalities, Games without Rules provides revelatory insight into a country at the center of political debate.

• The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers
• Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes
• Nicaragua
• Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan
• Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics)
• Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics)
• Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
• Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan
• Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
• Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia