Central Asia occupies a large chunk of our planet, stretching from the Middle East to western China, including northern India, the oil states and the countries whose name ends in "---stan".

It is arguably the most volatile region, because of its strategic position and wealth, and how boundaries were drawn after various attempts at colonization. Pakistan journalist, Ahmed Rashid, an expert on jihad and Muslim extremist movements, the Taliban and al Qaeda, and the failure of US policy in the region, has written an authoritative and engaging account of what's been happening there over the past twenty years, and helps to separate the many complicated threads in the story.

Pakistan, under military rule and Musharraf, and Afghanistan are key players in the drama. Rashid is of the opinion that the United States had no further interest in Afghanistan, once the Soviets left with their tails drooping. This left a critical power vacuum for which the US and the West would pay an enormously high price one decade later in the form we know as the Taliban, whose name like that of Genghis Khan centuries ago instills dread.

After the Soviet withdrawal, warlords took over, seizing people's homes and farms, abusing the population and taxing travellers at will. The Taliban emerged as a direct consequence of these conditions. Frustrated young men who had fought against the Soviets and then returned to madrassas in Pakistan to resume their religious studies or to their villages in Afghanistan gathered around their elders demanding action. They chalked out a minimum agenda:

to restore peace, disarm the population, enforce Sharia law and defend Islam in Afghanistan. For their leader they chose a pious, itinerant mullah with no social status or tribal pedigree, Mohammed Omar. He wore battle scars from the Soviet occupation.

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, describes his first meeting with the Taliban. "They were good people initially, but very soon they were taken over by the (US-backed) ISI, the much-feared Pakistan military intelligence, and became a proxy. Later they came under the influence of al Qaeda. In 1998 I warned the Americans and the British many, many times that Osama bin Laden was now playing a leadership role within the Taliban. But who was listening? Nobody."

Their definition of Sharia, influenced by extremism and a perversion of the Pashtun code of behaviour, was alien to Afghan culture and tradition. Their intellectual shortcomings later allowed them come under the global jihad philosophy of al Qaeda. Between 1996 and 2001 they trained an estimated thirty thousand militants from around the world.

The author heavily criticizes Musharraf, whom the late Benazhir Bhutto called "the West's favourite dictator, viewed by his own people as a foreign puppet"; and the Bush-Cheney-Rumfeld triad, their manipulating the very rules of war to which the US is signatory, and undermining the Constitution, to justify their war on terrorism, which set in motion a contempt and hatred for America by the very people they were supposed to help.

Book: Descent into Chaos

Author: Ahmed Rashid

Volume: 498 pages

Cost: Shs 36,000

Reviewer: Martyn Drakard

Available at Aristoc