Got hold of a new Tariq Ali book on Afghanistan. It's a book which basically tries to tell the overall story of the last 20 years. There must be about ten books which have more or less the same structure and objectives by now.
Never read him before but got the impression he was quite respected. The book isn't the worst thing I've read on Afghanistan, but it is pretty bad. He doesn't really seem to know what he's talking about and makes new claims about various things which I've never seen claimed elsewhere, but he gives no evidence for them and doesn't seem to have done any new fieldwork. He seems to be pretty far off the facts and it makes it quite an unreliable book.
In the preface alone he says that Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar are related, that one in ten young afghans are opium addicts, that people moved to slums in Kabul just to go through the bins of the American military, that the afghan military was infiltrated by the taliban at an early stage, and that there was a big sex trade around the US bases. None of these things are things that I've heard before and they seem a bit far fetched.
I had to watch Fahrenheit 9/11 the other day and that was a bit similar on the afghan parts, where it says that Karzai was installed by the US in order to help them get an oil pipeline through the country. It's just total bullshit, such a great example of people essentially being uninterested in the facts, and just using these conflicts to make whatever point they want to make about America.