Foundation Course is a great place to return to reading books. 5 days into the course and finished reading first book Hunting Bin Laden: How Al-Qaeda Is Winning The War On Terror by Rob Schultheis.
Rob's expertise with Afghanistan is well known and yet again, he comes out with an authoritative account on Al Qaeda, its role in Afghan's war against Soviet invasion and how Saudi Arabia and ISI have helped create such organisations (Al-Qaeda is just one of many). Apart from various other things that Rob mentions in the book regarding why Iraq and Afghanistan are slipping out of American hands (if ever they were... EVER), I particularly like his solution package on the penultimate page where he suggests, among other things, that Indian Civil Servants be included in any solution schema on Afghanistan. Lord Curzon had secured the north-western borders of British India like never before in the history of sub-continent, better than Akbar, and has left behind lot of literature on exactly how. If anything that comes close to that expertise today, it is the Indian bureaucracy (rather than British!!).
The picturesque representation of developments in Afghanistan leading upto 9/11 and its aftermath bears an unmistakable mark of a man who has spent decades there. Fun reading in every sense.
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