"Focusing principally on events in Afghanistan in the 1990s, award-winning journalist Roy Gutman advances a narrative that reveals the inner workings of U.S. foreign policymaking, the internal debates among key actors in and around Afghanistan during the 1990s, and the media's lapses in coverage of Afghanistan during that period that might have put that situation higher up on the U.S. foreign policy agenda. Drawing on field research and numerous interviews with key individuals both in the United States and abroad, Gutman highlights key strategic mistakes made by the West: first in allowing the Taliban to fill the power vacuum left in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and then, with the emergence of Osama bin Laden, in leaving strategic, policies in the hands of counterterrorism experts rather than political and diplomatic officials."--Jacket.