"In The Dust of Empire, Karl E. Meyer examines the historical impact of the Western encounter with Central Asia's fragile and volatile nations. Blending scholarship with reportage, Meyer provides detail about regions and people now of urgent concern to America: the five Central Asian republics, the Caspian and the Caucasus, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and long-dominant Russia." "Meyer's narrative also introduces us to the larger-than-life characters whose actions in that part of the world reverberate to this day - from Count Mikhail Vorontsov, the Regency dandy who Russified and subjugated the Caucasus in the service of the tsar; to Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the "frontier Gandhi," whose embrace of nonviolent protest shaped the political development of Pakistan and Afghanistan; to Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA man (and grandson of Theodore) who was the brains behind the notorious 1953 coup in Iran that preserved the Shah's throne for the next quarter century." "The Dust of Empire provides the context for America's war on terrorism, for Washington's search for friends and allies in an Islamic world rife with extremism, and for the new politics of pipelines and human rights in an area richer in the former than the latter. Meyer offers a complex tapestry of a region where empires so have often come to grief - a cautionary tale for Americans and their Western allies today."--BOOK JACKET.