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When Charles de Gaulle learned that France's
former colonies in Africa had chosen independence, the great
general shrugged dismissively. "They are the dust of
empire." But as Americans have learned, particles of
dust from a remote and seemingly medieval country like Afghanistan
can, at great human and material cost, jam the gears of
a great superpower.
In The Dust of Empire, Karl E. Meyer,
the coauthor of the acclaimed history Tournament of Shadows,
examines the historical impact of the Western encounter
with Central Asia's fragile and volatile nations. Blending
scholarship with reportage, Meyer provides fascinating detail
about regions and peoples 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 rich and complex tapestry of a region where empires have
so often come to grief -- a cautionary tale for Americans
and their Western allies today.
Karl E. Meyer is the author of nine books,
most recently Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game
and the Race for Empire in Central Asia (with Shareen
Blair Brysac), a New York Times Notable Book. A longtime
member of The New York Times editorial board, he
previously was a foreign correspondent for The Washington
Post and is currently the editor of World Policy
Journal. He holds a doctorate from Princeton University
and has taught at Princeton, Yale, and Tufts Universities.
He lives in New York City.
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