This book is such a complete crock [hate the book, and hated the movie even more, but Tom Hanks has a real talent for making fictional movies and claiming they are fact! ! !] - - reframing everything from the word go. What the reader should research instead is how did the extremist Islamic sects end up both on the northern Afghanistani border [originally populated by moderate Sufi Islamic pratictioners] with the Soviet Union, and then foment that trouble which destabilized a once-secular government. [Can anyone . . . anyone, tell us what real news we ever learned from career CBS guy and author of this book, George Crile??????]