nited States seemed to support this fear for some in the Politburo. According to Cooley, it was a small number of people in the Politburo who made the fateful decision to invade, without much consultation from the outside. It was to be the Soviet Vietnam. Some of the subsidiary effects of the war, such as the increased drug problem and the culture of violence were to plague the Soviets for some time to come and are now plaguing the Russians in Chechnya and in the development of their own mafias, for example. This is essentially a story of the twentieth-century version of the British-French-Russian "Great Game in Asia," which turned sour for most of those involved. The decision to weaken the USSR "at any cost" seems to have been made without calculating all of the potential costs. The decision was to weight the fall of the USSR much higher than the possible creation of an Islamic threat, which, according to Cooley, will be the source of terrorism and other nasty subsidiary effects for a long time to come. Cooley does not pull any punches in his criticism of the parties involved in the ugly war in Afghanistan. He seems particularly vitriolic in his criticism of those who sold the stingers, allowed the drug production and sales to increase, and financially and otherwise supported the Islamists without regard for the danger these people might have posed, and are posing years after the end of the war. He claims that the Afghan jihad was at best a Pyrrhic victory for the Western and Muslim states who supported the war. This is a highly controversial book. Cooley seems to accuse the CIA and others of the most heinous acts in support of the Afghan war. His cynicism with regard to policy makers from Washington to Paris to Riyadh is stunning. This makes the lack of source material all the more unfortunate. Many of the specifics are developed without any citations of sources. Some of the most controversial statements in the book have virtually no ...
