The Afghan solution : the inside story of Abdul Haq, the CIA and how Western hubris lost Afghanistan / Lucy Morgan Edwards.

Includes appendices, endnotes and bibliographical references (pages 361-365.)

In 2001, in the weeks around the World Trade Centre attacks, a group of Afghan tribal leaders, commanders and senior Taliban regime figures met in Rome and Peshawar and agreed to work together under the banner of the ex King of Afghanistan with the objective of toppling the Taliban regime. They would be led by the famed Resistance leader of the anti-Soviet war period, Abdul Haq. The plan would be financed by two American Republican brothers who had made their fortune on the Chicago options exchange. On the other side of the Atlantic, a private British contingent including a former head of the UK's Special Boat Service, an ex marine turned tv cameraman and a British Baronet also recognized the potential of Abdul Haq's plan and lobbied for it in Whitehall. The story of all these men, but most of all Abdul Haq, and the reasons he went into Afghanistan on a seemingly impetuous mission, only to be assassinated by the Taliban in October 2001, is told for the first time here by a British woman who experienced important events of the Afghan war first hand and who spent many months in Eastern Afghanistan in the months after the loss of bin Laden from Tora Bora. She stayed with Haq's remaining family, tribal leaders whom journalists had once dubbed 'Resistance Royalty' but who were now accused of drug dealing and who were a pariah to the international community, yet neither were they friends of Pakistan. This is the story of the Afghan solution to the Taliban, why the West thwarted that plan and what it means for NATO as it seeks to stabilize and exit from Afghanistan today.