The main element to understanding the calamitous Afghan war is the complex, ultimately failed relationship between the powerful, duplicitous Karzai family and the United States, brilliantly portrayed here by the former Kabul bureau chief for The Washington Post.

The United States visited Afghanistan on a simple mission: avenge the September 11 attacks and drive the Taliban from power. This took less than two months. Over the course of the next decade, the ensuing fight for power and cash- about A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai as well as the Afghan Devastation supplied to one from the poorest nations on the planet, in ever-greater amounts-left the spot even more dangerous than prior to the first troops showed up.

At the guts of this story is the Karzai family members. Chief executive Hamid Karzai and his brothers began the battle as symbols of a new Afghanistan: moderate, educated, fluent in the civilizations of East and Western, as well as the antithesis of the brutish and backward Taliban regime. The siblings, from a prominent politics family members near Afghanistan’s former king, had been thrust into exile with the Soviet war. While Hamid Karzai lived in Pakistan and worked with the resistance, others shifted to the United States, finding work as waiters and managers before starting their very own restaurants. After Sept 11, the brothers came back home to help restore Afghanistan and reshape their homeland with ambitious plans.

Today, with the united states in shambles, they are in open issue with each other and their Western allies. Joshua Partlow’s clear-eyed evaluation reveals the errors, squandered expectations, and wasted chances behind the scenes of a would-be politics dynasty. Nothing illustrates the arc of the battle and America’s relationship with Afghanistan-from optimism to despair, a friendly relationship to enmity-as neatly as the story from the Karzai family itself, told here in its entirety for the first time.