Before Taliban. Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad. University of California Press, 2002, 354 p.

According to the author, this is a book about the Marxists and their enemies. His objective is to contextualize the history of the present in the history of the past, in order to evaluate what happened in Afghanistan. To attain this objective the author tries to frame his own exercise in historical understanding in genealogical terms. He believes that friendship, authority, love, and even enmity are volatile until they have been transmitted into genealogical form, which traditionally is the a..