After twelve years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's difficult to remember how it all started or figure out where it's going. As United States intelligence has turned topsyturvy, Mark Mazzetti, a New York Times reporter, tries to answer these questions and many more in his book The Way of the Knife. The beginning of the war in Afghanistan now seems dark and murky. In brief, as Mazzetti recounts, Pakistan aided the Taliban against the Northern Alliance while its archrival, India, long supported the Northern Alliance to form an Indian proxy-state on Pakistan's western border. I had forgotten India's role in the Afghan war, and the fact that immediately after 11 September 2001 (9/11) India offered the United States the use of its air bases to conduct the war.
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