Book Launch—A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster

The United States came to Afghanistan in 2001 on a simple mission: to avenge the September 11 attacks and to drive the Taliban from power. This took less than two months. But over the next decade, the ensuing fight arguably left the region even more dangerous than before the first troops arrived.

At the center of this story are President Hamid Karzai and his brothers. They began the war as symbols of a new, moderate, forward-looking Afghanistan—the antithesis of the brutish and backward Taliban regime. But then, with the war in shambles, they fell into open conflict with one other and with their Western allies.

In A Kingdom of Their Own, Joshua Partlow, the Washington Post's Kabul bureau chief from 2009 to 2012, reveals the mistakes, squandered hopes, and wasted chances behind the scenes of a would-be political dynasty. This story also illustrates the arc of a U.S. relationship with Afghanistan that would veer from optimism to despair, and from friendship to enmity.