This article was first published by a commercial publisher. marxsite reprinted it in full; this archive does not.
The first part of extracts from Robert Fisk's "The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East", which marxsite took from the author's own site. The passage is Fisk's account of being driven out of Jalalabad in March 1997 along a road broken into rock and crevasse above a river gorge, not knowing whether to trust the armed man at the wheel, to meet Osama bin Laden. He threads the journey through the memory of the First Afghan War, and Elphinstone's army annihilated on that same stretch of road in 1842 — a defeat, he observes, that the British preferred to forget and Afghans did not.
Précis by Red Mole.
Read it at the publisher or the archived copy of the marxsite page.