Additional information
by Jere Van Dyk (Author)
"Without Borders: The Haqqani Network and the Road to Kabul" is the untold story of the origins, political awakening, and rise of what the United States and its allies call the Haqqani Network, and what the Haqqani family calls the Haqqani Mujahideen. The author lived with the Haqqanis as a young reporter for the New York Times in the 1980s, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, when they were America's allies in the Afghan-Soviet war. After 9/11, the network became America's enemy. This book tells the exciting story of how the author began to try to find the Haqqanis again, and, later, his quest to understand their influence in the greater Middle East. This is the story of the rise of an ideology and movement born in the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258, which resurfaced in Arabia and India in the 18th Century, lived on in the anti-Christian, anti-British, anti-European, and anti-Russian colonial movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, and in modern times evolved, with American help, into the Haqqani Mujahideen, and that of their allies, and their Arab backers, and followers around the world.
Author Biography
Jere Van Dyk attended the University of Oregon, served in the U.S. Army in Germany, and later went to the Sorbonne and the Institut d'Études Politiques. In 1973, he and his younger brother drove a Volkswagen from Europe to Afghanistan. He returned there in 1981 for the New York Times to cover the Afghan-Soviet war, for which he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In 1984, he became Executive Director of Friends of Afghanistan. After travels in Asia and South America, he was an analyst for CBS on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and al-Qaida. In 2008, he was kidnapped by the Taliban and returned to Afghanistan six years later to find out who had kidnapped him and why. He is a consultant to 60 Minutes and is working on a book about the death of Pat Tillman, the former professional football star and U.S. Army Ranger, who was killed in Haqqani territory in 2004.
