When the Soviet Union crossed their southern border and invaded Afghanistan at Christmas of 1979, few outside the national security establishment of the major western capitals understood the game of deception at play. Dramatized as the greatest threat to peace since World War II by President Jimmy Carter, Afghanistan rolled the clock back thirty years on U.S./Soviet relations, justified the largest buildup of American force since World War II and paved the way for Ronald Reagan’s “conservative revolution” that changed the face of the American economy and its politics. Absent from the news media coverage of Afghanistan throughout the 1980’s and after was any hint that Afghanistan had for years been at the center of a multinational intrigue that saw the United States and its allies (known by insiders as the Chinese-Iranian-Pakistani-Arabian peninsula Axis) plotting to undermine Afghanistan’s sovereignty while using it as a stepping stone for control of Central Asia. Following the events of September 11, 2001 Afghanistan would again drastically shift the foundation of American politics, while advancing a foreign policy devoted to endless war and military budgets even larger and more ruinous than those of the 1980’s. As told by the first Americans to pierce the media blackout surrounding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1981, our book reveals the shocking story of how American policy transformed Afghanistan from a Cold War buffer state into a secure multi-billion dollar technological training base for Islamic terrorism while setting the stage for a privatized heroin industry of historic proportions. The true story of how America’s policy makers undermined American security from within, Invisible History, Afghanistan’s Untold Story provides the sobering facts and details that every American should have known about America’s secret war, but were never told

In its long history, the region today delineated as both Afghanistan and Pakistan has known many borders, yet none have been more important to American security than the one today separating Pakistan from Afghanistan known as the Durand line but referred to by the military and intelligence community as Zero line. The United States has fought on both sides of the Durand line: In the 1980s on the side of extremist-political Islam from Pakistan and since September 11, 2001, against it from the Afghan side. A funny thing happened to the United States when the Obama administration decided to cross Zero line again and bring the Afghan war into Pakistan. Instead of resolution, after years into the administration’s AfPak strategy, it would seem the gap between reality and the Washington beltway has only widened. If the Obama administration had set out to correct the mistakes of the past, it would now appear that Washington’s effort to defeat the Taliban has instead turned full circle into a plan to openly embrace them. As advertised since 9/11, Al Qaeda is the number one justification for America’s “war on terror.” But the ongoing efforts by both the United States and Pakistan to bring Al Qaeda- aligned Taliban militants into the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai reveal that the justification for the AfPak war is not what it appears. Negotiating with Al Qaeda controlled militants on the AfPak border completely undercuts the raison d’etre for America’s ten year “war on terror.” How can the U.S. be making war on a sworn enemy and its terror allies and at the same time embrace them as a resolution? Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire lays out the bizarre and often paralyzing contradictions of America’s AfPak strategy by clarifying the complex web of interests and individuals surrounding the AfPak war and focusing on the little understood importance of the Durand Line to any resolution to the Afghan conflict.