The Lion's Grave

by Jon Lee Anderson

"Jon Lee Anderson arrived in Afghanistan ten days before U.S. bombers began pounding Al Qaeda and Taliban forces. He followed the fighting and reported the peace - or what passed for it - as The New Yorkers' only correspondent on the ground. Anderson witnessed the fall of Kunduz, one of the Taliban's last bastions, and made a hair-raising trip across the Hindu Kush to Kabul, where the interim government was clumsily taking power. In Kandahar, he found that the Taliban were not simply the austere, self-abnegating men they claimed to be. His reports include portraits of warlords, crafty politicians, fighters who have a distinctly non-Western view of loyalty, and an American soldier of fortune. Anderson's report on the search for Osama bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora is published here for the first time. In the final dispatch, he investigates the assassination of the charismatic Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud - the Lion of the Panjshir - who was murdered by Al Qaeda agent