Craved King of Kings for imperial hubris laid bare? Craig Whitlock's The Afghanistan Papers delivers the next autopsy.

If King of Kings left you hungry for another autopsy of imperial arrogance, The Afghanistan Papers dissects two decades of American hubris with the same scalpel precision. Whitlock excavates declassified documents and insider confessions to expose a war built on optimistic lies, ignored intelligence, and cultural tone-deafness—every miscalculation as catastrophic as Carter's Iranian blindness, every Pentagon briefing as delusional as the Shah's final days.

This is the same slow-motion policy disaster you craved in Anderson's work, only now the tribal dynamics are Afghan, the blunders are bipartisan, and the irony cuts even deeper. No moralizing—just the grim satisfaction of watching hubris collapse under its own weight.

If you thought the Iranian Revolution was a masterclass in unintended consequences, wait until you see Afghanistan.