Before Taliban
Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad
Introduction
Into Forbidden Afghanistan
Lowell Thomas needed another adventure. At age twenty-eight, the ambitious
showman from Cripple Creek, Colorado, had become an international
celebrity through his immensely popular lecture tour "With Allenby in
Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia." Charming appreciative audiences and
collecting handsome receipts, Thomas had spent most of 1920 and 1921
traveling the length and breadth of the British Commonwealth-from Scotland
to India to Malaya to Australia-and his show had been seen by several
million people. Two years into it, however, he was feeling the need for an
encore, and Edmund Allenby and T.E. Lawrence were a hard act to
follow-Lawrence in particular. Before Thomas had transformed him into a
household name, Lawrence had been a somewhat reclusive figure whose story
was well known to only a small number of military and diplomatic insiders.
Thomas had changed that picture with his richly embroidered tales of the
handsome archaeologist, garbed in the robes of "a ... read full excerpt from Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad ebook
