Short answers, pulled from the story.
Unholy Wars was written by John K. Cooley, a news correspondent who spent decades in the Middle East. The book draws on his direct interactions with administrators, diplomats, politicians, and ordinary people in the region.
Unholy Wars examines United States policies and alliances in the Middle East from 1979 to 1989. The book focuses on decisions made during that decade and their contribution to the emergence of international terrorism.
Cooley described the central role of what he called the CIA's Muslim mercenaries in the Afghanistan war, citing upwards of 2,000 Algerians as participants. Journalist Peter Bergen noted that Cooley did not present evidence to support those claims.
Norwegian researcher Thomas Hegghammer concluded that Unholy Wars did more than any other work to propagate the view that the CIA trained the Afghan Arabs. This assessment highlights the book's substantial impact on public debate about the conflict.
Based on information from Soviet defector Vasili Mitrokhin, historian Odd Arne Westad concluded that Unholy Wars "obviously originates in Soviet disinformation from the 1980s." This placed the book's central arguments in a very different light from the corrective account Cooley intended.
Unholy Wars is divided into eleven chapters. They include sections dedicated to Carter and Brezhnev, Anwar al-Sadat, Zia al-Haq, and Deng Xiaoping, as well as chapters on recruiters and spooks, donors and bankers, poppy fields and drug lords, Russia's bitter aftertaste, and two chapters titled "The Contagion Spreads" covering Egypt, the Maghreb, and the assault on America.