Since the dramatic events of a decade ago—the revolutions in Kabul and Teheran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Gulf War—"Greater Central Asia" has recaptured the imagination of academia. Historians, Islamicists, anthropologists, political scientists, and defense analysts began to convene conferences and to produce collective volumes that concentrated on two seemingly unrelated subjects: the continuity and strength of ethnocultural patterns in Muslim Central Asia, on the one hand, and the limited range of U.S. military options for defense of the oil-rich Gulf region against hypothetical Soviet invasion, on the other. The contributors to this volume were asked to focus on the long term significance of the junction between Afghanistan and Soviet Eurasia through the "Midlands" region—a relationship that could have wide implications.