It is hard to review Antonio Giustozzi's research. He says that over the years he has assembled a “battle-tested team” of “Afghan and Pakistani researchers,” mostly with a “background in journalism,” who have apparently gained access to many sources unavailable to other researchers. His conclusions in The Islamic State in Khorasan, such as the division of the Afghan Taliban into a set of relatively autonomous shuras (councils), often differ from other accounts, which also tend to rely on anonymous sources when they are not based on technical intelligence. As with so much research on covert operations and illegal organizations, there is an ethical limit to transparency.
That is even more the case with this study of the expansion of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Daesh, in its Arabic acronym) into Afghanistan and Pakistan, where it goes by the name “Islamic State—Khorasan” (IS-K). Giustozzi's researchers reported interviews with...
