The idea that large groups of armed men bent on killing each other can be persuaded to change sides may seem fanciful at first. It is this book's primary objective to show that it is not fanciful at all. Specifically, in Afghanistan's intra-mujahedin civil war, which lasted from 1992 to 1998 and is the motivating case of this book, the heads of mujahedin groups constantly changed their allegiances as shifts in the balance of power demanded a strategic realignment. More than the fighting, it was this flipping that decided major outcomes – it kept people alive while allowing their groups to stay in power. Meanwhile, these elites came up with vivid stories to justify their behavior.

The analysis of the 1992–1998 Afghan civil war that follows brings the mujahedin's civil war machinations to life by drawing on a diverse set of mostly primary data collected in the field. These range from semi-structured interviews with Afghan warlords and mujahedin who took part in the conflict to wartime fatwas, declarations, and Taliban decrees; coverage in the local and international press; and U.S. Freedom of Information Act declassified documents – including Guantanamo Bay testimony of Afghan detainees and U.S. diplomatic wires. Afghan culture is largely an oral one, compounding the typical data scarcity that characterizes civil wars. This was particularly a challenge in trying to systematically capture the changes in power over the war years and their resultant effect on alliance formation and group fractionalization. For that I rely on interviews and other pertinent primary and secondary sources to territorially trace the power and alliance/group shifts throughout the civil war's trajectory. In that regard, I use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to geo-reference and digitize Soviet declassified maps on the provincial level for the whole of Afghanistan. I use these maps to quantify and spatially project territorial changes over time as a way to test the extent to which the empirical evidence corresponds to the proposed theoretical framework, complementing the rich qualitative data analysis. The stories of alliance switches and group fractionalization, and the ensuing victories and defeats, are told on the level of the various warring groups/subgroups and their leaders that were in the heart of this ethnic conflict.