david hillstrom, in the foreign policy journal, describes "breeding ground" as a "concise yet powerful book" which details the dangerously interlocking decisions and ill-thought-through strategies that inflamed the afghan conflict. according to hillstrom, tripathi used a broad array of sources that only recently became available from both us and soviet archives. he writes that the tragedy is that afghanistan, which has now been at war for 40 years, has suffered the same before, from the 'great game' that the russian empire played with the british empire in the 19th century; the players then as now had "simplistic strategic goals" but only "a shallow understanding" of afghanistan itself. hillstrom finds that tripathi sums up the tragedy beautifully by closing his book with a quote from tolstoy: