So it's getting up there in age (almost 17 years old!!) but Steve Coll's Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 is probably a good place to start. As it was written in 2004 it obviously doesn't deal with the past 20 years of conflict in Afghanistan, and it's definitely focused on the US role in the conflict, but it's a very readable and accessible primer on the war(s) being fought in Afghanistan from 1979 to 2001. If you're interested in the role that Bin Laden and al-Qaeda played in intersection with these events (although Bin Laden and al-Qaeda feel a bit quaint in 2021), then the book traditionally "paired" with Ghost Wars is Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (I honestly cannot vouch for the Hulu series based on the book). One thing I would say though about Wright's book is that, at least to me, it showed how peripheral Bin Laden and al-Qaeda really were in Afghanistan, both during the Soviet Afghan War and in the Taliban period when they were awkward foreign guests hosted in very run-down camps.

I haven't read George Crile's 2003 Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times, although I did see the Tom Hanks movie version. It's supposed to also be a good read, although my understanding is that it's very laser focused on Representative Charles Wilson, which I suspect makes a good story but also potentially makes the US involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s come off as the work of one maverick Texan politician, which...I'd question that.

Given my flair I actually have to confess that I'm not too well-read in books specifically on the Soviet experience the Soviet-Afghan War. Svetlana Alexievich's Boys in Zinc (occasionally horribly-translated as Zinky Boys) is a good oral history of the Soviet war experience. Lester Grau's translation of The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan is a 25-ish year old deep dive into Soviet military accounts of the conflict. The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan by Gregory Feifer is a much newer (but still 13-ish year old) account of the war written by NPR's Moscow correspondent. I'm not super familiar with it but it gets good reviews.

Also to approach things from a very different perspective, I'd recommend Anatol Lieven's Pakistan: A Hard Country. Lieven is from a pretty prominent British family of Russian origin (his brother Dominic is a well-known Russian history professor), and Lieven covered both the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and events in Pakistan and Afghanistan before that as a correspondent. I think his book on Pakistan is very good because it provides a lot of perspective a Western reader usually doesn't get from even books like the ones I mentioned above. He meets with lots of locals (including in places like Peshawar and the then-North-West Frontier Province) and touches on a lot of events in Afghanistan from the Pakistani perspective. I should also mention Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid's books Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia and Taliban: The Power of Militant Islam in Afghanistan and Beyond. I'm not personally familiar with Rashid's books, but he is well-regarded and wrote these works based on many personal contacts he had with political actors in the region.

I guess I'm obligated to at least mention Peter Hopkirk's books, notably The Great Game, although I personally don't like them. He focuses very much on the role of British intelligence in Central Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, not only are they getting really old, but they tend to overemphasize the role of individual British gentlemen-spies in the region's geopolitics, to the point of actual local actors and peoples being basically local exotic background material. It also means he tends to focus a lot on what British intelligence perceived as major geopolitical threats to its Empire in the region, which come across like a game of Risk: Napoleon invading British India though Russia and Central Asia, Lenin starting a Communist Revolution in India in the early 1920s, etc.

One thing you might notice is that there aren't a lot of books written specifically on Afghanistan from the country's perspective, rather than "this is what the great power I'm inter ested in was doing there", let alone books in English written by Afghan historians. There are a couple concise histories out there, like Martin Ewans' Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics, and Barry Youngerman and Shaista Wahab's A Brief History of Afghanistan, but I would have to leave it to someone else to talk about them.

For the Middle East I would start with A Peace to End All Peace David Fromkin. It talks about how we ended up with the colonies in the Middle East and the nonsense borders throughout. You will need to find another book for the Cold War aspects of the conflict, due to the book primarily dealing with the World War 1 era though.