Have you ever been to Kabul?

Have you ever been to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan? You can count yourself lucky if you haven't. There isn't a sadder city in the world.

Most of all, it's because of the children. Kabul is a city of ruins—and a city of children. The little ones are everywhere, running through the old part of town in their colorful clothing, their eyes as big as their expectations.

Some time after the ouster of the Taliban, I traveled with a group of politicians and military officials to Kabul, where we visited the city's only girls' school, which had finally opened—with Western assistance—after years of the Taliban's oppression of women.

There were no desks or benches. The girls sat on the floor surrounding their female teachers, reading out loud and giggling. Many of the children were not much older than my own two daughters. Their eyes sparkled. They listened to the teachers' every word. If the spark of freedom truly exists, it was there in the eyes of those children. Perhaps they were still too young to have even heard the word freedom yet, and certainly no one had told them about the great country of the United States of America and of its constitution that guarantees the pursuit of happiness. But even without knowing these things, these girls, or so I believed at the time, were finally experiencing both freedom and happiness.

We were surrounded by unbridled optimism and the hope for a different, better, and truly human life. I was convinced that for the girls of Kabul, the West's involvement in Afghanistan, both militarily and humanitarian, had been worthwhile.

But I was naïve. We returned home to news reports that the girls' school had been destroyed during the night by unknown attackers. Fearing for the students' lives, the administration closed the school. I remembered what a local army general had told me, and what I had refused to believe at the time: that the Taliban had returned.

Today I see Kabul as a place of shattered hopes. My experiences there—and today's reality—have forced me to confront a question of fundamental importance: is it even possible to bring a medieval society into the modern age with money, determination, and military might? Can we build nations the way we build aircraft and houses?

Have you ever been to Shanghai? You can count yourself lucky if you haven't, because you can feel the desire to outrival the greatest Western cities. And if you have, you might have been shocked by the city that is taking shape in southern China—it looks like the next New York, the next Wall Street, and you immediately get the feeling that you are in the middle of the beating heart of a new global power.

The rooftop terrace at M on the Bund, one of Shanghai's finest restaurants, offers an excellent view of the financial district, including the futuristic Shanghai Stock Exchange building, which looks like a recently landed spaceship. The diners on the restaurant's terrace are rich and self-confident, and the prices on the menu (which don't seem to trouble any of the guests) can easily hold their own with anything New York or Washington, D.C., has to offer. Downtown Shanghai, with its traffic jams, its constant buzz of commerce, and its colorful entertainment districts, says more about today's China than the Chinese Communist Party could ever express. And the message it conveys is simple: We have arrived!

I wrote this book because I believe that we spend too much time scratching our heads about places like Kabul and Baghdad and paying too little attention to Shanghai. We get ourselves into heated debates over Islam and the problems of the Sunnis and the Shiites, and yet the greatest danger terrorism poses could very well be that it distracts our attention. It prevents us from recognizing our true rivals. The United States and the remaining Western world waste far too much energy and attention on pursuing and trying to understand a group of Stone Age warriors that barely outnumbers a division of the U.S. Army.

Don't get me wrong. The risk of terrorism is very real, and we must protect ourselves. But our fears have been spun out of proportion. The Taliban consists of military dwarves and political pygmies. A country like Iran, with a gross domestic product the size of Connecticut's and a military budget only as big as Sweden's, doesn't deserve the attention of the entire American public and its government.

Nowadays, world history isn't being written in Afghanistan, Baghdad, or Tehran, but in Shanghai. The fateful word confronting our generation is not terror, but globalization. It is the rise of India and China, not the goings on in the mountains of Pakistan, that will leave their imprint on this era. The war for wealth, a bitter struggle for a share of affluence, and the related struggle over political and cultural dominance in the world, are the real conflicts of our day. The war on terror is overblown, the man in the White House has set the wrong priorities, and the public— deliberately or not—is being kept in the dark over the true extent of the global shift of power and wealth.

In my book, I hope to tell the true story of globalization, in an understandable way but without mincing words, and with respect for the new powers but free of naïveté. It differs greatly from the official story we are fed. Why? Because the true tale of globalization is anything but a win-win situation.

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The War for Wealth, by Gabor Steingart, addresses the issue of globalization and the problems it presents. Is it a force for good or an attempt to destroy the U.S.'s economic standing? Discuss this book and topic in the McGraw-Hill Books group this month and see where you stand on the issue. Click here to join the group.

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