Download or read book Afghan Crucible written by Elisabeth Leake and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Offers a new global history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, exploring the conflict both within and beyond the framework of the Cold War. Based on extensive, multilingual research in archives across South Asia, Europe, and North America. Draws on recently declassified US documents"--
Download or read book Afghan Crucible written by Elisabeth Leake and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new global history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - an invasion whose consequences are still felt in Afghanistan and across the wider world. On 24 December 1979, Soviet armed forces entered Afghanistan, beginning an occupation that would last almost a decade and creating a political crisis that shook the world. To many observers, the Soviet invasion showed the lengths to which one of the world's superpowers would go to vie for supremacy in the global Cold War. The Soviet war, and parallel covert American aid to Afghan resistance fighters, would come to be a defining event of international politics in the final years of the Cold War, lingering far beyond the Soviet Union's own demise. Yet Cold War competition is only a small part of the story. Soviet troops entered a country already at war with itself. A century of debates within Afghanistan over the nature of modern nationhood culminated in a 1978 coup in which self-described Afghan communists pledged to fundamentally reshape Afghanistan. Instead what broke out was a civil war in which Afghans asserted competing models of Afghan statehood. Afghan socialists and Islamists came to the fore of this conflict in the 1980s, thanks in part to Soviet and American involvement, but they represented a broader movement for local articulations of social and political modernity that did not derive from foreign models. Afghans, in conversation with foreigners, set many of the parameters of the conflict. This sweeping history moves between centres of state in Kabul, Moscow, Islamabad, and Washington, the halls of global governance in Geneva and New York, resistance hubs in Peshawar and Panjshir, and refugee camps scattered across Pakistan's borderlands to tell a story that is much more expansive than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - a global history of a moment of crisis not just for Afghanistan or the Cold War but international relations and the postcolonial state.
Download or read book Afghan War Military History written by Emerson Briggs and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2024-03-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the shockwaves of the intense battles in the unforgiving landscapes of Afghanistan, this book offers a concise yet comprehensive analysis of the military strategies, key players, and pivotal moments that shaped the course of the war. Delve into the evolution of tactics, the challenges of counterinsurgency, and the dynamic interplay of forces on the ground.
Download or read book Up in Arms written by Adam E Casey and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How support from foreign superpowers propped up—and pulled down—authoritarian regimes during the Cold War, offering lessons for today’s great power competition Throughout the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union competed to prop up friendly dictatorships abroad. Today, it is commonly assumed that this military aid enabled the survival of allied autocrats, from Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek to Ethiopia’s Mengistu Haile Mariam. In Up in Arms, political scientist Adam E. Casey rebuts the received wisdom: aid to autocracies often backfired during the Cold War. Casey draws on extensive original research to show that, despite billions poured into friendly regimes, US-backed dictators lasted in power no longer than those without outside help. In fact, American aid often unintentionally destabilized autocratic regimes. The United States encouraged foreign regimes to establish strong, independent armies like its own, but those armies often went on to lead coups themselves. By contrast, the Soviets promoted the subordination of the army to the ruling regime, neutralizing the threat of military takeover. Ultimately, Casey concludes, it is subservient militaries—not outside aid—that help autocrats maintain power. In an era of renewed great power competition, Up in Arms offers invaluable insights into the unforeseen consequences of overseas meddling, revealing how military aid can help pull down dictators as often as it props them up.
Download or read book Unwinnable written by Theo Farrell and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Afghanistan was an unwinnable war. As British and American troops withdraw, discover this definitive account that explains why. It could have been a very different story. British forces could have successfully withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2002, having done the job they set out to do: to defeat al-Qaeda. Instead, in the years that followed, Britain paid a devastating price for their presence in Helmand province. So why did Britain enter, and remain, in an ill-fated war? Why did it fail so dramatically, and was this expedition doomed from the beginning? Drawing on unprecedented access to military reports, government documents and senior individuals, Professor Theo Farrell provides an extraordinary work of scholarship. He explains the origins of the war, details the campaigns over the subsequent years, and examines the West's failure to understand the dynamics of local conflict and learn the lessons of history that ultimately led to devastating costs and repercussions still relevant today. 'The best book so far on Britain's...war in Afghanistan' International Affairs 'Masterful, irrefutable... Farrell records all these military encounters with the irresistible pace of a novelist' Sunday Times
Download or read book The Red Warrior U S Perceptions of Stalin s Strategic Role in the Allied Journey to Victory in The Second World War written by Reagan Fancher and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program, American leaders sought to keep Joseph Stalin’s Red Army in the field and fighting Adolf Hitler’s forces in the Second World War from 1941 forward. Delivered by the Anglo-American Arctic naval convoys, overland through the Iranian deserts and mountains, and through the skies from Alaska to Siberia, this much-needed material aid helped Stalin’s Red Army to continue fighting and thereby prevented a separate peace with Hitler’s Germany and a mechanized repeat of the First World War’s Brest-Litovsk fiasco. Yet Roosevelt and other U.S. officials, due to their severe underestimation of Stalin’s character and his rigid and fanatical devotion to exporting Communism at gunpoint, gambled incorrectly that they could win the Soviet premier’s heart and mind through several excessive wartime aid gestures, including the furnishing of atomic bomb materials to the Soviet regime. By 1945, American leaders had succeeded in their strategic goal of keeping Stalin and his Red Army in the war and hastening victory but failed in their efforts to purchase the Soviet premier’s goodwill and commitment to postwar peace, heralding the global Cold War, and setting the stage for later U.S. martial aid programs to those resisting aggression abroad. In addition to its primary focus on the American leadership’s perceptions of Stalin’s strategic importance to the Allied war effort in the Second World War, this work also includes a detailed assessment of Roosevelt’s Soviet Lend-Lease program alongside U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s later support for the Afghan Islamic guerrillas resisting Soviet occupation during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s and a comparison of both martial aid programs with Washington’s recent revival of Lend-Lease aid for the Ukrainian war effort. It offers today’s American leaders and policymakers a chance to consult the lessons of history and apply them in the present.
Download or read book In Afghanistan written by Jere Van Dyk and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2002 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Afghanistan is the story of a young man, searching for adventure and self-discovery in war-torn Afghanistan during the time of the Soviet invasion. It is also a portrait of an exotic land and people desperately struggling for survival during that war, as they are today. In 1981, with a letter and some financial backing from The New York Times, Van Dyk, bearded and dressed as an Afghan, sneaked into Afghanistan , then off-limits to foreigners, and lived in the ruggedly-beautiful mountains and desert of this country with the Mujahideen, the men then fighting the Soviet Union. “My spine tingled like a boy’s. I felt the sensation of adventure…The Turbans of ten laughing young men, armed to the teeth, flapped in the wind…I would not have traded this moment for all the money in the world. It was suicidal, magnificent, and I knew we’d be all right.” But it was close. He lived through Soviet ground and helicopter attacks, saw death and suffering, but also laughter. He had much to learn about Islam, tribal traditions and the holy war the guerrillas were waging. He was accused of being a Soviet spy, but ultimately won the trust of his Afghan guides. He saw a strong, courageous, often frightened people fighting to protect the only thing they knew--their homes, their families, their way of life. The author, a former runner, a fledgling politician and writer, who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family in a small town in the Northwest, also went looking for something deep among these men who shouted “God is Great” and went into battle against the Red Army. His story is about the people he met and his journey.
Download or read book The Defiant Border written by Elisabeth Leake and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores why the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands have remained largely independent of state controls throughout the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Afghan Campaign written by Steven Pressfield and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-06-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2,300 years ago an unbeaten army of the West invaded the homeland of a fierce Eastern tribal foe. This is one soldier’s story . . . The bestselling novelist of ancient warfare returns with a riveting historical novel that re-creates Alexander the Great’s invasion of the Afghan kingdoms in 330 b.c. In a story that might have been ripped from today’s combat dispatches, Steven Pressfield brings to life the confrontation between an invading Western army and fierce Eastern warriors determined at all costs to defend their homeland. Narrated by an infantryman in Alexander’s army, The Afghan Campaign explores the challenges, both military and moral, that Alexander and his soldiers face as they embark on a new type of war and are forced to adapt to the methods of a ruthless foe that employs terror and insurgent tactics. An edge-of-your-seat adventure, The Afghan Campaign once again demonstrates Pressfield’s profound understanding of the hopes and desperation of men in battle and of the historical realities that continue to influence our world.
Download or read book NATO in the Crucible written by Deborah L. Hanagan and published by Hoover Press. This book was released on 2019-09-01 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) became involved in security operations during the War in Afghanistan, it faced a range of complex challenges, including a highly motivated Afghan insurgency that changed over time and repeatedly defied assumptions.Conflicts within NATO also posed challenges. The alliance brought together a quarter of the world's nations, each with its own goals and interests, in an effort to stabilize an agrarian country that posed no immediate security threat. For more than a decade, through changes in leadership and strategy, the nations experienced bitter disagreements, resentments, and a conflict that escalated to a level of violence and uncertainty few had anticipated.In NATO in the Crucible, Deborah Lynn Hanagan analyzes these challenges and explains how the alliance maintained cohesion despite them. She examines why NATO succeeded in Afghanistan when history suggests most coalitions fracture under such intense pressure. In the end, she argues, member nations summoned the political will and organizational capacity to cooperate and endure. And they agreed, above all, that failure in Afghanistan would be catastrophic—both for NATO and for the world.
Download or read book The Soviet Afghan War written by Russia (Federation). Generalʹnyĭ shtab and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a candid view of a war that played a significant role in the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union. Presents analysis absolutely vital to Western policymakers, as well as to political, diplomatic, and military historians and anyone interested in Russian and Soviet history. Provides insights regarding current and future Russian struggles in ethnic conflicts both at and within their borders, struggles that could potentially destroy the Russian Federation.
Download or read book God s Crucible Islam and the Making of Europe 570 1215 written by David Levering Lewis and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-01-12 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning author, God’s Crucible brings to life “a furiously complex age” (New York Times Book Review). Resonating as profoundly today as when it was first published to widespread critical acclaim a decade ago, God’s Crucible is a bold portrait of Islamic Spain and the birth of modern Europe from one of our greatest historians. David Levering Lewis’s narrative, filled with accounts of some of the most epic battles in world history, reveals how cosmopolitan, Muslim al-Andalus flourished—a beacon of cooperation and tolerance—while proto-Europe floundered in opposition to Islam, making virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, religious intolerance, perpetual war, and slavery. This masterful history begins with the fall of the Persian and Roman empires, followed by the rise of the prophet Muhammad and five centuries of engagement between the Muslim imperium and an emerging Europe. Essential and urgent, God’s Crucible underscores the importance of these early, world-altering events whose influence remains as current as today’s headlines.
Download or read book Humanitarian Invasion written by Timothy Nunan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanitarian Invasion provides a history of international development and humanitarianism in Cold War Afghanistan.
Download or read book Sisters on the Bridge of Fire written by Debra Denker and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Documents in World History written by Peter N. Stearns and published by Pearson/Education. This book was released on 2003 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography traces the career of Frenchman Jacques Coeur, royal official, merchant, and financier, amidst war and exploration in fifteenth-century Europe and invites readers to consider Coeur's career against a broad historical context.
Download or read book Commerce written by and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 1612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
