Download or read book The Afghans written by Willem Vogelsang and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2001-11-28 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated paperback edition telling the dramatic history of the land and peoples of Afghanistan from prehistoric times to the present day. Offers a detailed history, from the Indo-Iranian invasions of the second millennium BC and Alexander the Great, through to Soviet occupation, Taliban rule, and the 'war on terror' Much description of the contemporary period is based on the author’s own research in Afghanistan Includes a new final chapter covering developments since 2001, including the fall of the Taliban, state building and foreign intervention in the region. The bibliography has also been updated.

Download or read book Television and the Afghan Culture Wars written by Wazhmah Osman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2020-12-14 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portrayed in Western discourse as tribal and traditional, Afghans have in fact intensely debated women's rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam as part of their nation building in the post-9/11 era. Wazhmah Osman places television at the heart of these public and politically charged clashes while revealing how the medium also provides war-weary Afghans with a semblance of open discussion and healing. After four decades of gender and sectarian violence, she argues, the internationally funded media sector has the potential to bring about justice, national integration, and peace. Fieldwork from across Afghanistan allowed Osman to record the voices of many Afghan media producers and people. Afghans offer their own seldom-heard views on the country's cultural progress and belief systems, their understandings of themselves, and the role of international interventions. Osman analyzes the impact of transnational media and foreign funding while keeping the focus on local cultural contestations, productions, and social movements. As a result, she redirects the global dialogue about Afghanistan to Afghans and challenges top-down narratives of humanitarian development.

Download or read book Afghan Modern written by Robert D. Crews and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-14 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rugged, remote, riven by tribal rivalries and religious violence, Afghanistan seems to many a country frozen in time and forsaken by the world. Afghan Modern presents a bold challenge to these misperceptions, revealing how Afghans, over the course of their history, have engaged and connected with a wider world and come to share in our modern globalized age. Always a mobile people, Afghan travelers, traders, pilgrims, scholars, and artists have ventured abroad for centuries, their cosmopolitan sensibilities providing a compass for navigating a constantly changing world. Robert Crews traces the roots of Afghan globalism to the early modern period, when, as the subjects of sprawling empires, the residents of Kabul, Kandahar, and other urban centers forged linkages with far-flung imperial centers throughout the Middle East and Asia. Focusing on the emergence of an Afghan state out of this imperial milieu, he shows how Afghan nation-making was part of a series of global processes, refuting the usual portrayal of Afghans as pawns in the “Great Game” of European powers and of Afghanistan as a “hermit kingdom.” In the twentieth century, the pace of Afghan interaction with the rest of the world dramatically increased, and many Afghan men and women came to see themselves at the center of ideological struggles that spanned the globe. Through revolution, war, and foreign occupations, Afghanistan became even more enmeshed in the global circulation of modern politics, occupying a pivotal position in the Cold War and the tumultuous decades that followed.

Download or read book How We Won and Lost the War in Afghanistan written by Douglas Grindle and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017-11 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Douglas Grindle provides a firsthand account of how the war in Afghanistan was won in a rural district south of Kandahar City and how the newly created peace slipped away when vital resources failed to materialize and the United States headed for the exit. By placing the reader at the heart of the American counterinsurgency effort, Grindle reveals little-known incidents, including the failure of expensive aid programs to target local needs, the slow throttling of local government as official funds failed to reach the districts, and the United States’ inexplicable failure to empower the Afghan local officials even after they succeeded in bringing the people onto their side. Grindle presents the side of the hard-working Afghans who won the war and expresses what they really thought of the U.S. military and its decisions. Written by a former field officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, this story of dashed hopes and missed opportunities details how America’s desire to leave the war behind ultimately overshadowed its desire to sustain victory.

Download or read book Afghanistan written by Thomas Barfield and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-25 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the political history of Afghanistan from the sixteenth century to the present, looking at what has united the people as well as the regional, cultural, and political differences that divide them.

Download or read book Afghanistan s Endless War written by Larry P. Goodson and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Going beyond the stereotypes of Kalashnikov-wielding Afghan mujahideen and black-turbaned Taliban fundamentalists, Larry Goodson explains in this concise analysis of the Afghan war what has really been happening in Afghanistan in the last twenty years. Beginning with the reasons behind Afghanistan’s inability to forge a strong state -- its myriad cleavages along ethnic, religious, social, and geographical fault lines -- Goodson then examines the devastating course of the war itself. He charts its utter destruction of the country, from the deaths of more than 2 million Afghans and the dispersal of some six million others as refugees to the complete collapse of its economy, which today has been replaced by monoagriculture in opium poppies and heroin production. The Taliban, some of whose leaders Goodson interviewed as recently as 1997, have controlled roughly 80 percent of the country but themselves have shown increasing discord along ethnic and political lines.

Download or read book Afghanistan of the Afghans written by Ikbal Ali Shah (Sirdar.) and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Afghanistan of the Afghans written by Ikbal Ali Shah (Sirdar.) and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Afghan Napoleon written by Sandy Gall and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first biography in a decade of Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the forces of resistance were disparate. Many groups were caught up in fighting each other and competing for Western arms. The exception were those commanded by Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military strategist and political operator who solidified the resistance and undermined the Russian occupation, leading resistance members to a series of defensive victories. Sandy Gall followed Massoud during Soviet incursions and reported on the war in Afghanistan, and he draws on this first-hand experience in his biography of this charismatic guerrilla commander. Afghan Napoleon includes excerpts from the surviving volumes of Massoud’s prolific diaries—many translated into English for the first time—which detail crucial moments in his personal life and during his time in the resistance. Born into a liberalizing Afghanistan in the 1960s, Massoud ardently opposed communism, and he rose to prominence by coordinating the defense of the Panjsher Valley against Soviet offensives. Despite being under-equipped and outnumbered, he orchestrated a series of victories over the Russians. Massoud’s assassination in 2001, just two days before the attack on the Twin Towers, is believed to have been ordered by Osama bin Laden. Despite the ultimate frustration of Massoud’s attempts to build political consensus, he is recognized today as a national hero.

Download or read book The Races of Afghanistan written by Henry Walter Bellew and published by . This book was released on 1880 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Races of Afghanistan was written towards the end of, and shortly after, the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-80) and published in London in 1880. The author, Henry Walter Bellew, was a surgeon and medical officer in the Indian Army who over the years had undertaken a number of political missions in Afghanistan and written several books on Indian and Afghan subjects. In explaining the purpose of his book, Bellew writes that the peoples of Afghanistan in his view soon would become subjects of the British Empire and that, "to know the history, interests, and aspirations of a people, is half the battle gained in converting them to loyal, contented, and peaceable subjects...." The book begins with an introduction, an overview chapter on the Afghans, and separate chapters on the history of the Afghans, British relations with Afghanistan, and Sher Ali (the emir of Afghanistan who reigned 1863-66 and 1868-79). These introductory chapters are followed by individual chapters on the following ethnic groups or tribes: Pathan (today usually seen as Pashtun or Paktun, Puktun, or Pushtun), Yusufzai, Afridi, Khattak, Dadicae, Ghilji (also seen today as Ghilzi and Khilji), Tajik, and Hazarah (Hazara in modern times). Bellew speculates on the pre-Islamic origins of the different Afghan peoples, discussing the tradition that the Afghans were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and referring to the writings of Herodotus, in which the Dadicae are mentioned as one of four Indian nations forming a satrapy on the extreme eastern frontier of the Persian Empire under the emperor, Darius I. Bellew's book was used as a source by later writers, for example Percy Molesworth Sykes (1867-1945) in his A History of Persia (1921). Bellew was the author of other books on Afghanistan and neighboring countries, of grammars and dictionaries of several Afghan languages, and of studies of individual ethnic groups.

Download or read book The Afghanistan Papers written by Craig Whitlock and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Best Book of 2021 ​The #1 New York Times bestselling investigative story of how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public year after year about America’s longest war, foreshadowing the Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan, by Washington Post reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Craig Whitlock. Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives. Distracted by the war in Iraq, the US military become mired in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict in a country it did not understand. But no president wanted to admit failure, especially in a war that began as a just cause. Instead, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations sent more and more troops to Afghanistan and repeatedly said they were making progress, even though they knew there was no realistic prospect for an outright victory. Just as the Pentagon Papers changed the public’s understanding of Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers contains “fast-paced and vivid” (The New York Times Book Review) revelation after revelation from people who played a direct role in the war from leaders in the White House and the Pentagon to soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. In unvarnished language, they admit that the US government’s strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government. All told, the account is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who knew that the US government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground. Documents unearthed by The Washington Post reveal that President Bush didn’t know the name of his Afghanistan war commander—and didn’t want to meet with him. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.” His successor, Robert Gates, said: “We didn’t know jack shit about al-Qaeda.” The Afghanistan Papers is a “searing indictment of the deceit, blunders, and hubris of senior military and civilian officials” (Tom Bowman, NRP Pentagon Correspondent) that will supercharge a long-overdue reckoning over what went wrong and forever change the way the conflict is remembered.

Download or read book History of the Afghans written by N'Imat Allah and published by . This book was released on 1836 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Afghan History Through Afghan Eyes written by Nile Green and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent international intervention in Afghanistan has reproduced familiar versions of the Afghan national story, from repeatedly doomed invasions to perpetual fault lines of ethnic division. Yet almost no attention has been paid to the ways in which Afghans themselves have made sense of their history. Radically questioning received ideas about how to understand Afghanistan, Afghan History Through Afghan Eyes asks how Afghan intellectuals, ideologues and ordinary people have understood their collective past. The book brings together the leading international specialists to focus on case studies of the Dari, Pashto and Uzbek histories which Afghans have produced in abundance since the formation of the Afghan state in the mid-eighteenth century. As crucial sources on Afghans' own conceptions of state, society and culture, their writings help us understand the dominant and marginal, conflicting and changing, ways in which Afghans have understood the emergence of their own society and its relationships with the wider world.Based on new research in Afghan languages, Afghan History Through Afghan Eyes opens up entirely fresh perspectives on Afghan political, social and cultural life, providing penetrating insights into the master narratives behind domestic and international conflict in Afghanistan.

Download or read book No Good Men Among the Living written by Anand Gopal and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Told through the lives of three Afghans, the stunning tale of how the United States had triumph in sight in Afghanistan--and then brought the Taliban back from the dead In a breathtaking chronicle, acclaimed journalist Anand Gopal traces in vivid detail the lives of three Afghans caught in America's war on terror. He follows a Taliban commander, who rises from scrawny teenager to leading insurgent; a US-backed warlord, who uses the American military to gain personal wealth and power; and a village housewife trapped between the two sides, who discovers the devastating cost of neutrality. Through their dramatic stories, Gopal shows that the Afghan war, so often regarded as a hopeless quagmire, could in fact have gone very differently. Top Taliban leaders actually tried to surrender within months of the US invasion, renouncing all political activity and submitting to the new government. Effectively, the Taliban ceased to exist--yet the Americans were unwilling to accept such a turnaround. Instead, driven by false intelligence from their allies and an unyielding mandate to fight terrorism, American forces continued to press the conflict, resurrecting the insurgency that persists to this day. With its intimate accounts of life in war-torn Afghanistan, Gopal's thoroughly original reporting lays bare the workings of America's longest war and the truth behind its prolonged agony. A heartbreaking story of mistakes and misdeeds, No Good Men Among the Living challenges our usual perceptions of the Afghan conflict, its victims, and its supposed winners.

Download or read book Afghanistan s Islam written by Nile Green and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book provides the first ever overview of the history and development of Islam in Afghanistan. It covers every era from the conversion of Afghanistan through the medieval and early modern periods to the present day. Based on primary sources in Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Urdu and Uzbek, its depth and scope of coverage is unrivalled by any existing publication on Afghanistan. As well as state-sponsored religion, the chapters cover such issues as the rise of Sufism, Sharia, women's religiosity, transnational Islamism and the Taliban. Islam has been one of the most influential social and political forces in Afghan history. Providing idioms and organizations for both anti-state and anti-foreign mobilization, Islam has proven to be a vital socio-political resource in modern Afghanistan. Even as it has been deployed as the national cement of a multi-ethnic 'Emirate' and then 'Islamic Republic,' Islam has been no less a destabilizing force in dividing Afghan society. Yet despite the universal scholarly recognition of the centrality of Islam to Afghan history, its developmental trajectories have received relatively little sustained attention outside monographs and essays devoted to particular moments or movements. To help develop a more comprehensive, comparative and developmental picture of Afghanistan's Islam from the eighth century to the present, this edited volume brings together specialists on different periods, regions and languages. Each chapter forms a case study 'snapshot' of the Islamic beliefs, practices, institutions and authorities of a particular time and place in Afghanistan"--Provided by publishe

Download or read book Zarbul Masalha 151 Afghan Dari Proverbs written by Edward Zellem and published by Cultures Direct LLC . This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning and world's most popular bilingual book of commonly-used Afghan Proverbs. Beautifully illustrated with 50 original artworks by Afghan high school students in Kabul. Collected and translated in Afghanistan by Edward Zellem, a U.S. Navy Captain and Dari speaker. Available at leading booksellers in over 40 countries in e-book and paperback. Awarded a QED Seal for quality in e-book design. Reads easily on screens large and small. In English and Dari with transliterations. Zarbul Masalha means "Proverbs" in Dari (Afghan Farsi). More information at afghansayings.com.

Download or read book Afghanistan The People written by Erinn Banting and published by Crabtree Publishing Company. This book was released on 2003 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how the history, climate, geography, ethnology, wars, and religion of Afghanistan have shaped the customs and practices of modern daily life in the mountains, deserts, and cities.