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 2001 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Going beyond the stereotypes of Kalashnikov-wielding Afghan mujahideen and the black-turbaned fundamentalists, Larry Goodson combines Taliban interviews and fiedl research with concise analysis to explain what has been happening in Afghanistan in the last 20 years and why the future of Afghanistan matters.
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and the dispersal of some six million others as refugees to the complete collapse of its economy, which today has been replaced by monoagriculture in opium poppies and heroin production.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 s Endless War written by Larry P. Goodson and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive history of Afghan politics in the 20th century, highlighting the events leading up to the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan (which effectively instigated American involvement in the region). It's useful reading for anyone who wants a guide to the overall economic, social, cultural and political situation at the present moment. - New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Hopeless but Optimistic written by Douglas A. Wissing and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-08 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A fascinating ground level account of the effect of absurd and inappropriate Washington strategies on Afghans and on American soldiers.”—Abdulkader Sinno, author of Organizations at War in Afghanistan & Beyond Award-winning journalist Douglas A. Wissing’s poignant and eye-opening journey across insurgency-wracked Afghanistan casts an unyielding spotlight on greed, dysfunction, and predictable disaster while celebrating the everyday courage and wisdom of frontline soldiers, idealistic humanitarians, and resilient Afghans. As Wissing hauls a hundred pounds of body armor and pack across the Afghan warzone in search of the ground truth, US officials frantically spin a spurious victory narrative, American soldiers try to keep their body parts together, and Afghans try to stay positive and strain to figure out their next move after the US eventually leaves. As one technocrat confided to Wissing, “I am hopeless—but optimistic.” Along with a deep inquiry into the 21st-century American way of war and an unforgettable glimpse of the enduring culture and legacy of Afghanistan, Hopeless but Optimistic includes the real stuff of life: the austere grandeur of Afghanistan and its remarkable people; warzone dining, defecation, and sex; as well as the remarkable shopping opportunities for men whose job is to kill. Silver Medal, War & Military, Foreword Indies Awards Silver Medal, Current Events, Independent Publisher Book Awards “A scathing dispatch from an embedded journalist in Afghanistan . . . Pungent, embittered, eye-opening observations of a conflict involving lessons still unlearned.”—Kirkus Reviews “Here we confront in granular detail the waste and folly that is America’s war in Afghanistan.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, author of The Age of Illusions
Download or read book American Cipher written by Matt Farwell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The explosive narrative of the life, captivity, and trial of Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier who was abducted by the Taliban and whose story has served as a symbol for America's foundering war in Afghanistan ”An unsettling and riveting book filled with the mysteries of human nature.” —Kirkus Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl left his platoon's base in eastern Afghanistan in the early hours of June 30, 2009. Since that day, easy answers to the many questions surrounding his case—why did he leave his post? What kinds of efforts were made to recover him from the Taliban? And why, facing a court martial, did he plead guilty to the serious charges against him?—have proved elusive. Taut in its pacing but sweeping in its scope, American Cipher is the riveting and deeply sourced account of the nearly decade-old Bergdahl quagmire—which, as journalists Matt Farwell and Michael Ames persuasively argue, is as illuminating an episode as we have as we seek the larger truths of how the United States lost its way in Afghanistan. The book tells the parallel stories of a young man's halting coming of age and a nation stalled in an unwinnable war, revealing the fallout that ensued when the two collided: a fumbling recovery effort that suppressed intelligence on Bergdahl's true location and bungled multiple opportunities to bring him back sooner; a homecoming that served to deepen the nation's already-vast political fissure; a trial that cast judgment on not only the defendant, but most everyone involved. The book's beating heart is Bergdahl himself—an idealistic, misguided soldier onto whom a nation projected the political and emotional complications of service. Based on years of exclusive reporting drawing on dozens of sources throughout the military, government, and Bergdahl's family, friends, and fellow soldiers, American Cipher is at once a meticulous investigation of government dysfunction and political posturing, a blistering commentary on America's presence in Afghanistan, and a heartbreaking story of a naïve young man who thought he could fix the world and wound up the tool of forces far beyond his understanding.
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 The Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan written by N. Nojumi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the turbulent political history of Afghanistan from the communist upheaval of the 1970s through to the aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001. It reviews the importance of the region to external powers and explains why warfare and instability have been endemic. The author analyses in detail the birth of the Taliban and the bloody rise to power of fanatic Islamists, including Osama bin Laden, in the power vacuum following the withdrawal of US aid. Looking forward, Nojumi explores the ongoing quest for a third political movement in Afghanistan - an alternative to radical communists or fanatical Islamists and suggests the support that will be neccessary from the international community in order for such a movement to survive.
Download or read book Endless War written by Ralph Peters and published by Stackpole Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Endless War features controversial strategist Ralph Peters at his most provocative and popular, raising perceptive, often shocking questions others fear to ask. In a sweeping collection that ranges from Muslim military triumphs a thousand years ago through the turning of the tide between East and West to the brutal unconventional struggles of today and tomorrow, former Military Intelligence officer Peters extends his successful series of books on strategy and security affairs that have won him diehard fans for his insight, firsthand experience, and frankness. Endless War engages the toughest security issues of our time, including: Does our Afghan war make sense? Can we win? Do we even have a strategy? ; Has flawed military planning left our troops as virtual hostages in combat zones? ; Can Israel survive? What would an Iranian nuclear arsenal mean for the world? ; Is Islam a "religion of peace," or has the war between Islam and Western civilization continued virtually without interruption for almost fourteen centuries? ; Why doesn't the greatest superpower in history win more often? Are we our own worst enemies? ; Have we lost our sense of warfare's reality? Why don't we fight to win? ; Do terrorist prisoners really deserve better treatment than American citizens? ; What's the true price of striking serious history courses from our schools? ; Who does deeper damage to the United States, our violent enemies or arrogant ruling elite? In powerful prose combining clarity with passion, Ralph Peters continues to shape our country's military and strategic thought, while standing up for our troops and American values. No book on strategy or foreign affairs this year will be fiercer or more brutally honest. As ever more dark clouds gather over the world, this is a voice we need!--Publisher description.
Download or read book Women of the Afghan War written by Deborah Ellis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2000-04-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an account of the Afghan War and its tragic aftermath as told by the women who were caught up in it and became its innocent victims. The voices in this oral history will provide personal snapshots to the news reports of the Taliban activities now coming out of Afghanistan. These accounts provide an historical background to the growth of the Taliban, and reveal circumstances of the daily life of the women who must survive in this very closed society. Through the medium of oral history, this book brings to light the stories of the women who have suffered the consequences of the Afghan War and whose lives and whose daughter's lives have been changed forever. Through the voices of the Soviet women who supported their soldiers on Afghan soil, and the voices of the Afghan women scattered by circumstance around the globe, the last Cold War battle between the superpowers takes on a very personal tone. Policy decisions issued from on high became the rockets that destroyed these women physically, mentally, and emotionally. Children were killed or maimed and homes and families destroyed. Ultimately, these women were forced to flee or become invisible within their homeland. The Taliban militia rose from the dust of this war and by government decree reduced even the most educated and influential of the women to non-person status.
Download or read book Love War in Afghanistan written by Alex Klaits and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love and War in Afghanistan presents true stories of fourteen ordinary men and women living in Northern Afghanistan. In a quarter-century of uninterrupted war, the people of Afghanistan have endured foreign invasions, ethnic strife, a fundamentalist Islamic totalitarian regime, and the unending crossfire of rival warlord factions. The country remains an object of fascination for journalists, academics, and filmmakers from around the world. In the midst of it all it is a startlingly powerful experience to discover, here, the voices of the Afghan people themselves. Young lovers who elope against the wishes of their kin; a mullah whose wit is his only defense against his armed captors; a defector from the Soviet army; a woman who is forced to stand up to gangsters in Tajikistan—their dramatic stories emerge in their own unforgettable words. Whether in the sudden awakening of mercy in a Taliban militiaman, the lingering contempt of a woman for her husband’s first wife, the pain and confusion of flight into exile, or the resourcefulness of a child who must provide for an entire family, the real focus of these narratives is the strength of solitary individuals faced daily with their own vulnerability. Men, women, orphans, widows, widowers, Tajiks, Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Turkmens, schoolteachers, mullahs, former Taliban, mujahideen, big brothers, little sisters, captive wives, lovers in flight: Love and War in Afghanistan tells their stories, putting human faces onto a country torn by war.
Download or read book The United States of War written by David Vine and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist, History A provocative examination of how the U.S. military has shaped our entire world, from today’s costly, endless wars to the prominence of violence in everyday American life. The United States has been fighting wars constantly since invading Afghanistan in 2001. This nonstop warfare is far less exceptional than it might seem: the United States has been at war or has invaded other countries almost every year since independence. In The United States of War, David Vine traces this pattern of bloody conflict from Columbus's 1494 arrival in Guantanamo Bay through the 250-year expansion of a global U.S. empire. Drawing on historical and firsthand anthropological research in fourteen countries and territories, The United States of War demonstrates how U.S. leaders across generations have locked the United States in a self-perpetuating system of permanent war by constructing the world’s largest-ever collection of foreign military bases—a global matrix that has made offensive interventionist wars more likely. Beyond exposing the profit-making desires, political interests, racism, and toxic masculinity underlying the country’s relationship to war and empire, The United States of War shows how the long history of U.S. military expansion shapes our daily lives, from today’s multi-trillion–dollar wars to the pervasiveness of violence and militarism in everyday U.S. life. The book concludes by confronting the catastrophic toll of American wars—which have left millions dead, wounded, and displaced—while offering proposals for how we can end the fighting.
Download or read book The Wrong War written by Bing West and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2012-02-21 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER In this definitive account of the conflict, acclaimed war correspondent and bestselling author Bing West provides a practical way out of Afghanistan. Drawing on his expertise as both a combat-hardened Marine and a former assistant secretary of defense, West has written a tour de force narrative, rich with vivid characters and gritty combat, which shows the consequences when strategic theory meets tactical reality. Having embedded with dozens of frontline units over the past three years, he takes the reader on a battlefield journey from the mountains in the north to the opium fields in the south. A fighter who understands strategy, West builds the case for changing course. His conclusion is sure to provoke debate: remove most of the troops from Afghanistan, stop spending billions on the dream of a modern democracy, and insist the Afghans fight their own battles. Bing West’s book is a page-turner about brave men and cunning enemies that examines our realistic choices as a nation.
Download or read book The Hardest Place written by Wesley Morgan and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: COLBY AWARD WINNER • “One of the most important books to come out of the Afghanistan war.”—Foreign Policy “A saga of courage and futility, of valor and error and heartbreak.”—Rick Atkinson, author of the Liberation Trilogy and The British Are Coming Of the many battlefields on which U.S. troops and intelligence operatives fought in Afghanistan, one remote corner of the country stands as a microcosm of the American campaign: the Pech and its tributary valleys in Kunar and Nuristan. The area’s rugged, steep terrain and thick forests made it a natural hiding spot for local insurgents and international terrorists alike, and it came to represent both the valor and futility of America’s two-decade-long Afghan war. Drawing on reporting trips, hundreds of interviews, and documentary research, Wesley Morgan reveals the history of the war in this iconic region, captures the culture and reality of the conflict through both American and Afghan eyes, and reports on the snowballing missteps—some kept secret from even the troops fighting there—that doomed the American mission. The Hardest Place is the story of one of the twenty-first century’s most unforgiving battlefields and a portrait of the American military that fought there.
Download or read book The Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan written by M. Nazif Shahrani and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a new Preface and Epilogue written by the author after the fall of the Taliban explaining the extraordinary changes that have taken place since this book was first published in 1979, this ethnographic study describes the cultural and ecological adaptation of the nomadic Kirghiz and their agriculturalist neighbors, the Wakhi, to high altitudes and a frigid climate in Afghanistan.
Download or read book Fool s Errand written by Scott Horton and published by The Libertarian Institute. This book was released on 2017-08-16 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "After more than a decade and a half, the results are in. The U.S. government has been unable to achieve its goals in Afghanistan. Even worse, what state it has been able to achieve there is completely unsustainable and certain to fall apart when the occupation is finally called off, and America does come home. The politicans, generals, and intelligence officers behind this unending catastrophe, who always promise they can fix these problems with just a little bit more time, money and military force, have lost all credibility. The truth is America's Afghan war is an irredeemable disaster. It was meant to be a trap in the first place. America is not only failing to defeat its enemies, but is destroying itself, just as Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda always intended. Fool's Errand is an attempt to present the American people with the reality of this forgotten war, because only the ignorance of pride and refusal to admit they have been deceived can prevent Americans from realizing they have supported a policy that is destructive to the United States as well as Afghanistan." -- from Introduction.
Download or read book Afghanistan written by Tim Bird and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines why the West has failed to achieve its objectives in Afghanistan, discussing the country's drug trade, political corruption, troubled relations with Pakistan, and harsh terrain, and the lessons about nation building that can be learned from the experience.
Download or read book Afghanistan Graveyard of Empires written by John A. Tyler and published by Aries Consolidated LLC. This book was released on 2021-10-10 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the spring and summer of 2021, global news reports were filled with the impending US/NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan. At best, it would be viewed as a stalemate, with an orderly transition to a stable, US-backed Afghan government. At worse, it would be looked upon as two decades of futile war, ending with a shameful retreat that left the county at the mercy of a ruthless Taliban regime. What went wrong? This close look at the history of foreign invasions of the country, from Alexander the Great to the US/NATO occupation, gives insight into the geographical and cultural reasons this land, in the valley of the Hindu Kush mountain range, has long earned the sobriquet: Graveyard of Empires.
