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 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 Media Power and The Transformation of War written by Chiara de Franco and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-10-10 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do the news media have any role in the transformation of war and warfare? Focusing on television, this book argues that the news media alters the cognitive and strategic environment of the actors of war and politics and therefore changes the way these interact with one another.

Download or read book Against White Feminism Notes on Disruption written by Rafia Zakaria and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women’s rights. Upper-middle-class white women have long been heralded as “experts” on feminism. They have presided over multinational feminist organizations and written much of what we consider the feminist canon, espousing sexual liberation and satisfaction, LGBTQ inclusion, and racial solidarity, all while branding the language of the movement itself in whiteness and speaking over Black and Brown women in an effort to uphold privilege and perceived cultural superiority. An American Muslim woman, attorney, and political philosopher, Rafia Zakaria champions a reconstruction of feminism in Against White Feminism, centering women of color in this transformative overview and counter-manifesto to white feminism’s global, long-standing affinity with colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist ideals. Covering such ground as the legacy of the British feminist imperialist savior complex and “the colonial thesis that all reform comes from the West” to the condescension of the white feminist–led “aid industrial complex” and the conflation of sexual liberation as the “sum total of empowerment,” Zakaria follows in the tradition of intersectional feminist forebears Kimberlé Crenshaw, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. Zakaria ultimately refutes and reimagines the apolitical aspirations of white feminist empowerment in this staggering, radical critique, with Black and Brown feminist thought at the forefront.

Download or read book Media Controversy Breakthroughs in Research and Practice written by Management Association, Information Resources and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2019-09-06 with total page 839 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Media is rapidly evolving. From social media to news channels, individuals are being bombarded with headlines, new technologies, and varying opinions. Consequently, it has become pivotal to develop new approaches for information processing, understanding, and redistributing. Media Controversy: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice examines the effect of conflicting opinions and views of news outlets and other mass media outlets on cultures, individuals, and groups. It also examines the role of the internet, mobile phones, and other digital platforms in creating an environment for discussing and sharing the latest controversial news. Highlighting a range of topics such as censorship, media ethics, and media transparency, this publication is an ideal reference source for government officials, leaders, activists, professionals, policymakers, media specialists, academicians, and researchers interested in the various facets of media controversy.

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 The Media and the War on Terrorism written by Stephen Hess and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003-07-16 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These candid conversations capture the difficulties of reporting during crisis and war, particularly the tension between government and the press. The participants include distinguished journalists—American and foreign, print and broadcast—and prominent public officials, past and present. They illuminate the struggle to balance free speech and the right to know with the need to protect sensitive information in the national interest. As the Information Age collides with the War on Terrorism, that challenge becomes even more critical and daunting. "We are very careful in what we talk about publicly. We do not want to paint a picture for the bad guys. So we don't talk very much at all about what we're going to do going forward."—Victoria Clarke, Department of Defense "This was a war that was very different. It was conducted primarily by about 200 to 250 special forces soldiers on the ground. There were no reporters with those soldiers until after the fall of Kandahar, until the war was essentially over. There were no eyes and ears, and that's the way the Pentagon wants it."—John McWethy, ABC News "I covered Capitol Hill for a very long time and was always astounded by the nonpolitical motivation of a lot of people that are up there who really do want to make the world better, want to make the U.S. better. So don't come away believing that because there are political implications that there are always political motivations."—Candy Crowley, CNN "There is a feeling among the community, Muslim Americans, and also overseas that we might become the new enemy. But so far nobody knows whether it is just because of the war or if it's going to last."—Hafez Al-Mirazi, Al-Jazeera Cosponsored with the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School, Harvard University.

Download or read book Haunting Legacy written by Marvin Kalb and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States had never lost a war —that is, until 1975, when it was forced to flee Saigon in humiliation after losing to what Lyndon Johnson called a "raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country." The legacy of this first defeat has haunted every president since, especially on the decision of whether to put "boots on the ground" and commit troops to war. In Haunting Legacy, the father-daughter journalist team of Marvin Kalb and Deborah Kalb presents a compelling, accessible, and hugely important history of presidential decisionmaking on one crucial issue: in light of the Vietnam debacle, under what circumstances should the United States go to war? The sobering lesson of Vietnam is that the United States is not invincible —it can lose a war —and thus it must be more discriminating about the use of American power. Every president has faced the ghosts of Vietnam in his own way, though each has been wary of being sucked into another unpopular war. Ford (during the Mayaguez crisis) and both Bushes (Persian Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan) deployed massive force, as if to say, "Vietnam, be damned." On the other hand, Carter, Clinton, and Reagan (to the surprise of many) acted with extreme caution, mindful of the Vietnam experience. Obama has also wrestled with the Vietnam legacy, using doses of American firepower in Libya while still engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. The authors spent five years interviewing hundreds of officials from every post war administration and conducting extensive research in presidential libraries and archives, and they've produced insight and information never before published. Equal parts taut history, revealing biography, and cautionary tale, Haunting Legacy is must reading for anyone trying to understand the power of the past to influence war-and-peace decisions of the present, and of the future.

Download or read book We Are Afghan Women written by Laura Bush and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We Are Afghan Women chronicles the lives of young and old, daughters and mothers, educated and those who are still learning. Their stories are a stark reminder that women's progress in society, business, and politics cannot be taken for granted. Many of these women face serious risks for speaking so openly, but they want the world to listen. Their words will change not only how we as Americans see Afghanistan but also how we understand the complex challenges still facing women and girls around the globe.

Download or read book The Civil Society Reader written by Virginia Hodgkinson and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2009-08-15 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "civil society" anthology for experts and students alike.

Download or read book Your Country Our War written by Katherine A. Brown and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journalists are actors in international relations, mediating communications between governments and publics, but also between the administrations of different countries. American and foreign officials simultaneously consume the work of U.S. journalists and use it in their own thinking about how to conduct their work. As such, journalists play an unofficial diplomatic role. However, the U.S. news media largely amplifies American power. Instead of stimulating greater understanding, the U.S. elite, mainstream press can often widen mistrust as they promote an American worldview and, with the exception of some outliers, reduce the world into a tight security frame in which the U.S. is the hegemon. This has been the case in Afghanistan since 2001, particularly as emerging Afghan journalists have relied significantly on U.S. and other Western news outlets to report events within their government and their country. Based on eight years of interviews in Kabul, Washington, and New York, Your Country, Our War demonstrates how news has intersected with international politics during the War in Afghanistan and shows the global power and reach of the U.S. news media, especially within the context of the post-9/11 era. It reviews the trajectory of the U.S. news narrative about Afghanistan and America's never-ending war, and the rise of Afghan journalism, from 2001 to 2017. The book also examines the impact of the American news media inside a war theater. It examines how U.S. journalists affected the U.S.-Afghan relationship and chronicles their contribution to the rapid development of a community of Afghan journalists who grappled daily with how to define themselves and their country during a tumultuous and uneven transition from fundamentalist to democratic rule. Providing rich detail about the U.S.-Afghan relationship, especially former President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai's convictions about the role of the Western press, we begin to understand how journalists are not merely observers to a story; they are participants in it.

Download or read book Demands of Citizenship written by Catriona McKinnon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What should be protected - in the name of the protection of liberty, equality and stability - of citizens? Since the seventeenth century, liberal thought has been interested in the rights of individuals and their capacity to engage as free equals in the political activity of their community. This volume presents new essays by writers including Jim Tully, Alan Patten, and Philippe van Parijs that offer a fresh perspective on citizenship. After two decades of strident individualism, the contributors argue that it is time to go beyond the standard concern of what can be ascribed to citizens.

Download or read book Basic Radio Journalism written by Paul Chantler and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A working manual and practical guide containing all the tools and techniques you need to succeed in radio journalism.

Download or read book Rethinking Media Coverage written by Lisa Parks and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the post-9/11 era, media technologies have become increasingly intertwined with vertical power as airwaves, airports, air space, and orbit have been commandeered to support national security and defense. In this book, Lisa Parks develops the concept of vertical mediation to explore how audiovisual cultures enact and infer power relations far beyond the screen. Focusing on TV news, airport checkpoints, satellite imagery, and drone media, Parks demonstrates how "coverage" makes vertical space intelligible to global publics in new ways and powerfully reveals what is at stake in controlling it.

Download or read book Security Development and Violence in Afghanistan written by Althea-Maria Rivas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Security, Development, and Violence in Afghanistan provides a unique insight into the lived realities of the international intervention in Afghanistan and highlights the diversity, relationships, and interdependence of various groups including both external actors and Afghan communities. Analysis of the international intervention in Afghanistan following the post 9/11 invasion in 2001, one of the largest and most expensive in history, tends to focus on the perspective of organisational dynamics and policies or external actors. Drawing on the author’s five years of experience living, researching and working in Afghanistan, this book uses ethnographic methodologies to explore the micro-level interactions between different actors, showing how communities, local leaders, aid workers, UN officials, military and others navigated shifting security, development, and conflict dynamics. Starting with a contextual introduction to the intervention and the key debates surrounding it, this book goes on to explore the stories of security, development, and violence as constructed through official policy discourse, and then through the lived experiences of interveners and local actors. The book weaves a compelling narrative which links local and global issues and focuses on the everyday practices, relationships and acts of resistance which take place in two provinces of Afghanistan. Finally, the author highlights what this book’s findings mean both for what we know about Afghanistan and for how we understand international interventions and the everyday dynamics between actors who live and work in spaces of conflict. Security, Development, and Violence in Afghanistan: Everyday Stories of Intervention will be of considerable interest to scholars and professionals with an interest in Afghanistan, aid work, humanitarian intervention, development studies, and peace and conflict studies.

Download or read book Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare Implications for Army and Defense Policy written by and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The defense debate tends to treat Afghanistan as either a revolution or a fluke: either the "Afghan Model" of special operations forces (SOF) plus precision munitions plus an indigenous ally is a widely applicable template for American defense planning, or it is a nonreplicable product of local idiosyncrasies. In fact, it is neither. The Afghan campaign of last fall and winter was actually much closer to a typical 20th century mid-intensity conflict, albeit one with unusually heavy fire support for one side. And this view has very different implications than either proponents or skeptics of the Afghan Model now claim. Afghan Model skeptics often point to Afghanistan's unusual culture of defection or the Taliban's poor skill or motivation as grounds for doubting the war's relevance to the future. Afghanistan's culture is certainly unusual, and there were many defections. The great bulk, however, occurred after the military tide had turned not before-hand. They were effects, not causes. The Afghan Taliban were surely unskilled and ill-motivated. The non-Afghan al Qaeda, however, have proven resolute and capable fighters. Their host's collapse was not attributable to any al Qaeda shortage of commitment or training. Afghan Model proponents, by contrast, credit precision weapons with annihilating enemies at a distance before they could close with our commandos or indigenous allies. Hence the model's broad utility: with SOF-directed bombs doing the real killing, even ragtag local militias will suffice as allies. All they need do is screen U.S. commandos from the occasional hostile survivor and occupy the abandoned ground thereafter. Yet the actual fighting in Afghanistan involved substantial close combat. Al Qaeda counterattackers closed, unseen, to pointblank range of friendly forces in battles at Highway 4 and Sayed Slim Kalay.

Download or read book Tweeting is Leading written by Annelise Russell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: : Introduction -- Rhetorical agendas : a new framework for Senate representation -- Communicating Congressional priorities in the digital age -- "Short, not-so-sweet, and to (some) point" : Senate Tweets in 2013 and 2015 -- Categorizing Senators' Tweets and styles of communication -- Putting policy first : building a reputation as a policy wonk -- All politics is local : senators prioritize constituent service -- Partisan agendas : two parties, two patterns of partisan rhetoric -- Prioritization and representation : a future for social media and agenda-setting.