Come Back to Afghanistan: Trying to Rebuild a Country with My Father, My Brother, My One-Eyed Uncle, Bearded Tribesmen, and President Karzai

Come Back to Afghanistan: Trying to Rebuild a Country with My Father, My Brother, My One-Eyed Uncle, Bearded Tribesmen, and President Karzai PDF Author: Said Hyder Akbar
Publisher: Turtleback Books
ISBN: 9781417768981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
For use in schools and libraries only. The author describes his experiences as he traveled to Afghanistan with his father, who was the spokesman for President Hamid Karzai and then became the governor of Kunar.

Come Back to Afghanistan: Trying to Rebuild a Country with My Father, My Brother, My One-Eyed Uncle, Bearded Tribesmen, and President Karzai

Come Back to Afghanistan: Trying to Rebuild a Country with My Father, My Brother, My One-Eyed Uncle, Bearded Tribesmen, and President Karzai PDF Author: Said Hyder Akbar
Publisher: Turtleback Books
ISBN: 9781417768981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
For use in schools and libraries only. The author describes his experiences as he traveled to Afghanistan with his father, who was the spokesman for President Hamid Karzai and then became the governor of Kunar.

Come Back to Afghanistan

Come Back to Afghanistan PDF Author: Said Hyder Akbar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1596919973
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
In what began as two episodes of NPR's This American Life, Akbar recounts his pilgrimage to his home country with precocious wisdom and insight, taking readers from palaces to prisons and from Kabul to the borderlands in a revealing portrait of a country in the midst of a historic transition. A Top 10 ALA Best Books for Young Adults 2005 "Honest and precociously articulate, Akbar, now 20, filters complex Afghan traditions and history through a pop-culture lens."-Entertainment Weekly "There's no shortage of realistic detail. This is a book that leaves dust in your hair and blows sand into your teeth."-San Francisco Chronicle "Raw, honest and unnerving, the book is a grim reminder of Afghanistan's ongoing political struggles."-USA Today Said Hyder Akbar is currently a junior at Yale University in New Haven, CT. He is also codirector and founder of his own nongovernmental organization, Wadan Afghanistan, which has rebuilt schools and constructed pipe systems in rural Kunar province. Susan Burton is a contributing editor of This American Life and a former editor at Harper's. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine. Also available: HC ISBN 1-58234-520-1 ISBN-13 978-1-58234-520-8 $24.95

A Kingdom of Their Own

A Kingdom of Their Own PDF Author: Joshua Partlow
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0345804031
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
The key to understanding the calamitous Afghan war is the complex, ultimately failed relationship between the powerful, duplicitous Karzai family and the United States, brilliantly portrayed here by the former Kabul bureau chief for The Washington Post. The United States went to Afghanistan on a simple mission: avenge the September 11 attacks and drive the Taliban from power. This took less than two months. Over the course of the next decade, the ensuing fight for power and money—supplied to one of the poorest nations on earth, in ever-greater amounts—left the region even more dangerous than before the first troops arrived. At the center of this story is the Karzai family. President Hamid Karzai and his brothers began the war as symbols of a new Afghanistan: moderate, educated, fluent in the cultures of East and West, and the antithesis of the brutish and backward Taliban regime. The siblings, from a prominent political family close to Afghanistan’s former king, had been thrust into exile by the Soviet war. While Hamid Karzai lived in Pakistan and worked with the resistance, others moved to the United States, finding work as waiters and managers before opening their own restaurants. After September 11, the brothers returned home to help rebuild Afghanistan and reshape their homeland with ambitious plans. Today, with the country in shambles, they are in open conflict with one another and their Western allies. Joshua Partlow’s clear-eyed analysis reveals the mistakes, squandered hopes, and wasted chances behind the scenes of a would-be political dynasty. Nothing illustrates the arc of the war and America’s relationship with Afghanistan—from optimism to despair, friendship to enmity—as neatly as the story of the Karzai family itself, told here in its entirety for the first time.

The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner PDF Author: Khaled Hosseini
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781594483172
Category : Afghanistan
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's son in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.

The Red Circle

The Red Circle PDF Author: Brandon Webb
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250018404
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Explosive, revealing, and intelligent, The Red Circle provides a uniquely personal glimpse into one of the most challenging and secretive military training courses in the world. Now including an excerpt from The Killing School: Inside the World's Deadliest Sniper Program BEFORE HE COULD FORGE A BAND OF ELITE WARRIORS... HE HAD TO BECOME ONE HIMSELF. Brandon Webb's experiences in the world's most elite sniper corps are the stuff of legend. From his grueling years of training in Naval Special Operations to his combat tours in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan, The Red Circle provides a rare and riveting look at the inner workings of the U.S. military through the eyes of a covert operations specialist. Yet it is Webb's distinguished second career as a lead instructor for the shadowy "sniper cell" and Course Manager of the Navy SEAL Sniper Program that trained some of America's finest and deadliest warriors-including Marcus Luttrell and Chris Kyle-that makes his story so compelling. Luttrell credits Webb's training with his own survival during the ill-fated 2005 Operation Redwing in Afghanistan. Kyle went on to become the U.S. military's top marksman, with more than 150 confirmed kills. From a candid chronicle of his student days, going through the sniper course himself, to his hair-raising close calls with Taliban and al Qaeda forces in the northern Afghanistan wilderness, to his vivid account of designing new sniper standards and training some of the most accomplished snipers of the twenty-first century, Webb provides a rare look at the making of the Special Operations warriors who are at the forefront of today's military.

My Life with the Taliban

My Life with the Taliban PDF Author: Abdul Salam Zaeef
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1849044449
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
This is the autobiography of Abdul Salam Zaeef, a senior former member of the Taliban. His memoirs, translated from Pashto, are more than just a personal account of his extraordinary life. My Life with the Taliban offers a counter-narrative to the standard accounts of Afghanistan since 1979. Zaeef describes growing up in rural poverty in Kandahar province. Both of his parents died at an early age, and the Russian invasion of 1979 forced him to flee to Pakistan. He started fighting the jihad in 1983, during which time he was associated with many major figures in the anti-Soviet resistance, including the current Taliban head Mullah Mohammad Omar. After the war Zaeef returned to a quiet life in a small village in Kandahar, but chaos soon overwhelmed Afghanistan as factional fighting erupted after the Russians pulled out. Disgusted by the lawlessness that ensued, Zaeef was one among the former mujahidin who were closely involved in the discussions that led to the emergence of the Taliban, in 1994. Zaeef then details his Taliban career as civil servant and minister who negotiated with foreign oil companies as well as with Afghanistan's own resistance leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud. Zaeef was ambassador to Pakistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and his account discusses the strange "phoney war" period before the US-led intervention toppled the Taliban. In early 2002 Zaeef was handed over to American forces in Pakistan, notwithstanding his diplomatic status, and spent four and a half years in prison (including several years in Guantanamo) before being released without having been tried or charged with any offence. My Life with the Taliban offers a personal and privileged insight into the rural Pashtun village communities that are the Taliban's bedrock. It helps to explain what drives men like Zaeef to take up arms against the foreigners who are foolish enough to invade his homeland.

Waiting for Dignity

Waiting for Dignity PDF Author: Florian Weigand
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553641
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
In August 2021, Taliban fighters entered the presidential palace in Kabul, ending twenty years of international efforts to build a democratic state in Afghanistan. Did the Taliban’s success rest on coercion and violence alone, or did they win the battle for public support through ideology and better services? Or did most people in the country not believe in the idea of the state at all, trusting only local elders and traditional councils? What is the source of legitimacy during armed conflict? In Waiting for Dignity, Florian Weigand investigates legitimacy and its absence in Afghanistan. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, he examines the perspectives of ordinary people in Afghanistan as well as those of rival claimants to authority: insurgents, warlords, members of parliament, security forces, and community leaders. By exploring how different types of authority attempted to legitimize their rule, Waiting for Dignity challenges common assumptions about how to build legitimacy, such as by delivering services, holding elections, or adopting traditional institutions. Weigand shows that what matters in conflict zones is what he terms interactive dignity: Citizens judge authorities on the basis of their day-to-day experiences with them. People want to be treated with dignity. The extent to which people perceive interactions to be fair, inclusive, and respectful is vital to the construction of lasting order. Combining theoretical originality with in-depth and compelling empirical detail, this book offers timely new insights into recent developments in Afghanistan and the challenges facing conflict-torn areas more widely.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

A Thousand Splendid Suns PDF Author: Khaled Hosseini
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 074758589X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
A riveting and powerful story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship and an indestructible love

The Trillion Dollar War

The Trillion Dollar War PDF Author: Abid Amiri
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781737040576
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"The Trillion Dollar War is the culmination of an Afghan's personal life story weaved into academic understanding and coupled with professional experience in the field of development. It is written for Afghans, Afghan policymakers, and those in the West and broader international community who truly wish to see Afghanistan progress after more than 20 years of war. This title offers a perspective on how the United States and Afghanistan got where they are and proposes ways to find the economic growth that has until now remained elusive"--

88 Days to Kandahar

88 Days to Kandahar PDF Author: Robert L. Grenier
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476712085
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
The director of the American-Afghan war describes how he orchestrated the defeat of the Taliban in the region by forging separate alliances with warlords, Taliban dissidents, and the Pakistani intelligence service.