Inside Afghanistan

Inside Afghanistan PDF Author: John Weaver
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 1418568945
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
He is living what many would call a nightmare. John Weaver is serving God in a war-torn country that is being blamed for the terrorist acts on American soil. Despite the fact that every day is dangerous and possibly life-threatening, John Weaver believes he sees God at work in Afghanistan and he is optimistic about its spiritual future. Inside Afghanistan is the story of the Taliban and September 11, as only this servant of God can tell it. John Weaver was there as the last American aid worker in the hostile country he now calls home. He is witness to God's ability to use ordinary Christians in the U.S. to "spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a country that otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity." This is John Weaver's riveting account of why he went and why he wouldn't leave.

Inside Afghanistan

Inside Afghanistan PDF Author: John Weaver
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 1418568945
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Get Book Here

Book Description
He is living what many would call a nightmare. John Weaver is serving God in a war-torn country that is being blamed for the terrorist acts on American soil. Despite the fact that every day is dangerous and possibly life-threatening, John Weaver believes he sees God at work in Afghanistan and he is optimistic about its spiritual future. Inside Afghanistan is the story of the Taliban and September 11, as only this servant of God can tell it. John Weaver was there as the last American aid worker in the hostile country he now calls home. He is witness to God's ability to use ordinary Christians in the U.S. to "spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a country that otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity." This is John Weaver's riveting account of why he went and why he wouldn't leave.

Adventures in Afghanistan

Adventures in Afghanistan PDF Author: Louis Palmer
Publisher: Octagon Press, Limited
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Soviet troops had "officially" withdrawn, but the country was still in the ravages of war when Louis Palmer ventured into Afghanistan, pursuing legends of a secret knowledge. His story is a fascinating interweave of political and spiritual intrigue. Not unlike Journeys with a Sufi Master, this enthralling book falls into the category described by Shah in The Commanding Self as "designed to produce a certain preparatory climate in the mind of the reader or to inform those who are not able to understand the total implications of a person's function. These books have a value which is not immediately obvious, but which is useful in many ways.... Those who are prepared to see the 'wave as an aspect of the sea' can learn that the book, a part of its content, is a stepping-stone to something else."

America in Afghanistan

America in Afghanistan PDF Author: Sharifullah Dorani
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786735822
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Afghanistan has been a theatre of civil and international conflict for much of the twentieth century – stability is essential if there is to be peace in the Greater Middle East. Yet policy-makers in the West often seem to forget the lessons learned from previous administrations, whose interventions have contributed to the instability in the region. Here, Sharifullah Dorani focuses on the process of decision-making, looking at which factors influenced American policy-makers in the build-up to its longest war, the Afghanistan War, and how reactions on the ground in Afghanistan have influenced events since then. America in Afghanistan is a new, full history of US foreign policy toward Afghanistan from Bush's 'War on Terror', to Obama's war of 'Countering Violent Extremism' to Trump's war against 'Radical Islamic Terrorism'. Dorani is fluent in Pashto and Dari and uses unique and unseen Afghan source-work, published here for the first time, to understand the people in Afghanistan itself, and to answer their unanswered questions about 'real' US Afghan goals, the reasons for US failures in Afghanistan, especially its inability to improve governance and stop Pakistan, Iran and Russia from supporting the insurgency in Afghanistan, and the reasons for the bewildering changes in US Afghan policy over the course of 16 and a half years. To that end the author also assesses Presidents Karzai and Ghani's responses to Bush, Obama and Trump's policies in Afghanistan and the region. In addition, the book covers the role Afghanistan's neighbours – Russia, Iran, India, and especially Pakistan – played in America's Afghanistan War. This will be an essential book for those interested in the future of the region, and those who seek to understand its recent past.

Out of Afghanistan

Out of Afghanistan PDF Author: Diego Cordovez
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195062949
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
The United Nations mediator for the Afghanistan conflict and a foreign policy analyst provide their own interpretations of the negotiations that helped to end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. They describe how the ideological hard line taken by the Reagan administration prolonged the conflict.

The Hardest Place

The Hardest Place PDF Author: Wesley Morgan
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812995074
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
“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.

Our Latest Longest War

Our Latest Longest War PDF Author: Aaron B. O'Connell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022626579X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
American and Afghan veterans contribute to this anthology of critical perspectives—“a vital contribution toward understanding the Afghanistan War” (Library Journal). When America went to war with Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, it did so with the lofty goals of dismantling al Qaeda, removing the Taliban from power, remaking the country into a democracy. But as the mission came unmoored from reality, the United States wasted billions of dollars, and thousands of lives were lost. Our Latest Longest War is a chronicle of how, why, and in what ways the war in Afghanistan failed. Edited by prize-winning historian and Marine lieutenant colonel Aaron B. O’Connell, the essays collected here represent nine different perspectives on the war—all from veterans of the conflict, both American and Afghan. Together, they paint a picture of a war in which problems of culture, including an unbridgeable rural-urban divide, derailed nearly every field of endeavor. The authors also draw troubling parallels to the Vietnam War, arguing that ideological currents in American life explain why the US government has repeatedly used military force in pursuit of democratic nation-building. In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, this created a dramatic mismatch of means and ends that neither money, technology, nor weapons could overcome.

Pious Peripheries

Pious Peripheries PDF Author: Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503614727
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
The Taliban made piety a business of the state, and thereby intervened in the daily lives and social interactions of Afghan women. Pious Peripheries examines women's resistance through groundbreaking fieldwork at a women's shelter in Kabul, home to runaway wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters of the Taliban. Whether running to seek marriage or divorce, enduring or escaping abuse, or even accused of singing sexually explicit songs in public, "promiscuous" women challenge the status quo—and once marked as promiscuous, women have few resources. This book provides a window into the everyday struggles of Afghan women as they develop new ways to challenge historical patriarchal practices. Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi explores how women negotiate gendered power mechanisms, notably those of Islam and Pashtunwali. Sometimes defined as an honor code, Pashtunwali is a discursive and material practice that women embody through praying, fasting, oral and written poetry, and participation in rituals of hospitality and refuge. In taking ownership of Pashtunwali and Islamic knowledge, in both textual and oral forms, women create a new supportive community, finding friendship and solidarity in the margins of Afghan society. So doing, these women redefine the meanings of equality, honor, piety, and promiscuity in Afghanistan.

The American War in Afghanistan

The American War in Afghanistan PDF Author: Carter Malkasian
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197550797
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 601

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book Winner of 2022 Lionel Gelber Prize The first authoritative history of American's longest war by one of the world's leading scholar-practitioners. The American war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, is now the longest armed conflict in the nation's history. It is currently winding down, and American troops are likely to leave soon but only after a stay of nearly two decades. In The American War in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasian provides the first comprehensive history of the entire conflict. Malkasian is both a leading academic authority on the subject and an experienced practitioner, having spent nearly two years working in the Afghan countryside and going on to serve as the senior advisor to General Joseph Dunford, the US military commander in Afghanistan and later the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Drawing from a deep well of local knowledge, understanding of Pashto, and review of primary source documents, Malkasian moves through the war's multiple phases: the 2001 invasion and after; the light American footprint during the 2003 Iraq invasion; the resurgence of the Taliban in 2006, the Obama-era surge, and the various resets in strategy and force allocations that occurred from 2011 onward, culminating in the 2018-2020 peace talks. Malkasian lived through much of it, and draws from his own experiences to provide a unique vantage point on the war. Today, the Taliban is the most powerful faction, and sees victory as probable. The ultimate outcome after America leaves is inherently unpredictable given the multitude of actors there, but one thing is sure: the war did not go as America had hoped. Although the al-Qa'eda leader Osama bin Laden was killed and no major attack on the American homeland was carried out after 2001, the United States was unable to end the violence or hand off the war to the Afghan authorities, which could not survive without US military backing. The American War in Afghanistan explains why the war had such a disappointing outcome. Wise and all-encompassing, The American War in Afghanistan provides a truly vivid portrait of the conflict in all of its phases that will remain the authoritative account for years to come.

The Afghanistan Papers

The Afghanistan Papers PDF Author: Craig Whitlock
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982159014
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
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.

Into the Land of Bones

Into the Land of Bones PDF Author: Frank L. Holt
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520953754
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The so-called first war of the twenty-first century actually began more than 2,300 years ago when Alexander the Great led his army into what is now a sprawling ruin in northern Afghanistan. Frank L. Holt vividly recounts Alexander's invasion of ancient Bactria, situating in a broader historical perspective America's war in Afghanistan.