Author: Dov S. Zakheim
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815725469
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
A firsthand account of how the Bush administration mismanaged its Afghan campaign, A Vulcan's Tale shines new and important light on the events and people behind the headlines in the immediate years following the September 11 attacks. The "Vulcans," so named by Condoleezza Rice, were eight foreign policy experts who advised George W. Bush during his 2000 presidential campaign. After Bush assumed the presidency, the Vulcans helped shape the administration’s foreign policy following 9/11, including the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. All were veterans of past administrations, having served under either Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush, and they included among their ranks Dov Zakheim. Made comptroller and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense in 2001, Zakheim was also named the DoD’s coordinator for Afghan civilian reconstruction in 2002. In A Vulcan's Tale, Zakheim draws on his own participation and intimate knowledge to analyze how the United States missed critical opportunities while it struggled to manage two wars, particularly the seemingly endless endeavor in Afghanistan. In his view, the Bush administration's disappointing results in Afghanistan were partly attributable to the enormity of the challenges, certainly. But flawed leadership and deficiencies of management, understanding, and forethought all played their parts as well. The power of the purse proved to be especially damaging. The Office of Management and Budget was slow to fund Defense's efforts at the outset of the Afghan conflict and then inadequately funded the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, casting the die for several additional years of conflict. The invasion of Iraq siphoned off critical resources for Afghanistan, thereby further complicating that country's reconstruction. Even with public policy of the highest order, the devil still lurked in the details, as the DoD's "money man" was soon to discover while he struggled to fund and manage the reconstruction of civilian Afghanistan. A Vulcan's Tale is an authoritative, candid but fair account of how a wise and admirable goal can be waylaid by insufficient funding and ineffective coordination, with the result of faulty—or, at best, incomplete—implementation.
Author: Moonis Ahmar
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Afghanistan
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Challenge of Rebuilding Afghanistan, held at Islamabad during 2-3 March 2005.
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.
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: International Development Committee
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215513632
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 84
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Book Description
This report, produced by the International Development Committee (HCP 65-I. session 2007-08), along with oral and written evidence (HCP 65-II, session 2007-08, ISBN 9780215513649) examines the reconstruction of Afghanistan. The Committee reached a number of conclusions, including: that reconstruction of the country and its economy will be a lengthy process and that Afghanistan will not meet the UN's Millennium Development Goals by 2015; that any reconstruction process needs to be Afghan-led; that the consequences for global security are significant if the international community abandons Afghanistan. The Committee also set out 50 recommendations, that include: the Committee supports the UK Government's continuing commitment to help bring peace and security to this region, and that Afghanistan needs to remain a major focus for the Department for International Development; that the presence of 7,000 British troops in this region needs the support of the British public, but that DFID needs a media and communications strategy that places greater emphaisis on the achievements in political reform, economic growth and basic services; that the international commitments by the Afghanistan Government to the rights of women are honoured; the Committee recommends the early provision of a dedicated aeroplane for the use of DFID and other Embassy staff in Afghanistan; the Committee expressed disappointment that sufficient international momentum could not be gained for the appointment of a high level joint UN, NATO, EU coordinator, or super-envoy in Afghanistan, and that ways must be found to fully resource the UN Special Representative in the region; that to stabilise security conditions, full cooperation between the NATO forces, the Afghan Government and armed forces is crucial; that further international pressure be placed on Pakistan to control more effectively the Federally Administered Tribal Areas also that controlling drug trafficking between Afghanistan and Pakistan is key to any counter-narcotics policy; that there has been insufficient attention to and funding for the agricultural and livestock sectors which could provide a range of alternatives to Opium poppy production, and that DFID should establish a programme to offer technical advice and training in agricultural extension services and develop a multifaceted rural livelihoods approach. For a report on UK Operations in Afghanistan, see (HCP 408, session 2006-07, ISBN 9780215035073). For an earlier oral and written evidence on reconstructing Afghanistan, see (HCP 772-i, session 2005-06, ISBN 9780215028112).
Author: International Monetary Fund
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 9781589063242
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 102
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Book Description
This book, which reflects the IMF staff's work in Afghanistan from early 2002 through the first quarter of 2004, provides an overview of the institutional and economic achievements in Afghanistan in the post-Taliban period, that is, from late 2001 to early 2004. During this period, the staff focused on helping (often under difficult circumstances) the Afghan authorities quickly establish abasic framework for economic management and policies, including rebuilding key institutions. Reconstructing Afghanistan describes the strong economic recovery that took place during 2002 and 2003; traces the formulation and implementation of the government’s budgetary policy; discusses the progress made in rebuilding fiscal institutions; and outlines the challenges and issues that the authorities faced in the area of monetary and exchange rate policy.
Author: William Maley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317608925
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
This book identifies some of the main lessons for civil-military interactions that can be derived from the experiences of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan. The book has three main themes. Firstly, the volume analyses why the ways in which civil and military actors interact in theatres of operations such as Afghanistan matter — for both those categories of actors, and for the ordinary people who their interactions serve. Second, the book highlights that these interactions are invariably complex. The third theme, which arises specifically from ‘the PRT experience’ in Afghanistan, is that such teams vary significantly in their roles, resourcing, and operational environments. Consequently, to appraise the value of ‘the PRT experience’, it is necessary to unpack the experiences of different PRTs, which the use of case studies allows one to do. The volume comprises an introduction, identifying some key questions to which the PRT experience gives rise, and case studies of the experiences of the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, The Netherlands, Australia, Germany and France; chapters dealing with the roles played by NGOs and the UN system and a discussion from an Afghan perspective of the implications of civilian casualties. It is the combination of the diverse cases discussed in this book with a focus on the broad challenges of optimising civil-military interactions that makes this book distinctive. This book will be of much interest to students of the Afghan War, civil-military relations, statebuilding, Central Asian politics and IR in general.
Author: Adenrele Awotona
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781032475448
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Rebuilding Afghanistan in Times of Crisis provides academics and researchers interested in planning, urbanism and conflict studies with a multidisciplinary, international assessment of the reconstruction and foreign aid efforts in Afghanistan. The book draws together expert contributions from countries across three continents - Asia, Europe and North America - which have provided external aid to Afghanistan. Using international, regional and local approaches, it highlights the importance of rebuilding sustainable communities in the midst of ongoing uncertainties. It explores the efficacy of external aid; challenges faced; the response of multilateral international agencies; the role of women in the reconstruction process; and community-based natural disaster risk management strategies. Finally, it looks at the lessons learned in the conflict reconstruction process to better prepare the country for future potential human, economic, infrastructural and institutional vulnerabilities.
Author: Adam Pain
Publisher: Practical Action
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
This book will be of interest to readers concerned with the future of Afghanistan and also those with a broader interest in post-conflict rehabilitation in fragile states, providing an important reference for operational agencies and researchers.
Author: Larry P. Goodson
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295801581
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
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.
Author: Nik Hynek
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136661018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
This edited volume maps and theorizes NATO-ISAF’s multi-national contribution to peacebuilding and reconstruction in Afghanistan. It answers key questions through a series of case studies which together form a comparative study of national contributions to the multilateral mission in Afghanistan.
