After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests

After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests PDF Author: Ted Rall
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 1429955589
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
An unflinching account—in words and pictures—of America's longest war by our most outspoken graphic journalist Ted Rall traveled deep into Afghanistan—without embedding himself with U.S. soldiers, without insulating himself with flak jackets and armored SUVs—where no one else would go (except, of course, Afghans). He made two long trips: the first in the wake of 9/11, and the next ten years later to see what a decade of U.S. occupation had wrought. On the first trip, he shouted his dispatches into a satellite phone provided by a Los Angeles radio station, attempting to explain that the booming in the background—and sometimes the foreground—were the sounds of an all-out war that no one at home would entirely own up to. Ten years later, the alternative newspapers and radio station that had financed his first trip could no longer afford to send him into harm's way, so he turned to Kickstarter to fund a groundbreaking effort to publish online a real-time blog of graphic journalism (essentially, a nonfiction comic) documenting what was really happening on the ground, filed daily by satellite. The result of this intrepid reporting is After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests—a singular account of one determined journalist's effort to bring the realities of life in twenty-first-century Afghanistan to the world in the best way he knows how: a mix of travelogue, photography, and award-winning comics.

After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests

After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests PDF Author: Ted Rall
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 1429955589
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
An unflinching account—in words and pictures—of America's longest war by our most outspoken graphic journalist Ted Rall traveled deep into Afghanistan—without embedding himself with U.S. soldiers, without insulating himself with flak jackets and armored SUVs—where no one else would go (except, of course, Afghans). He made two long trips: the first in the wake of 9/11, and the next ten years later to see what a decade of U.S. occupation had wrought. On the first trip, he shouted his dispatches into a satellite phone provided by a Los Angeles radio station, attempting to explain that the booming in the background—and sometimes the foreground—were the sounds of an all-out war that no one at home would entirely own up to. Ten years later, the alternative newspapers and radio station that had financed his first trip could no longer afford to send him into harm's way, so he turned to Kickstarter to fund a groundbreaking effort to publish online a real-time blog of graphic journalism (essentially, a nonfiction comic) documenting what was really happening on the ground, filed daily by satellite. The result of this intrepid reporting is After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests—a singular account of one determined journalist's effort to bring the realities of life in twenty-first-century Afghanistan to the world in the best way he knows how: a mix of travelogue, photography, and award-winning comics.

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

Return of a King

Return of a King PDF Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307958299
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
From William Dalrymple—award-winning historian, journalist and travel writer—a masterly retelling of what was perhaps the West’s greatest imperial disaster in the East, and an important parable of neocolonial ambition, folly and hubris that has striking relevance to our own time. With access to newly discovered primary sources from archives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and India—including a series of previously untranslated Afghan epic poems and biographies—the author gives us the most immediate and comprehensive account yet of the spectacular first battle for Afghanistan: the British invasion of the remote kingdom in 1839. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed helmets, and facing little resistance, nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the mountain passes from India into Afghanistan in order to reestablish Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne, and as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into rebellion. This First Anglo-Afghan War ended with an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world ambushed and destroyed in snowbound mountain passes by simply equipped Afghan tribesmen. Only one British man made it through. But Dalrymple takes us beyond the bare outline of this infamous battle, and with penetrating, balanced insight illuminates the uncanny similarities between the West’s first disastrous entanglement with Afghanistan and the situation today. He delineates the straightforward facts: Shah Shuja and President Hamid Karzai share the same tribal heritage; the Shah’s principal opponents were the Ghilzai tribe, who today make up the bulk of the Taliban’s foot soldiers; the same cities garrisoned by the British are today garrisoned by foreign troops, attacked from the same rings of hills and high passes from which the British faced attack. Dalryrmple also makes clear the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan’s age-old tribal rivalries, the stranglehold they have on the politics of the nation and the ways in which they ensnared both the British in the nineteenth century and NATO forces in the twenty-first. Informed by the author’s decades-long firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan, and superbly shaped by his hallmark gifts as a narrative historian and his singular eye for the evocation of place and culture, The Return of a King is both the definitive analysis of the First Anglo-Afghan War and a work of stunning topicality.

From Kabul to Baghdad and Back

From Kabul to Baghdad and Back PDF Author: John R Ballard
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1612511686
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
From Kabul to Baghdad and Back provides insight into the key strategic decisions of the Afghan and Iraq campaigns as the United States attempted to wage both simultaneously against al-Qaeda and its supporting affiliates. It also evaluates the strategic execution of those military campaigns to identify how well the two operations were conducted in light of their political objectives. The book identifies the elements that made the 2001 military operation to oust the Taliban successful, then with combat operations in Iraq as a standard of comparison, the authors analyze the remainder of the Afghan campaign and the essential problems that plagued that effort, from the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2002, through the ill-fated transition to NATO lead in Afghanistan in 2006, the dismissal of Generals McKiernan and McChrystal, the eventual decision by President Obama to make the Afghan campaign the main effort in the war on extremism, and the final development of drawdown plans following the end of the war in Iraq. No other book successfully compares and contrasts the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan from a national strategic perspective, analyzing the impact of fighting the Iraq War on the success of the United States campaign in Afghanistan. It is also the first book to specifically question several key operational decisions in Afghanistan including: the decision to give NATO the lead in Afghanistan, the decisions to fire Generals McKiernan and McChrystal and the decision to conduct an Iraq War-style surge in Afghanistan. It also compares the Afghan campaigns fought by the Soviet Union and the United States, the counterinsurgency campaigns styles in Iraq and Afghanistan and the leadership of senior American officials in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In the final chapter, the key lessons of the two campaigns are outlined, including the importance of effective strategic decision-making, the utility of population focused counterinsurgency practices, the challenges of building partner capacity during combat, and the mindset required to prosecute modern war.

Come Back to Afghanistan

Come Back to Afghanistan PDF Author: Said Hyder Akbar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780747583660
Category : Afghanistan
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Said Hyder Akbar's ordinary suburban Californian life was turned upside-down after September 11th. Hyder's father, a scion of an Afghan political family, left for Afghanistan to become the new president's chief spokesman and later governor of Kunar, a rural province. Obsessed since childhood with a country he had never visited, seventeen-year-old Hyder convinced his father to let him join him. Working alongside his father at the presidential palace and in Kunar gave Hyder a unique perspective on the creation of democratic government in Afghanistan. In Come Back to Afghanistan, Hyder interweaves his personal journey - that of a teenager struggling to find his identity in his parents' homeland - with his travels, which take him from palaces to prisons and from Kabul to the borderlands, to give a dramatic account of political and civilian life in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Returning Home from Iraq and Afghanistan

Returning Home from Iraq and Afghanistan PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309152852
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Nearly 1.9 million U.S. troops have been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq since October 2001. Many service members and veterans face serious challenges in readjusting to normal life after returning home. This initial book presents findings on the most critical challenges, and lays out the blueprint for the second phase of the study to determine how best to meet the needs of returning troops and their families.

Fahim Speaks

Fahim Speaks PDF Author: Fahim Fazli
Publisher: Warriors Publishing Group
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
A Warrior-Actor's Odyssey from Afghanistan to Hollywood and Back Fahim Fazli is a man of two worlds: Afghanistan, the country of his birth, and America, the nation he adopted and learned to love. He’s also a man who escaped oppression, found his dream profession, and then paid it all forward by returning to Afghanistan as an interpreter with the U.S. Marines. When Fahim speaks, the story he tells is harrowing, fascinating, and inspiring. Born and raised in Kabul, Fahim saw his country and family torn apart by revolution and civil war. Dodging Afghan authorities and informers with his father and brother, Fahim made his way across the border to Pakistan and then to America. After reuniting with his mother, sisters, and another brother, he moved to California with dreams of an acting career. After 15 turbulent years that included two unsuccessful arranged marriages to Afghan brides, he finally qualified for membership in the Screen Actors Guild—and found true American love. Though Fahim's California life was happy and rewarding, he kept thinking about the battlefields of Afghanistan. Haunted by a desire to serve his adopted country, he became a combat linguist. While other interpreters opted for safe assignments, Fahim chose one of the most dangerous: working with the Leathernecks in embattled Helmand Province, where his outgoing personality and deep cultural understanding made him a favorite of both Marines and local Afghans—and a pariah to the Taliban, who put a price on his head. Fahim Speaks is an inspiring story of perseverance and patriotism—and of the special love that one man developed for his adopted country. A gold medal winner from the Military Writers Society of America!

Long Way Back

Long Way Back PDF Author: Christopher Alexander
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
ISBN: 144340912X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Christopher Alexander was sent to Afghanistan in 2003, charged with supporting the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, part of the global response to 9/11. Primarily covering the years 2001 to 2011, The Long Way Back tells the story of the historic achievements and bitter disappointments encountered on the road to political stability in Afghanistan. But this is much more than a first-hand account of recent events: it is a clear-eyed take on what has been achieved, the triumphs and failings of Afghans and foreigners alike, and why the country is still mired in conflict. Alexander guides us through the intricacies of the cross-border insurgency—showing that Pakistan continues the campaign begun under the British frontier policy and scaled up by the U.S. for jihad against the Soviets. With Alexander’s direct access to and experience with the country’s leaders, the international players and ordinary Afghan citizens, a unique portrait of Afghanistan is revealed and an argument is made for what it will take for the country to achieve a lasting peace.

Courage After Fire

Courage After Fire PDF Author: Keith Armstrong
Publisher: Ulysses Press
ISBN: 1569755132
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Offers soldiers and their families a comprehensive guide to dealing with the all-too-common repercussions of combat duty, including posttraumatic stress symptoms, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse.

Connecting Histories in Afghanistan

Connecting Histories in Afghanistan PDF Author: Shah Hanifi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804774110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Originally published online in 2008 by Columbia University Press.