Afghanistan's Narco War
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 40
ISBN-13:
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Seeds of Terror
Author: Gretchen Peters
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2009-05-12
Total Pages: 322
ISBN-13: 0312379277
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRevealing the astonishing story of how Afghanistan's booming opium trade is bankrolling Al Qaeda and the Taliban, "Seeds of Terror" follows the drugs from the fields of the small farmers to the clandestine deals of the weapons merchants.
Drugs, Oil, and War
Author: Peter Dale Scott
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 252
ISBN-13: 9780742525221
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPeter Dale Scott's brilliantly researched tour de force illuminates the underlying forces that drive U.S. global policy from Vietnam to Colombia and now to Afghanistan and Iraq. He brings to light the intertwined patterns of drugs, oil politics, and intelligence networks that have been so central to the larger workings of U.S. intervention and escalation in Third World countries through alliances with drug-trafficking proxies. This strategy was originally developed in the late 1940s to contain communist China; it has since been used to secure control over foreign petroleum resources. The result has been a staggering increase in the global drug traffic and the mafias associated with it--a problem that will worsen until there is a change in policy. Scott argues that covert operations almost always outlast the specific purpose for which they were designed. Instead, they grow and become part of a hostile constellation of forces. The author terms this phenomenon parapolitics--the exercise of power by covert means--which tends to metastasize into deep politics--the interplay of unacknowledged forces that spin out of the control of the original policy initiators. We must recognize that U.S. influence is grounded not just in military and economic superiority, Scott contends, but also in so-called soft power. We need a "soft politics" of persuasion and nonviolence, especially as America is embroiled in yet another disastrous intervention, this time in Iraq.
Poppies, Politics, and Power
Author: James Tharin Bradford
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2019-06-15
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 1501738348
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHistorians have long neglected Afghanistan's broader history when portraying the opium industry. But in Poppies, Politics, and Power, James Tharin Bradford rebalances the discourse, showing that it is not the past forty years of lawlessness that makes the opium industry what it is, but the sheer breadth of the twentieth-century Afghanistan experience. Rather than byproducts of a failed contemporary system, argues Bradford, drugs, especially opium, were critical components in the formation and failure of the Afghan state. In this history of drugs and drug control in Afghanistan, Bradford shows us how the country moved from licit supply of the global opium trade to one of the major suppliers of hashish and opium through changes in drug control policy shaped largely by the outside force of the United States. Poppies, Politics, and Power breaks the conventional modes of national histories that fail to fully encapsulate the global nature of the drug trade. By providing a global history of opium within the borders of Afghanistan, Bradford demonstrates that the country's drug trade and the government's position on that trade were shaped by the global illegal market and international efforts to suppress it. By weaving together this global history of the drug trade and drug policy with the formation of the Afghan state and issues within Afghan political culture, Bradford completely recasts the current Afghan, and global, drug trade.
Shooting Up
Author: Vanda Felbab-Brown
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2009-12-01
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 081570450X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMost policymakers see counterinsurgency and counternarcotics policy as two sides of the same coin. Stop the flow of drug money, the logic goes, and the insurgency will wither away. But the conventional wisdom is dangerously wrongheaded, as Vanda Felbab-Brown argues in Shooting Up. Counternarcotics campaigns, particularly those focused on eradication, typically fail to bankrupt belligerent groups that rely on the drug trade for financing. Worse, they actually strengthen insurgents by increasing their legitimacy and popular support. Felbab-Brown, a leading expert on drug interdiction efforts and counterinsurgency, draws on interviews and fieldwork in some of the world's most dangerous regions to explain how belligerent groups have become involved in drug trafficking and related activities, including kidnapping, extortion, and smuggling. Shooting Up shows vividly how powerful guerrilla and terrorist organizations — including Peru's Shining Path, the FARC and the paramilitaries in Colombia, and the Taliban in Afghanistan — have learned to exploit illicit markets. In addition, the author explores the interaction between insurgent groups and illicit economies in frequently overlooked settings, such as Northern Ireland, Turkey, and Burma. While aggressive efforts to suppress the drug trade typically backfire, Shooting Up shows that a laissez-faire policy toward illicit crop cultivation can reduce support for the belligerents and, critically, increase cooperation with government intelligence gathering. When combined with interdiction targeting major traffickers, this strategy gives policymakers a better chance of winning both the war against the insurgents and the war on drugs.
The Afghanistan Papers
Author: Craig Whitlock
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2022-08-30
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 1982159014
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA 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.
American War Machine
Author: Peter Dale Scott
Publisher: War and Peace Library
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780742555952
DOWNLOAD EBOOKScott explores the covert aspects of U.S. foreign policy. He presents compelling evidence to expose the extensive growth of sanctioned but illicit violence in politics and state affairs, especially when related to America's long-standing involvement with the global drug traffic.
Killer High
Author: Peter Andreas
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 353
ISBN-13: 0190463015
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIntroduction: How drugs made war and war made drugs -- Drunk on the front -- Where there's smoke there's war -- Caffeinated conflict -- Opium, empire, and Geopolitics -- Speed warfare -- Cocaine wars -- Conclusion: The drugged battlefields of the 21st century .
Seeds of Terror
Author: Gretchen Peters
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2012-08-07
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 9350094061
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSeptember 11 cost al Qaeda only $500,000. Terrorist groups can now earn that from the dope trade every week.” We think of the Taliban and al Qaeda as jihadis fighting an Islamic crusade from caves in Afghanistan. But that doesn’t explain why, eight years after the war on terror was declared, the CIA says these groups are better armed and better funded than ever. Seeds of Terror will reshape the way we think about the Taliban and al Qaeda, revealing them less as ideologues and more as criminals who earn half a billion dollars every year off the opium trade. With the breakneck pace of a thriller, author Gretchen Peters traces their activities from the vast poppy fields of Helmand to heroin labs run by Taliban commanders, from drug convoys protected by Stinger missiles to Dawood Ibrahim's money-laundering services in Karachi and Dubai. In this book, information gleaned from hundreds of interviews with Taliban fighters, smugglers, and law enforcement and intelligence agents is matched by intelligence reports shown to the author by frustrated U.S. officials who fear the next 9/11 will be far deadlier than the first––and paid for with drug profits. Seeds of Terror makes the case that we must cut terrorists off from their drug earnings if we ever hope to beat them. This war isn’t about ideology or religion. It’s about creating a new economy for the region: the war on terror must equally be a war on drugs.
Cruel Harvest
Author: Julien Mercille
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2012-12-24
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780745332321
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMainstream commentators claim that the Taliban are the main culprits behind Afghanistan's skyrocketing drug trade and that the US military is waging a war on drugs in Afghanistan to weaken the insurgency and keep our streets free of heroin. Cruel Harvest lifts the lid on the reality behind the mainstream narrative, showing that the United States in fact shares a large part of the responsibility by supporting drug lords, refusing to adopt effective drug control policies and failing to crack down on drug money laundered through Western banks. Julien Mercille argues that the United States is not concerned about waging a real war on drugs, and that alleged concerns about narco-terrorism mostly act as pretexts to justify occupation. In a powerful conclusion Mercille contends that US intervention in Afghanistan is motivated by power imperatives, not benign intentions.
