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Author: A. Radack Jesselyn
Publisher:
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 165
ISBN-13: 9780983992806
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAlso include in this revised edition of "The Canary in the Coalmine: Blowing the Whistle in the Case of "American Taliban", which documents the case of John Walker Lindh, is subsequent whistleblowing information regarding Thomas Drake.
Author: Richard D. Mahoney
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 9781559707145
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn expert on international economics and foreign policy now offers an explosive investigation into the death of an American hero and the strange case of the "American Taliban," and why the public never got the truth about either--until now. of photos.
Author: Pearl Abraham
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-04-13
Total Pages: 273
ISBN-13: 1588369781
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn avid, near-six-foot-tall surfer, John Jude Parish cuts a striking figure on the beaches of the Outer Banks in North Carolina. When he isn’t on water, John lives on wheels, a self-described skate rat—grinding and kickflipping with his friends, and encouraged by his progressive parents. His hero is the great explorer Richard Burton, his personal prophet is Bob Dylan, and his world is wide open—to new ideas, philosophies, and religions. Through online forums and chat rooms, John meets a young woman from Brooklyn who spurs his interest in Islam and Arab literature. Deferring Brown University for a year, he moves to the idyllic New York borough to study Arabic. Like Burton, John embraces the experience heart, body, and soul—submitting to Islam, practicing the salaat, fasting and meditating, dancing with dervishes, and encountering the extraordinary. Burton lived the life of a nineteenth-century adventurer, but he also penetrated the ancient wisdom of secret worlds. John will too—with unforeseen consequences. Critically acclaimed novelist Pearl Abraham uses her gifts of psychological acuity and uncommon empathy to depict a typical upper-middle-class family snared by the forces of history, politics, and faith. In American Taliban, she imagines this young surfer/skater on a distinctly American spiritual journey that begins with Transcendentalism and countercultural impulses, enters into world mysticism, and finds its destination in Islam. Provocative, unsettling, and written in a brilliantly inventive, refreshingly original voice, American Taliban is poised to become one of the most talked-about novels of the year.
Author: Jean-Charles Brisard
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 249
ISBN-13: 9781560254140
DOWNLOAD EBOOKContends that a secret diplomatic oil agreement between the United States and the Taliban thwarted the search for Osama bin Laden and precipitated the September 11 attacks. Original.
Author: Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef
Publisher: Hurst & Company Limited
Published: 2011-06-16
Total Pages: 382
ISBN-13: 1849041520
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAbdul Zaeef describes growing up in poverty in rural Kandahar province, which he fled for Pakistan after the Russian invasion of 1979. Zaeef joined the jihad in 1983, was seriously wounded in several encounters and met many leading figures of the resistance, including the current Taliban head, Mullah Mohammad Omar. Disgusted by the lawlessness that ensued after the Soviet withdrawal, Zaeef was one among the former mujahidin who were closely involved in the emergence of the Taliban, in 1994. He then details his Taliban career, including negotiations with Ahmed Shah Massoud and role as ambassador to Pakistan during 9/11. In early 2002 Zaeef was handed over to American forces in Islamabad and spent four and a half years in prison in Bagram and Guantanamo before being released without charge. My Life with the Taliban offers insights into the Pashtun village communities that are the Taliban's bedrock and helps to explain what drives men like Zaeef to take up arms against the foreigners who are foolish enough to invade his homeland.
Author: Anand Gopal
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2014-04-29
Total Pages: 319
ISBN-13: 0805091793
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTold through the lives of three Afghans, the stunning tale of how the United States had triumph in sight in Afghanistan--and then brought the Taliban back from the dead In a breathtaking chronicle, acclaimed journalist Anand Gopal traces in vivid detail the lives of three Afghans caught in America's war on terror. He follows a Taliban commander, who rises from scrawny teenager to leading insurgent; a US-backed warlord, who uses the American military to gain personal wealth and power; and a village housewife trapped between the two sides, who discovers the devastating cost of neutrality. Through their dramatic stories, Gopal shows that the Afghan war, so often regarded as a hopeless quagmire, could in fact have gone very differently. Top Taliban leaders actually tried to surrender within months of the US invasion, renouncing all political activity and submitting to the new government. Effectively, the Taliban ceased to exist--yet the Americans were unwilling to accept such a turnaround. Instead, driven by false intelligence from their allies and an unyielding mandate to fight terrorism, American forces continued to press the conflict, resurrecting the insurgency that persists to this day. With its intimate accounts of life in war-torn Afghanistan, Gopal's thoroughly original reporting lays bare the workings of America's longest war and the truth behind its prolonged agony. A heartbreaking story of mistakes and misdeeds, No Good Men Among the Living challenges our usual perceptions of the Afghan conflict, its victims, and its supposed winners.
Author: Carter Malkasian
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-06-15
Total Pages: 601
ISBN-13: 0197550797
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA 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.
Author: Bette Dam
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2021-12-15
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 9354892868
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor twenty years, the Taliban was the number one enemy of Western forces in Afghanistan. But it was an enemy that they knew little about, and about whose founder and leader, Mullah Omar, they knew even less. Armed with only a fuzzy black-and-white photo of the man, investigative journalist Bette Dam decided to track down the reclusive Taliban chief a decade back. But in the course of what had seemed an almost impossible job, she got to know the Taliban inside out, realized how dangerously misinformed the global forces fighting it were, and made a startling discovery about the elusive Omar's whereabouts. The outcome of a five-year-long pursuit, Looking for the Enemy is a woman journalist's epic story that takes the reader deep into the dangerous mountains and war-ravaged valleys of Afghanistan as it throws up several unknowns about an organization that is now once again at the helm in one of the world's most fragile states.
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.
Author: Wayne E. Lee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021
Total Pages: 273
ISBN-13: 0190920645
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTaking its title from The Face of Battle, John Keegan's canonical book on the nature of warfare, The Other Face of Battle illuminates the American experience of fighting in "irregular" and "intercultural" wars over the centuries. Sometimes known as "forgotten" wars, in part because they lackedtriumphant clarity, they are the focus of the book. David Preston, David Silbey, and Anthony Carlson focus on, respectively, the Battle of Monongahela (1755), the Battle of Manila (1898), and the Battle of Makuan, Afghanistan (2020) - conflicts in which American soldiers were forced to engage in"irregular" warfare, confronting an enemy entirely alien to them. This enemy rejected the Western conventions of warfare and defined success and failure - victory and defeat - in entirely different ways. Symmetry of any kind is lost. Here was not ennobling engagement but atrocity, unanticipatedinsurgencies, and strategic stalemate.War is always hell. These wars, however, profoundly undermined any sense of purpose or proportion. Nightmarish and existentially bewildering, they nonetheless characterize how Americans have experienced combat and what its effects have been. They are therefore worth comparing for what they hold incommon as well as what they reveal about our attitude toward war itself. The Other Face of Battle reminds us that "irregular" or "asymmetrical" warfare is now not the exception but the rule. Understanding its roots seems more crucial than ever.
