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Author: Elisabeth Leake
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022
Total Pages: 368
ISBN-13: 0198846010
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Offers a new global history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, exploring the conflict both within and beyond the framework of the Cold War. Based on extensive, multilingual research in archives across South Asia, Europe, and North America. Draws on recently declassified US documents"--
Author: Adam E Casey
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2024-04-02
Total Pages: 293
ISBN-13: 1541604024
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow support from foreign superpowers propped up—and pulled down—authoritarian regimes during the Cold War, offering lessons for today’s great power competition Throughout the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union competed to prop up friendly dictatorships abroad. Today, it is commonly assumed that this military aid enabled the survival of allied autocrats, from Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek to Ethiopia’s Mengistu Haile Mariam. In Up in Arms, political scientist Adam E. Casey rebuts the received wisdom: aid to autocracies often backfired during the Cold War. Casey draws on extensive original research to show that, despite billions poured into friendly regimes, US-backed dictators lasted in power no longer than those without outside help. In fact, American aid often unintentionally destabilized autocratic regimes. The United States encouraged foreign regimes to establish strong, independent armies like its own, but those armies often went on to lead coups themselves. By contrast, the Soviets promoted the subordination of the army to the ruling regime, neutralizing the threat of military takeover. Ultimately, Casey concludes, it is subservient militaries—not outside aid—that help autocrats maintain power. In an era of renewed great power competition, Up in Arms offers invaluable insights into the unforeseen consequences of overseas meddling, revealing how military aid can help pull down dictators as often as it props them up.
Author: Elisabeth Leake
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017
Total Pages: 279
ISBN-13: 1107126029
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores why the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands have remained largely independent of state controls throughout the twentieth century.
Author: Jere Van Dyk
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 059521553X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Afghanistan is the story of a young man, searching for adventure and self-discovery in war-torn Afghanistan during the time of the Soviet invasion. It is also a portrait of an exotic land and people desperately struggling for survival during that war, as they are today. In 1981, with a letter and some financial backing from The New York Times, Van Dyk, bearded and dressed as an Afghan, sneaked into Afghanistan , then off-limits to foreigners, and lived in the ruggedly-beautiful mountains and desert of this country with the Mujahideen, the men then fighting the Soviet Union. “My spine tingled like a boy’s. I felt the sensation of adventure…The Turbans of ten laughing young men, armed to the teeth, flapped in the wind…I would not have traded this moment for all the money in the world. It was suicidal, magnificent, and I knew we’d be all right.” But it was close. He lived through Soviet ground and helicopter attacks, saw death and suffering, but also laughter. He had much to learn about Islam, tribal traditions and the holy war the guerrillas were waging. He was accused of being a Soviet spy, but ultimately won the trust of his Afghan guides. He saw a strong, courageous, often frightened people fighting to protect the only thing they knew--their homes, their families, their way of life. The author, a former runner, a fledgling politician and writer, who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family in a small town in the Northwest, also went looking for something deep among these men who shouted “God is Great” and went into battle against the Red Army. His story is about the people he met and his journey.
Author: Liliane Stadler
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2024-02-12
Total Pages: 250
ISBN-13: 9004690662
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAfter 1979, Switzerland became increasingly involved in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan as a provider of humanitarian aid and good offices. It delivered aid to the region, hosted Soviet prisoners of war and eventually mediated between the Afghan regime and the mujahideen. What is puzzling about this development is that initially, following the Soviet invasion, both government and parliament refused to become diplomatically involved in Afghanistan on account of Swiss neutrality. The present study investigates how and why this changed between 1979 and 1992. While the practical impact of Switzerland’s good offices was modest, the crisis revealed that Switzerland continued to struggle to balance the competing imperatives of permanent neutrality and international solidarity in an increasingly multilateral world.
Author: Ahmad Shuja Jamal
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
Published: 2023-02-23
Total Pages: 385
ISBN-13: 1805260669
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 was the result of declining active support for the government, and of waste and inefficiency in aid delivery. Yet, while corrosive, these problems were not in themselves sufficient to have brought about a collapse. To a significant degree, they were the result of early failings in institutional design, reflecting an American inclination to pursue short-term policy approaches that created perverse incentives—thus interfering with the long-term objective of stability. This book exposes the true factors underpinning Kabul’s fall. The Afghan Republic came under relentless attack from Taliban insurgents who depended critically on Pakistani support. It also suffered a creeping invasion that put the government on the back foot as the US tried and failed to deal with Pakistan’s perfidy. The fatal blow came when bored US leaders naively cut an exit deal with the enemy, fatally compromising the operation of the Afghan army and air force and triggering the final collapse, with top leaders at odds over whether to make a final stand in Kabul. The Afghan Republic did not simply decline and fall. It was betrayed.
Author: Reagan Fancher
Publisher: Vernon Press
Published: 2024-09-24
Total Pages: 273
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThrough U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program, American leaders sought to keep Joseph Stalin’s Red Army in the field and fighting Adolf Hitler’s forces in the Second World War from 1941 forward. Delivered by the Anglo-American Arctic naval convoys, overland through the Iranian deserts and mountains, and through the skies from Alaska to Siberia, this much-needed material aid helped Stalin’s Red Army to continue fighting and thereby prevented a separate peace with Hitler’s Germany and a mechanized repeat of the First World War’s Brest-Litovsk fiasco. Yet Roosevelt and other U.S. officials, due to their severe underestimation of Stalin’s character and his rigid and fanatical devotion to exporting Communism at gunpoint, gambled incorrectly that they could win the Soviet premier’s heart and mind through several excessive wartime aid gestures, including the furnishing of atomic bomb materials to the Soviet regime. By 1945, American leaders had succeeded in their strategic goal of keeping Stalin and his Red Army in the war and hastening victory but failed in their efforts to purchase the Soviet premier’s goodwill and commitment to postwar peace, heralding the global Cold War, and setting the stage for later U.S. martial aid programs to those resisting aggression abroad. In addition to its primary focus on the American leadership’s perceptions of Stalin’s strategic importance to the Allied war effort in the Second World War, this work also includes a detailed assessment of Roosevelt’s Soviet Lend-Lease program alongside U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s later support for the Afghan Islamic guerrillas resisting Soviet occupation during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s and a comparison of both martial aid programs with Washington’s recent revival of Lend-Lease aid for the Ukrainian war effort. It offers today’s American leaders and policymakers a chance to consult the lessons of history and apply them in the present.
Author: Robert B. Rakove
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2023-08-08
Total Pages: 461
ISBN-13: 0231558422
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLong before the 1979 Soviet invasion, the United States was closely concerned with Afghanistan. For much of the twentieth century, American diplomats, policy makers, businesspeople, and experts took part in the Afghan struggle to modernize, delivered vital aid, and involved themselves in Kabul’s conflicts with its neighbors. For their own part, many Afghans embraced the potential benefits of political and commercial ties with the United States. Yet these relationships ultimately helped make the country a Cold War battleground. Robert B. Rakove sheds new light on the little-known and often surprising history of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan from the 1920s to the Soviet invasion, tracing its evolution and exploring its lasting consequences. Days of Opportunity chronicles the battle for influence in Kabul, as Americans contended with vigorous communist bloc competition and the independent ambitions of successive Afghan governments. Rakove examines the phases of peaceful Cold War competition, including development assistance, cultural diplomacy, and disaster relief. He demonstrates that Americans feared the “loss” of Afghanistan to Soviet influence—and were never simply bystanders, playing pivotal roles in the country’s political life. The ensuing collision of U.S., Soviet, and Afghan ambitions transformed the country—and ultimately led it, and the world, toward calamity. Harnessing extensive research in U.S. and international archives, Days of Opportunity unveils the remarkable and tragic history of American involvement in Afghanistan.
Author: Vassily Klimentov
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2024-02-15
Total Pages: 203
ISBN-13: 150177381X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA Slow Reckoning examines the Soviet Union's and the Afghan communists' views of and policies toward Islam and Islamism during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989). As Vassily Klimentov demonstrates, the Soviet and communist Afghan disregard for Islam was telling of the overall communist approach to reforming Afghanistan and helps explain the failure of their modernization project. A Slow Reckoning reveals how during most of the conflict Babrak Karmal, the ruler installed by the Soviets, instrumentalized Islam in support of his rule while retaining a Marxist-Leninist platform. Similarly, the Soviets at all levels failed to give Islam its due importance as communist ideology and military considerations dominated their decision making. This approach to Islam only changed after Mikhail Gorbachev replaced Karmal by Mohammad Najibullah and prepared to withdraw Soviet forces. Discarding Marxism-Leninism for Islam proved the correct approach, but it came too late to salvage the Soviet nation-building project. A Slow Reckoning also shows how Soviet leaders only started seriously paying attention to an Islamist threat from Afghanistan to Central Asia after 1986. While the Soviets had concerns related to Islamism in 1979, only the KGB believed the threat to be potent. The Soviet elites never fully conceptualized Islamism, continuing to see it as an ideology the United States, Iran, or Pakistan could instrumentalize at will. They believed the Islamists had little agency and that their retrograde ideology could not find massive appeal among progressive Soviet Muslims. In this, they were only partly right.
Author: John R. Schindler
Publisher:
Published:
Total Pages: 380
ISBN-13: 9781616739645
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAl-Qa’ida: in the 80s they were in Afghanistan, supported by America and fighting the Russians. In the new century they have metastasized throughout the world’s geopolitical body. Where were they in the 90s? Unholy Terror provides the answer, with all its terrifying implications for our world today. This book provides the missing piece in the puzzle of al-Qa’ida’s transformation from an isolated fighting force into a lethal global threat: the Bosnian war of 1992 to 1995. John R. Schindler reveals the unexamined role that radical Islam played in that terrible conflict--and the ill-considered contributions of American policy to al-Qa’ida’s growth. His book explores a truth long hidden from view: that, like Afghanistan in the 1980s, Bosnia in the 1990s became a training ground for the mujahidin. Unholy Terror at last exposes the shocking story of how bin Laden successfully exploited the Bosnian conflict for his own ends--and of how the U. S. Government gave substantial support to his unholy warriors, leading to blowback of epic proportions.
