Afghanistans Tragedy

Author : Matt Farwell
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0735221065
Total Pages : 409 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Cipher written by Matt Farwell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The explosive narrative of the life, captivity, and trial of Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier who was abducted by the Taliban and whose story has served as a symbol for America's foundering war in Afghanistan ”An unsettling and riveting book filled with the mysteries of human nature.” —Kirkus Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl left his platoon's base in eastern Afghanistan in the early hours of June 30, 2009. Since that day, easy answers to the many questions surrounding his case—why did he leave his post? What kinds of efforts were made to recover him from the Taliban? And why, facing a court martial, did he plead guilty to the serious charges against him?—have proved elusive. Taut in its pacing but sweeping in its scope, American Cipher is the riveting and deeply sourced account of the nearly decade-old Bergdahl quagmire—which, as journalists Matt Farwell and Michael Ames persuasively argue, is as illuminating an episode as we have as we seek the larger truths of how the United States lost its way in Afghanistan. The book tells the parallel stories of a young man's halting coming of age and a nation stalled in an unwinnable war, revealing the fallout that ensued when the two collided: a fumbling recovery effort that suppressed intelligence on Bergdahl's true location and bungled multiple opportunities to bring him back sooner; a homecoming that served to deepen the nation's already-vast political fissure; a trial that cast judgment on not only the defendant, but most everyone involved. The book's beating heart is Bergdahl himself—an idealistic, misguided soldier onto whom a nation projected the political and emotional complications of service. Based on years of exclusive reporting drawing on dozens of sources throughout the military, government, and Bergdahl's family, friends, and fellow soldiers, American Cipher is at once a meticulous investigation of government dysfunction and political posturing, a blistering commentary on America's presence in Afghanistan, and a heartbreaking story of a naïve young man who thought he could fix the world and wound up the tool of forces far beyond his understanding.

Author : Bo Huldt
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000357228
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Tragedy of Afghanistan written by Bo Huldt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 stunned the world and ushered in a new period of superpower confrontation. Research into Afghan society was severely curtailed, and the ability to research the Afghan resistance was non-existent. This book, first published in 1988, was the result of a Swedish seminar that focused on the results of the war on the people and culture of Afghanistan.

Author : Raja Anwar
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Tragedy of Afghanistan written by Raja Anwar and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Shughla Karzai
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
ISBN 13 : 1664163530
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Love in Despair written by Shughla Karzai and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2021-03-24 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book will be divided into two major parts, each with a number of shorter chapters. Part I will tell the story of Shughla’s journey and how Sana Orphanage came into existence, in chronological order. Each chapter will tell about a particular step on the way, an incident or a milestone that was significant. Part II will tell the stories of some of the individual children at Sana. Some chapters will be extremely brief, while others will be longer. Not all of the children’s stories can be told, as there are over fifty children now at the orphanage; but a sampling of various stories will be included, to give the reader an idea of the kinds of things these children have been forced to deal with in their short lives.

Author : Joshua Partlow
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307962652
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Kingdom of Their Own written by Joshua Partlow and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The key to understanding the calamitous Afghan war is the complex, ultimately failed relationship between the powerful, duplicitous Karzai family and the United States, brilliantly portrayed here by the former Kabul bureau chief for The Washington Post. The United States went to Afghanistan on a simple mission: avenge the September 11 attacks and drive the Taliban from power. This took less than two months. Over the course of the next decade, the ensuing fight for power and money—supplied to one of the poorest nations on earth, in ever-greater amounts—left the region even more dangerous than before the first troops arrived. At the center of this story is the Karzai family. President Hamid Karzai and his brothers began the war as symbols of a new Afghanistan: moderate, educated, fluent in the cultures of East and West, and the antithesis of the brutish and backward Taliban regime. The siblings, from a prominent political family close to Afghanistan’s former king, had been thrust into exile by the Soviet war. While Hamid Karzai lived in Pakistan and worked with the resistance, others moved to the United States, finding work as waiters and managers before opening their own restaurants. After September 11, the brothers returned home to help rebuild Afghanistan and reshape their homeland with ambitious plans. Today, with the country in shambles, they are in open conflict with one another and their Western allies. Joshua Partlow’s clear-eyed analysis reveals the mistakes, squandered hopes, and wasted chances behind the scenes of a would-be political dynasty. Nothing illustrates the arc of the war and America’s relationship with Afghanistan—from optimism to despair, friendship to enmity—as neatly as the story of the Karzai family itself, told here in its entirety for the first time.

Author : Christopher Wyatt
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780852335208
Total Pages : 17 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Afghanistan's tragedy written by Christopher Wyatt and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 17 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Craig Whitlock
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1982159014
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Afghanistan Papers written by Craig Whitlock and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Wesley Morgan
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0812985222
Total Pages : 697 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Hardest Place written by Wesley Morgan and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: COLBY AWARD WINNER • “One of the most important books to come out of the Afghanistan war.”—Foreign Policy “A saga of courage and futility, of valor and error and heartbreak.”—Rick Atkinson, author of the Liberation Trilogy and The British Are Coming Of the many battlefields on which U.S. troops and intelligence operatives fought in Afghanistan, one remote corner of the country stands as a microcosm of the American campaign: the Pech and its tributary valleys in Kunar and Nuristan. The area’s rugged, steep terrain and thick forests made it a natural hiding spot for local insurgents and international terrorists alike, and it came to represent both the valor and futility of America’s two-decade-long Afghan war. Drawing on reporting trips, hundreds of interviews, and documentary research, Wesley Morgan reveals the history of the war in this iconic region, captures the culture and reality of the conflict through both American and Afghan eyes, and reports on the snowballing missteps—some kept secret from even the troops fighting there—that doomed the American mission. The Hardest Place is the story of one of the twenty-first century’s most unforgiving battlefields and a portrait of the American military that fought there.

Author : Ron Corbett
Publisher : Dundurn
ISBN 13 : 1459703278
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book First Soldiers Down written by Ron Corbett and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2012-04-28 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many in Canada, the April 18, 2002 tragedy with Alpha Company signaled the true beginning of Canada's lengthy combat mission in Afghanistan. This story recounts what happened that evening through archival material and the recollections of troops.

Author : Ed Darack
Publisher : Smithsonian Institution
ISBN 13 : 1588345904
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Final Mission of Extortion 17 written by Ed Darack and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On August 6, 2011, a U.S. Army CH-47D Chinook helicopter approached a landing zone in Afghanistan 40 miles southwest of Kabul. The helicopter, call sign Extortion 17, was on a mission to reinforce American and coalition special operations troops. It would never return. Insurgents fired at the Chinook, severed one of its rear rotor blades, and brought it crashing to the ground. All 38 onboard perished instantly in the single greatest moment of sacrifice for Americans in the war in Afghanistan. Those killed were some of the U.S.'s most highly trained and battle-honed commandos, including 15 men from the Gold Squadron of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, known popularly as SEAL Team 6, which had raided a Pakistan compound and killed Osama bin Laden just three months earlier. The downing of Extortion 17 spurred a number of conspiracy theories, such as the idea that the shootdown was revenge for bin Laden's death. In The Final Mission of Extortion 17, Ed Darack debunks this theory and others and uncovers the truth behind this mysterious tragedy. His account of the brave pilots, crew, and passengers of Extortion 17 and the events of that fateful day is interwoven into a rich, complex narrative that also discusses modern joint combat operations, the history of the Afghan war to that date, U.S. helicopter use in Afghanistan, and the new and evolving military technologies and tactics being developed to mitigate such tragedies now and in the future. Amazon Best History Book of the Month - September 2017