No Good Men Among The Living

Download or read book No Good Men Among the Living written by Anand Gopal and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Told 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.

Download or read book An Enemy We Created written by Alex Strick van Linschoten and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: [London]: C. Hurst & Co., 2011.

Download or read book Afghanistan written by Thomas Barfield and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-25 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the political history of Afghanistan from the sixteenth century to the present, looking at what has united the people as well as the regional, cultural, and political differences that divide them.

Download or read book My Life with the Taliban written by Abdul Salam Zaeef and published by Hurst. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the autobiography of Abdul Salam Zaeef, a senior former member of the Taliban. His memoirs, translated from Pashto, are more than just a personal account of his extraordinary life. My Life with the Taliban offers a counter-narrative to the standard accounts of Afghanistan since 1979. Zaeef describes growing up in rural poverty in Kandahar province. Both of his parents died at an early age, and the Russian invasion of 1979 forced him to flee to Pakistan. He started fighting the jihad in 1983, during which time he was associated with many major figures in the anti-Soviet resistance, including the current Taliban head Mullah Mohammad Omar. After the war Zaeef returned to a quiet life in a small village in Kandahar, but chaos soon overwhelmed Afghanistan as factional fighting erupted after the Russians pulled out. Disgusted by the lawlessness that ensued, Zaeef was one among the former mujahidin who were closely involved in the discussions that led to the emergence of the Taliban, in 1994. Zaeef then details his Taliban career as civil servant and minister who negotiated with foreign oil companies as well as with Afghanistan's own resistance leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud. Zaeef was ambassador to Pakistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and his account discusses the strange "phoney war" period before the US-led intervention toppled the Taliban. In early 2002 Zaeef was handed over to American forces in Pakistan, notwithstanding his diplomatic status, and spent four and a half years in prison (including several years in Guantanamo) before being released without having been tried or charged with any offence. My Life with the Taliban offers a personal and privileged insight into the rural Pashtun village communities that are the Taliban's bedrock. It helps to explain what drives men like Zaeef to take up arms against the foreigners who are foolish enough to invade his homeland.

Download or read book The Anti-Inauguration written by Anand Gopal and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2016-01-30 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring contributions from Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Anand Gopal, and Owen Jones. The five essential speeches presented here are taken from The Anti-Inauguration, held on inauguration night 2017 at the historic Lincoln Theatre in Washington, D.C. The Anti-Inauguration event and ebook are joint projects of Jacobin, Haymarket Books and Verso Books.

Download or read book Globalization and War written by Tarak Barkawi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the interconnections between globalization and war, Barkawi (Centre of International Studies, U. of Cambridge, UK) first analyzes how war interconnects and reshapes places and how developments in the nature and utility of military force shape transregional and worldwide contexts, utilizing the relations among India, the British empire, and the Indian Army is illustrative material. He then examines cultural dimensions of war and globalization such as "geographic imaginaries" of a modern and advance West and a barbarous Orient. The themes developed in these chapters are then applied to the "War on Terror."

Download or read book Looking for the Enemy written by Bette Dam and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For 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.