88 Days To Kandahar Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of 88 Days To Kandahar book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
The director of the American-Afghan war describes how he orchestrated the defeat of the Taliban in the region by forging separate alliances with warlords, Taliban dissidents, and the Pakistani intelligence service.
The director of the American-Afghan war describes how he orchestrated the defeat of the Taliban in the region by forging separate alliances with warlords, Taliban dissidents, and the Pakistani intelligence service.
Winner of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars, the epic and enthralling story of America's intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11 Prior to 9/11, the United States had been carrying out small-scale covert operations in Afghanistan, ostensibly in cooperation, although often in direct opposition, with I.S.I., the Pakistani intelligence agency. While the US was trying to quell extremists, a highly secretive and compartmentalized wing of I.S.I., known as "Directorate S," was covertly training, arming, and seeking to legitimize the Taliban, in order to enlarge Pakistan's sphere of influence. After 9/11, when fifty-nine countries, led by the U. S., deployed troops or provided aid to Afghanistan in an effort to flush out the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the U.S. was set on an invisible slow-motion collision course with Pakistan. Today we know that the war in Afghanistan would falter badly because of military hubris at the highest levels of the Pentagon, the drain on resources and provocation in the Muslim world caused by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and corruption. But more than anything, as Coll makes painfully clear, the war in Afghanistan was doomed because of the failure of the United States to apprehend the motivations and intentions of I.S.I.'s "Directorate S". This was a swirling and shadowy struggle of historic proportions, which endured over a decade and across both the Bush and Obama administrations, involving multiple secret intelligence agencies, a litany of incongruous strategies and tactics, and dozens of players, including some of the most prominent military and political figures. A sprawling American tragedy, the war was an open clash of arms but also a covert melee of ideas, secrets, and subterranean violence. Coll excavates this grand battle, which took place away from the gaze of the American public. With unsurpassed expertise, original research, and attention to detail, he brings to life a narrative at once vast and intricate, local and global, propulsive and painstaking. This is the definitive explanation of how America came to be so badly ensnared in an elaborate, factional, and seemingly interminable conflict in South Asia. Nothing less than a forensic examination of the personal and political forces that shape world history, Directorate S is a complete masterpiece of both investigative and narrative journalism.
Lions of Kandahar by Rusty Bradley,Kevin Maurer Pdf
One of the most critical battles of the Afghan War is now revealed as never before. Lions of Kandahar is an inside account from the unique perspective of an active-duty U.S. Army Special Forces commander. As then-Captain Rusty Bradley he began his third tour of duty in southern Afghanistan in 2006, the Taliban were poised to reclaim Kandahar Province, their strategically vital onetime capital. To stop them, the NATO coalition launched Operation Medusa, the largest offensive in its history. This is the story of a two-week battle that raged in scorching heat over a territory the size of Rhode Island.--From publisher description.
October 6, 1879. The roar of guns and the shout of men reached a heightened pitch as the Highlanders and Gurkhas crested the ridgeline and attacked the Afghani trenches. Khaki and green uniforms mixed with the scarlet of the Afghans as the battle sea-sawed for a few minutes. Then the line of scarlet-clad Afghani troops wavered and broke. British Army lieutenant Robert Burton watched as thousands of Afghani troops fled in headlong retreat. The British had seized the first line. The Road to Kandahar is an historical fiction novel about a forgotten period of history when Britain and Russia fought the very first Cold War in the heart of Asia. In this book, a British political officer, Robert Burton, and his friends, Richard Leary and Ali Masheed, fight a battle of wits against a cunning Russian political officer, Count Nikolai Kuragin. Against a backdrop of the high passes and deserts of Afghanistan, Burton, Leary and Ali must stop a potential Russian invasion during the Second Afghan War (1878-80) and fight against treachery and injustice within their own ranks.
A thrilling true story of courage and duty after 9/11—“an extraordinary read from cover to cover . . . Gritty, frustrating, brutal, exhilarating” (Midwest Book Review). Within hours after the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, ex-Green Beret Duane Evans began a personal quest to become part of the US response against al-Qa’ida. His determination led him to join one of the CIAs elite teams bound for Afghanistan. It was a journey that eventually took him to the front lines in Pakistan—first as part of the advanced element of a CIA group supporting President Hamid Karzai, and finally as leader of the under-resourced and often overlooked Foxtrot team. Evans’s mission was to venture into southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban and al-Qa’ida held sway, and try to organize a cohesive resistance among the fractious warlords and tribal leaders. He traveled in the company of Pashtun warriors—one of only a handful of Americans pushing forward across the desert into some of the most dangerous, yet mesmerizingly beautiful, landscape on earth. Brilliantly crafted and fast-paced, Foxtrot in Kandahar “dramatically reports the huge challenges and exceptional success of [Evans’s] and his brothers’ work in Afghanistan defeating the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in nine weeks” (Ambassador Cofer Black, former director, Counterterrorist Center, CIA).
The author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City (winner of the 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize) now gives us the startling, behind-the-scenes story of the struggle between President Obama and the US military to remake Afghanistan.
Kandahar in the Nineteenth Century by William B. Trousdale Pdf
This comprehensive history of Kandahar uses unpublished and fugitive sources to provide a detailed picture of the geographical layout and political, social, ethnic, religious, and economic life in Afghanistan’s second largest city throughout the nineteenth century.
From William Dalrymple—award-winning historian, journalist and travel writer—a masterly retelling of what was perhaps the West’s greatest imperial disaster in the East, and an important parable of neocolonial ambition, folly and hubris that has striking relevance to our own time. With access to newly discovered primary sources from archives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and India—including a series of previously untranslated Afghan epic poems and biographies—the author gives us the most immediate and comprehensive account yet of the spectacular first battle for Afghanistan: the British invasion of the remote kingdom in 1839. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed helmets, and facing little resistance, nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the mountain passes from India into Afghanistan in order to reestablish Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne, and as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into rebellion. This First Anglo-Afghan War ended with an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world ambushed and destroyed in snowbound mountain passes by simply equipped Afghan tribesmen. Only one British man made it through. But Dalrymple takes us beyond the bare outline of this infamous battle, and with penetrating, balanced insight illuminates the uncanny similarities between the West’s first disastrous entanglement with Afghanistan and the situation today. He delineates the straightforward facts: Shah Shuja and President Hamid Karzai share the same tribal heritage; the Shah’s principal opponents were the Ghilzai tribe, who today make up the bulk of the Taliban’s foot soldiers; the same cities garrisoned by the British are today garrisoned by foreign troops, attacked from the same rings of hills and high passes from which the British faced attack. Dalryrmple also makes clear the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan’s age-old tribal rivalries, the stranglehold they have on the politics of the nation and the ways in which they ensnared both the British in the nineteenth century and NATO forces in the twenty-first. Informed by the author’s decades-long firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan, and superbly shaped by his hallmark gifts as a narrative historian and his singular eye for the evocation of place and culture, The Return of a King is both the definitive analysis of the First Anglo-Afghan War and a work of stunning topicality.
My Life with the Taliban by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef Pdf
Abdul 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 : William J. Daugherty Publisher : University Press of Kentucky Page : 330 pages File Size : 44,7 Mb Release : 2006-06-02 Category : Political Science ISBN : 0813191610
Daugherty addresses the public perception of the CIA as a rogue agency that initiates unsanctioned, risky, covert action programs. The 17-year veteran operations officer with the CIA produces evidence to disprove this notion.
Fighting For Afghanistan is the third book in the Rogue Historian trilogy, taking Maloney’s story into the conflict in 2006, when the Taliban-led insurgency threatened to overwhelm the U.S.-led coalition in southern Afghanistan. This shift to near-conventional warfare, as opposed to the small-scale guerilla attacks and urban terrorism in Kandahar, caught everybody by surprise and forced a small, under-equipped Canadian battle group, supported by a Canadian-led multinational brigade consisting of American, British, Dutch, forces, into a desperate series of battles to protect the city and to prevent the collapse of British forces in neighboring Helmand province. The author arrived on the ground just as the situation spun out of control and he was able to capture, at all levels from infantry company to battle group to brigade headquarters, exactly what happened. This book explains the difficulties in balancing security and development, the challenges of operating in an austere, alien environment, and the human cost of counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan. Fighting For Afghanistan takes the reader through all of the moving parts and planning and then depicts how it played out on the field of battle. During the course of the action, the author became the first Canadian military historian to go into combat since the Korean War. The battles around Kandahar City in 2006 were the turning point in the Afghanistan war and this book is the first to explain events in detail from all three levels. This is the only account that shows the scope of the fighting in the south in this time period. Because of his close proximity to the action, the author was nearly killed on several occasions that summer during the fighting and he brings the intensity of this experience to his writing.
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.
Traces the author's 2002 journey by foot across Afghanistan, during which he survived the harsh elements through the kindness of tribal elders, teen soldiers, Taliban commanders, and foreign-aid workers whose stories he collected along his way. By the author of The Prince of the Marshes. Original. 20,000 first printing.
The Underground Girls of Kabul by Jenny Nordberg Pdf
An award-winning foreign correspondent who contributed to a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series reveals the secret Afghan custom of disguising girls as boys to improve their prospects, discussing its political and social significance as well as the experiences of its practitioners.
