A tangle of assumptions, old contacts, favours and animosities were now reactivated. Superficially the invasion was quick and efficient, but Bin Laden's successful escape, together with that of much of the Taliban leadership, and a catastrophic failure to define the limits of NATO's mission in a tough, impoverished country the size of Texas, created a quagmire which lasted many years. At the heart of the problem lay 'Directorate S', a highly secretive arm of the Pakistan state which had its own views on the Taliban and Afghanistan's place in a wider competition for influence between Pakistan, India and China, and which assumed that the U.
Steve Coll's remarkable new book tells a powerful, bitter story of just how badly foreign policy decisions can go wrong and of many lives lost. Gathering contributions from a broad range of perspectives, it both identifies new technological developments in terrorism and insurgency, and addresses the distinct state responses to the threat of political, or religiously motivated violence; not only in the Middle East and Europe, but also in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and North and South America.
Through a combination of economic sanctions, global diplomacy, and intelligence work, successive U. The Iran Wars is an absorbing account of a battle waged on many levels—military, financial, and covert.
He catalogs the blunders of both the Bush and Obama administrations as they grappled with how to engage Iran, producing a series of both carrots and sticks. And he takes us inside the hotel suites where the nuclear agreement was negotiated, offering a frank assessment of the uncertain future of the U. This is a book rife. How is China undermining freedom of the sea?
Are these subversive activities new or do they reflect ancient wars? This book explores how state and non-state actors subvert one another. The core question is: why do strategies of subversion, whereby a weaker political entity undermines the dominant entity within a system to increase the weaker entity's relative power, appear to have so many commonalities across different situations and by both state and non-state actors?
I theorize that underlying principles exist within all subversive strategies. Ghost Wars. Ghost Wars Book Description:. Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll has spent years reporting from the Middle East, accessed previously classified government files and interviewed senior US. Bayou Savage, the Ghost Wars. We stood by and did nothing while the most extreme elements in the Middle East and Pakistan funded and equipped a faction in Afghanistan foreign to Afghans and Afghan history.
We even did some standing by while Pakistan used our money to fund our enemies. The main reason that Clinton did not want to help our ally fight our enemy is the pariah of American liberty, the drug war. To compete with the funding of oil Sheikhs, and the funding and assistance of the Pakistani military, Massaud was benefiting off of the number one cash crop in Afghanistan, opium. We are driving the vast profits of the drug trade away from the legal government, and to whoever will oppose us.
We are probably not going to stop a single European drug user from getting his fix, and I don't know why we are trying. It gives valuable background and insight into how that region of the world operates as well as how we the US have traditionally dealt with it. He comes off as very knowledgeable and seems to have a lot of 'inside' information. He doesn't get overly political, just tells it like it was, which is hard to find these days.
At times, this approach causes the text to be a little dry but I prefer this to the alternative i. If you are interested in the war on terror, this is a must read. If you ever wanted to understand why Afghanistan is where it is today, who bin Landen is and where he came from, which ties exist between the US and Saudia Arabia, how Islamic fundamentalist terror is justified - you get it all in this one book.
Highly credible, authentic, gripping. A must-read by all means. History of U. S By Dronera TheIndigenes. Download PDF. Mighty BattleMechs, once kings of the battlefields, now aid the reconstruction of war-torn worlds. But when terrorists destroy the interstellar communications net, each planet is thrust into isolation.
More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USA. The Ghost Army of World War II describes a perfect example of a little-known, highly imaginative, and daring maneuver that helped open the way for the final drive to Germany. It is a riveting tale told through personal accounts and sketches along the way—ultimately, a story of success against great odds. I enjoyed it enormously. For generations, the Republic of the Sphere has known a Golden Age of peace.
Suddenly old hatreds resurface and a people who have never known war face the prospect of learning its meaning firsthand. Ryan Smithson joined the Army Reserve when he was just out of high school. At age nineteen he was deployed to Iraq.
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