Ghosts of Afghanistan by Jonathan Steele
Yes, there are dozens of books on the Afghan wars. Most of them are all about firefights and heroics. But this is the first to take the events of the war Bush and Blair started and put them in the context of the Soviet war and even the British imperial wars that preceded them, and draw the lessons out, and make a sharp summary of what should happen next. No war is ever won against the Afghans. The only option is to give up, but the military never want to give up. The politicians eventually resume control, but Obama has not overruled his generals yet. Read Steele to see how the Russians coped; how Gorbachev ended the wasteful war, and see how Obama might. This is an extremely well-written modern history -- clear, coherent, with real explanatory power. It's a synthetic work, drawing on Steele's deep experience of the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979-1988 during which period he was the Guardian's man in Moscow, and using that to illuminate the course of war since the post-9/11 invasion. As Steele makes plain in reporting the views of all sides on the ground, almost all Afghans simply want all foreigners off their soil whether they be jihadist Arabs or ignorant Texans, and will fight until that happens. This is, as Steele demonstrates, like all previous foreign invasions of the country, an unwinnable war for the Western allies. Ghosts of Afghanistan stands out for the combination of its calm clarity and comprehensibility, the firmness of its arguments, Steele's stature as an analyst of the region of 30 years standing, his position as the one UK journalist who had first access to the WikiLeaks cache on Afghanistan, and his interpretation of what he found there.
Jonathan Steele was educated at Cambridge and Yale. He was Washington Bureau Chief, Moscow Bureau Chief, and Chief Foreign Correspondent for The Guardian. He is currently a columnist on international affairs. His previous book Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq was published in 2008. In May 2011, Steele won the One World Media Press Award for his reporting from Afghanistan.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781846274305 |
| ISBN 10 | 1846274303 |
| Title | Ghosts of Afghanistan |
| Author | Jonathan Steele |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Granta Books |
| Year published | 2011-10-06 |
| Number of pages | 256 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |