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Through in-depth research and detailed historical context, Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls report on the injustice of U.S. policies in Afghanistan historically and in the post-9/11 era. Drawing from declassified government documents and on-the-ground interviews with Afghan activists, journalists, lawyers, refugees, and students, Bleeding Afghanistan examines the connections between the U.S. training and arming of Mujahideen commanders and the subversion of Afghan democracy today. Bleeding Afghanistan boldly critiques the exploitation of Afghan women to justify war by both conservatives and liberals, analyzes uncritical media coverage of U.S. policies, and examines the ways in which the U.S. benefits from being in Afghanistan.
By the mid-1980s, public opinion in the USSR had begun to turn against Soviet involvement in Afghanistan: the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989) had become a long, painful, and unwinnable conflict, one that Mikhail Gorbachev referred to as a "bleeding wound" in a 1986 speech. The eventual decision to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan created a devastating ripple effect within Soviet society that, this book argues, became a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this comprehensive survey of the effects of the war on Soviet society and politics, Yaacov Ro'i analyzes the opinions of Soviet citizens on a host of issues connected with the war and documents the systemic change that would occur when Soviet leadership took public opinion into account. The war and the difficulties that the returning veterans faced undermined the self-esteem and prestige of the Soviet armed forces and provided ample ammunition for media correspondents who sought to challenge the norms of the Soviet system. Through extensive analysis of Soviet newspapers and interviews conducted with Soviet war veterans and regular citizens in the early 1990s, Ro'i argues that the effects of the war precipitated processes that would reveal the inbuilt limitations of the Soviet body politic and contribute to the dissolution of the USSR by 1991.
In Afghanistan is the story of a young man, searching for adventure and self-discovery in war-torn Afghanistan during the time of the Soviet invasion. It is also a portrait of an exotic land and people desperately struggling for survival during that war, as they are today. In 1981, with a letter and some financial backing from The New York Times, Van Dyk, bearded and dressed as an Afghan, sneaked into Afghanistan , then off-limits to foreigners, and lived in the ruggedly-beautiful mountains and desert of this country with the Mujahideen, the men then fighting the Soviet Union. “My spine tingled like a boy’s. I felt the sensation of adventure…The Turbans of ten laughing young men, armed to the teeth, flapped in the wind…I would not have traded this moment for all the money in the world. It was suicidal, magnificent, and I knew we’d be all right.” But it was close. He lived through Soviet ground and helicopter attacks, saw death and suffering, but also laughter. He had much to learn about Islam, tribal traditions and the holy war the guerrillas were waging. He was accused of being a Soviet spy, but ultimately won the trust of his Afghan guides. He saw a strong, courageous, often frightened people fighting to protect the only thing they knew--their homes, their families, their way of life. The author, a former runner, a fledgling politician and writer, who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family in a small town in the Northwest, also went looking for something deep among these men who shouted “God is Great” and went into battle against the Red Army. His story is about the people he met and his journey.
Shaping the debate on how to save the military from itself. The first part recognizes what the military has done well in attracting and developing leadership talent. The book then examines the causes and consequences of the modern military's stifling personnel system and offers solutions for attracting and retaining top talent.
I Am the Beggar of the World presents an eye-opening collection of clandestine poems by Afghan women. Because my love's American, blisters blossom on my heart. Afghans revere poetry, particularly the high literary forms that derive from Persian or Arabic. But the poem above is a folk couplet—a landay, an ancient oral and anonymous form created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than 20 million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. War, separation, homeland, love—these are the subjects of landays, which are brutal and spare, can be remixed like rap, and are powerful in that they make no attempts to be literary. From Facebook to drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans that first brought these poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago, landays reflect contemporary Pashtun life and the impact of three decades of war. With the U.S. withdrawal in 2014 looming, these are the voices of protest most at risk of being lost when the Americans leave. After learning the story of a teenage girl who was forbidden to write poems and set herself on fire in protest, the poet Eliza Griswold and the photographer Seamus Murphy journeyed to Afghanistan to learn about these women and to collect their landays. The poems gathered in I Am the Beggar of the World express a collective rage, a lament, a filthy joke, a love of homeland, an aching longing, a call to arms, all of which belie any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.
From Afghanistan to Paralympic gold -- an extraordinary tale of tragedy, resilience and triumph In 2012, Combat Engineer Curtis McGrath was serving in the Australian Army in Afghanistan when, in the line of duty, he stepped on a land mine. Seriously injured but still conscious and aware he'd bleed out and die within minutes, Curtis, as the unit's chief first-aid officer, directed his comrades to apply tourniquets and administer an IV and morphine. Then, as he was stretchered to a helicopter, fearing he would never see his family again, he joked that he planned to become a Paralympian. Just months later, Curtis was up and walking on prosthetic legs, motivated by the opportunity to march with his unit in their welcome-home ceremony. Kayaking gave him a new sense of purpose and, in 2013, he and his father, Paul, paddled more than 700 kilometres from Sydney to Brisbane to raise funds for Mates4Mates, which supports current and former Defence Force members. A year later, Curtis captained the Australian team at the inaugural Invictus Games in London, founded by Prince Harry for wounded, injured or ill veterans. Then, within four years of his injury, Curtis won gold at the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games. Now a ten-time world champion gold medallist, Curtis recently stormed to victory at the Tokyo Paralympics to bring home two more Paralympic gold medals for Australia. Passionate about the power of sport to transform lives, he's ready at last to share his extraordinary story, and how he has approached every setback and challenge with courage, resilience, humour and grit.
This book describes the conduct of the US-led post-9/11 war in Afghanistan. Adopting a long-term perspective, it argues that even though Washington initially had an opportunity to achieve its security goals and give Afghanistan a chance to enter a new era, it compromised any possibility of success from the very moment it let bin Laden escape to Pakistan in December 2001, and found itself locked in a strategic overreach. Given the bureaucratic and rhetorical momentum triggered by the war on terror in America, the Bush Administration was bound to deploy more resources in Afghanistan sooner or later (despite its focus on Iraq). The need to satisfy unfulfilled counter-terrorism objectives made the US dependent on Afghanistan’s warlords, which compromised the country’s stability and tarnished its new political system. The extension of the US military presence made Washington lose its leverage on the Pakistan army leaders, who, aware of America’s logistical dependency on Islamabad, supported the Afghan insurgents – their historical proxies - more and more openly. The extension of the war also contributed to radicalize segments of the Afghan and Pakistani populations, destabilizing the area further. In the meantime, the need to justify the extension of its military presence influenced the US-led coalition into proclaiming its determination to democratize and reconstruct Afghanistan. While highly opportunistic, the emergence of these policies proved both self-defeating and unsustainable due to an inescapable collision between the US-led coalition’s inherent self-interest, hubris, limited knowledge, limited attention span and limited resources, and, on the other hand, Afghanistan’s inherent complexity. As the critical contradictions at the very heart of the campaign increased with the extension of the latter’s duration, scale, and cost, America’s leaders, entrapped in path-dependence, lost their strategic flexibility. Despite debates on troops/resource allocation and more sophisticated doctrines, they repeated the same structural mistakes over and over again. The strategic overreach became self-sustaining, until its costs became intolerable, leading to a drawdown which has more to do with a pervasive sense of failure than with the accomplishment of any noble purpose or strategic breakthrough.
A personal journey from naivete to awareness in an ancient land of stark beauty and wartime devastation
The "high-stakes" true story of how an absent-minded inventor and a down-on-his-luck salesman joined forces to create a once‑in‑a‑generation lifesaving product: "Suspenseful storytelling helps us see and feel the struggle and frustration, the sweat and tears . . . Inspiring” (Robert Kolker, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road). At the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, dramatized by the popular film Black Hawk Down, the majority of soldiers who died were killed instantly or bled to death before they could reach an operating table. This tragedy reinforced the need for a revolutionary treatment that could transform trauma medicine. So, when Frank Hursey and Bart Gullong—who had no medical or military experience—discovered that a cheap, crushed rock called zeolite had blood‑clotting properties, they brought it to the military's attention. The Marines and the Navy adopted the resulting product, QuikClot, immediately. The Army, however, resisted. It had two products of its own being developed to prevent excessive bleeds, one of which had already cost tens of millions of dollars. The other, "Factor Seven," had a more dangerous complication: its side effects could be deadly. Unwilling to let its efforts end in failure—and led by the highly influential surgeon Colonel John Holcomb—the Army set out to smear QuikClot’s reputation. Over the course of six years, Hursey and Gullong engaged in an epic struggle with Holcomb for recognition. Ultimately, a whistle‑blower inside the Army challenged the Army’s embrace of Factor Seven, which resulted in a massive lawsuit led by the U.S. Department of Justice. The lawsuit focused further attention on the financial ties between the pharmaceutical company that produced Factor Seven and Holcomb’s research institute. By withholding QuikClot—which later became the medical miracle of the Iraq War—and in the use of Factor Seven with its known, life-threatening risks of heart attacks and strokes, the lives of countless soldiers were imperiled. Using deep reportage and riveting prose, In the Blood recounts this little‑known David‑and‑Goliath story of corruption, greed, and power within the military—and the devastating consequences of unchecked institutional arrogance.
Chronicles the Soviet Union's nine-year struggle to extricate itself from Afghanistan in the 1980s and compares it to the challenges the United States may face in withdrawing from the region.