Ghosts Of Afghanistan:The Haunted Battleground by Jonathan Steele

Ghosts of Afghanistan:The Haunted Battleground
Jonathan Steele
AED 169.00
ISBN 9781846274305

Description

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.

About the Author

Jonathan Steele is a British journalist, author of several books on international affairs. Jonathan Steele was educated at King's College, Cambridge (BA) and Yale University (MA). He has reported on Afghanistan, Russia, Iraq, and other countries. He was Washington Bureau Chief, Moscow Bureau Chief, and Chief Foreign Correspondent for The Guardian. He is currently a columnist on international affairs. In January 2008 his book Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq was published by I.B. Tauris in the UK and Counterpoint in the US.

The 9/11 Wars by Jason Burke

The 9/11 Wars
Jason Burke
AED 110.00
ISBN 9781846145179

Description

Throughout the 1990s a vast conflict was brewing. The storm broke on September 11th 2001. Since then much of the world has seen invasions, bombings, battles and riots. Hundreds of thousands of people have died. Jason Burke, a first hand witness of many of the conflict's key moments, has written the definitive account of its course. At once investigation, reportage and contemporary history, it is based on hundreds of interviews with participants including desperate refugees and senior intelligence officials, ministers and foot-soldiers, active militants and their victims. Burke reveals the true nature of contemporary Islamic militancy and the inside story of the fight against it. He cuts through the myth and propaganda of all sides to reveal the reality behind well-known - and lesser known - episodes, and brings characters, voices and a sense of place to a gripping narrative. "The 9/11 Wars" is an essential book for understanding the dangerous and unstable twenty-first century. Whether reporting on the riots in France or the killing of Bin Laden, suicide bombers in Iraq or British troops fighting in Helmand, Jason Burke tells the story of a world that changed forever when the hijacked planes flew out of the brilliant blue sky above Manhattan on September 11th 2001...

About the Author

Jason Burke (born 1970) is a British journalist and the author of several non-fiction books. A correspondent covering South Asia for The Observer and The Guardian, he is based in New Delhi as of 2010. In his years of journalism, Burke has addressed a wide range of topics including politics, social affairs and culture in Europe and the Middle East. He has written extensively on Islamic extremism and, among numerous other conflicts, covered the wars of 2001 in Afghanistan and 2003 in Iraq. According to a 2009 article in Asharq Al-Awsat, Burke has been the "first journalist to conduct an interview with President Pervez Musharraf after he seized power in Pakistan in October 1999" and "the first western journalist to enter the Afghan city of Khost during the US war in Afghanistan". In 2003, Burke authored Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, which was later updated and republished as…

That Used To Be Us:What Went Wrong With America-And How It Can Come Back by Thomas L. Friedman And Michael Mandelbaum

That Used to Be Us:What Went Wrong With America-And How It Can Come Back
Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
AED 90.00
ISBN 9781408703595

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Description

Pulitzer prize-winning, globally bestselling author charts America's fall from power and influence - and assesses its paths ahead.

America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges, on which its future depends, and it is failing to meet them. In That Used To Be Us , Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum analyze those challenges - globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation's chronic deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption - and spell out what needs to be done now to rediscover America's power and prowess.They explain how the end of the cold war blinded the nation to the need to address these issues seriously. They show how America's history, when properly understood, provides the key to coping successfully and explain how the paralysis of the US political system and the erosion of key American values have made it impossible to carry out the policies the country needs. that Used To Be Us is both a searching exploration of the American condition today and a rousing manifesto for American renewal.

About The Author

Thomas L. Friedman is a three-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his work with The New York Times. Michael Mandelbaum is director of the American Foreign Policy program at Johns Hopkins

Arrival City by Doug Saunders

Arrival City
Doug Saunders
AED 48.00
ISBN 9780099522393

Description

A third of the world's people are in the midst of the largest population move in human history, as the last of the word's rural populations abandons agriculture and moves to the urban areas of the developing world and of the wealthy West. This shift is at the heart of the most dangerous and violent conflicts today in North America, Europe and Asia. It also has enormous potential to renew the world's economies and bring a final end to mass poverty - if conflict and clashes can be avoided. It is taking place not in the cities we know but in a new type of space, on the margins of our great cities that we rarely notice: the 'arrival city'. These spaces are becoming the power centres of the new era. It is from these, the new home of an enormous floating population of 2 billion people, that most of the world's most serious crises and explosions of violence are emerging. In "Arrival City" - both a groundbreaking work of reportage and an exciting, vivid travelogue - award-winning journalist Doug Saunders offers a detailed tour of the key points in the Great Migration, and considers the actions that have turned this enormous population shift into either a success or a violent failure.

About the Author

Doug Saunders is the European Bureau Chief of the Globe and Mail, Canada's largest and most respected national daily newspaper, and the author of a popular and award-winning weekly column devoted to the intellectual ideas and social developments behind the news. An experienced foreign-affairs writer who has won the Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize on four occasions, he has visited the unknown outskirts and fringes of cities in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and China. He lives in London with his wife, the writer Elizabeth Renzetti, and their two children.

Adapt:Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

Adapt:Why Success Always Starts With Failure
Tim Harford
AED 86.00
ISBN 9781408701539

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Description

Everything we know about solving the world's problems is wrong. Out: Plans, experts and above all, leaders. In: Adapting - improvise rather than plan; fail, learn, and try again In this groundbreaking new book, Tim Harford shows how the world's most complex and important problems - including terrorism, climate change, poverty, innovation, and the financial crisis - can only be solved from the bottom up by rapid experimenting and adapting. From a spaceport in the Mojave Desert to the street battles of Iraq, from a blazing offshore drilling rig to everyday decisions in our business and personal lives, this is a handbook for surviving - and prospering - in our complex and ever-shifting world.

About the Author

Tim Harford wrote the million-selling 'The Undercover Economist' and has won awards both for his Financial Times columns and BBC Radio show 'More or Less'.

Pakistan:A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven

Pakistan:A Hard Country
Anatol Lieven
AED 101.00
ISBN 9781846144578

Description

In the past decade Pakistan has emerged as a country of immense importance. Large, heavily populated, strategically placed between Iran, Afghanistan and India, Pakistan has since its creation just over sixty years ago been pulled in several different, irreconcilable directions. In the wake of Pakistan s development of nuclear weapons, Osama Bin Laden s presence in its unpoliceable border areas, its shelter of the Afghan Taleban, and the spread of terrorist attacks by groups based in Pakistan to London, Bombay and New York, there is a clear need to understand this remarkable and highly contradictory place.Far from seeing Pakistan as the failed state often portrayed in the media, Lieven s extraordinary new book instead treats it as a viable and coherent state that, within limits and by the standards of its own region rather than the West, does work. Lieven argues strongly against US actions that would risk destroying that state in the illusory search for victory in Afghanistan. This work is based on a profound and sophisticated analysis of Pakistan s history and its social, religious and political structures. Lieven has interviewed hundreds of Pakistanis at every level of society, from leading politicians and soldiers to village mullahs and rickshaw drivers. In particular, his examination of the roots of popular sympathy for the Taleban in Pakistan draws on the testimony of people whose views are rarely consulted by Western analysts.

About the Author

(Peter Paul)^{[citation needed]} Anatol Lieven (28 June 1960) is a British author, journalist, and policy analyst. He is presently a Senior Researcher (Bernard L. Schwartz fellow and American Strategy Program fellow) at the New America Foundation, where he focuses on US global strategy and the War on Terrorism, Associated Scholar of the Transnational Crisis Project, Chair of International Relations and Terrorism Studies at King's College London.

Between 2000 and 2005, he was a Senior Associate for Foreign and Security policy at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Previously a journalist with the Financial Times covering Central Europe, with The Times (London) covering Pakistan, Afghanistan, the former Soviet Union, and Russia (including the First Chechen War), and wrote from India as a freelancer. He has also served as an editor at the International Institute for Strategic studies in London, where he worked for the Eastern Services of the BBC. He received a B.A. in history and a doctorate in political science from Jesus College, Cambridge.

Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Green Zone
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
AED 68.00
ISBN 9780307477538

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Description

As the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, Chandrasekaran has probably spent more time in U.S.-occupied Iraq than any other American journalist, and his intimate perspective permeates this history of the Coalition Provisional Authority headquartered in the Green Zone around Saddam Hussein's former palace. He presents the tenure of presidential viceroy L. Paul Bremer between May 2003 and June 2004 as an all-too-avoidable disaster, in which an occupational administration selected primarily for its loyalty to the Bush administration routinely ignored the reality of local conditions until, as one ex-staffer puts it, "everything blew up in our faces." Chandrasekaran unstintingly depicts the stubborn cluelessness of many Americans in the Green Zone—like the army general who says children terrified by nighttime helicopters should appreciate "the sound of freedom." But he sympathetically portrays others trying their best to cut through the red tape and institute genuine reforms. He also has a sharp eye for details, from casual sex in abandoned offices to stray cats adopted by staffers, which enable both advocates and critics of the occupation to understand the emotional toll of its circuslike atmosphere. Thanks to these personal touches, the account of the CPA's failures never feels heavy.

About the Author

Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an assisting managing editor of the Washington Post, where he has worked since 1994. He previously served the Post as a bureau chief in Baghdad, Cairo and Southeast Asia, and as a correspondent covering the war in Afghanistan. He recently completed a term as journalist-in-residence at the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, and was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. He lives in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, published by Bloomsbury in March 2007, and in paperback in March 2008, which has been awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2007.

The Art Of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar

The Art of Choosing
Sheena Iyengar
AED 60.00
ISBN 9780349121420

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Description

Every day we make choices. Coke or Pepsi? Save or spend? Stay or go?

Whether mundane or life-altering, these choices define us and shape our lives. Sheena Iyengar asks the difficult questions about how and why we choose: Is the desire for choice innate or bound by culture? Why do we sometimes choose against our best interests? How much control do we really have over what we choose? Her award-winning research reveals that the answers are surprising and profound. In our world of shifting political and cultural forces, technological revolution, and interconnected commerce, our decisions have far-reaching consequences. Use this book as your companion and guide for the many challenges ahead.

'No one asks better questions, or comes up with more intriguing answers' Malcolm Gladwell, author of THE TIPPING POINT.

About the Author

Sheena Iyengar is the S.T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia University and a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award. She holds an undergraduate degree from the Wharton School of Business and a doctorate in social psychology from Stanford University. Her work is regularly cited in periodicals such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and TIME.

Considered one of the world's experts on choice, Sheena has written her own book, The Art of Choosing. In the book, she explores questions such as why choice is powerful, and where its power comes from; the ways in which people make choices; the relationship between how we choose and who we are; why we are so often disappointed by our choices; how much control we really have over our everyday choices; how we choose when our options are practically unlimited; and whether we should ever let others choose for us, and if so, whom and why

We Can Have Peace In The Holy Land by Jimmy Carter

We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land
Jimmy Carter
AED 76.00
ISBN 9781849830645

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Description

President Carter has been a student of the biblical Holy Land all his life. For the last three decades, as president of the United States and as founder of The Carter Center, he has studied the complex and interrelated issues of the region's conflicts and has been actively involved in reconciling them. He knows the leaders of all factions in the region who will need to play key roles, and he sees encouraging signs among them. Carter describes the history of previous peace efforts and why they fell short. He argues persuasively that the road to a peace agreement is now open and that it has broad international and regional support. Most of all, since there will be no progress without courageous and sustained U.S. leadership, he says the time for progress is now. President Barack Obama is committed to a personal effort to exert that leadership, starting early in his administration. This is President Carter's call for action, and he lays out a practical and achievable path to peace.

About the Author

Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia, and served as thirty-ninth president of the United States. After leaving the White House, he and his wife, Rosalynn, founded the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a nonprofit organisation that works to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health around the world. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

The Taliban Shuffle by Kim Barker

The Taliban Shuffle
Kim Barker
AED 110.00
ISBN 9780385533317

Description

As one of the Middle East's longest-serving correspondents, Barker offers an insider's account of the "forgotten war" in Afghanistan and Pakistan, chronicling the years after America's initial routing of the Taliban, when we failed to finish the job.A true-life Catch-22 set in the deeply dysfunctional countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan, by one of the region’s longest-serving correspondents.

Kim Barker is not your typical, impassive foreign correspondent—she is candid, self-deprecating, laugh-out-loud funny. At first an awkward newbie in Afghanistan, she grows into a wisecracking, seasoned reporter with grave concerns about our ability to win hearts and minds in the region. In The Taliban Shuffle, Barker offers an insider’s account of the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, chronicling the years after America’s initial routing of the Taliban, when we failed to finish the job.

When Barker arrives in Kabul, foreign aid is at a record low, electricity is a pipe dream, and of the few remaining foreign troops, some aren’t allowed out after dark. Meanwhile, in the vacuum left by the U.S. and NATO, the Taliban is regrouping as the Afghan and Pakistani governments floun­der. Barker watches Afghan police recruits make a travesty of practice drills and observes the disorienting turnover of diplomatic staff. She is pursued romantically by the former prime minister of Pakistan and sees adrenaline-fueled col­leagues disappear into the clutches of the Taliban. And as her love for these hapless countries grows, her hopes for their stability and security fade.

Swift, funny, and wholly original, The Taliban Shuffle unforgettably captures the absurdities and tragedies of life in a war zone.