Afgantsy

"First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Profile Books"--T.p. verso.

The story of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is well known: the expansionist Communists overwhelmed a poor country as a means of reaching a warm-water port on the Persian Gulf. Afghan mujahideen upset their plans, holding on with little more than natural fighting skills, until CIA agents came to the rescue with American arms. Humiliated in battle, the Soviets hastily retreated. It is a great story-but it never happened. In this brilliant, myth-busting account, Rodric Braithwaite, the former British ambassador to Moscow, challenges much of what we know about the Soviets in Afghanistan. He provides an inside look at this little-understood episode, using first-hand accounts and piercing analysis to show the war as it was fought and experienced by the Russians. The invasion was a defensive response to a chaotic situation in the Soviets' immediate neighbor. They intended to establish a stable, friendly government, secure the major towns, and train the police and armed forces before making a rapid exit. But the mission escalated, as did casualties. Braithwaite does not paint the occupation as a Russian triumph. To the contrary, he illustrates the searing effect of the brutal conflict on soldiers, their families, and the broader public, as returning veterans struggled to regain their footing back home. Now available in paperback, Braithwaite carries readers through these complex and momentous events, capturing those violent and tragic days as no one has done before.

The Western-led efforts to establish a new post-Taliban order in Afghanistan are in serious trouble, and in this book Suhrke sets out to explain why. She begins with the dynamic of the intervention and its related peace-building mission. What were the forces shaping this grand international project? What explains the apparent systemic bias towards a deeper and broader international involvement? Many reasons have been cited for its limited achievements and ever-growing difficulties, the most common explanation being that the national, regional, and international contexts were unfavourable. But many policies were misguided while the multinational operation itself was extraordinarily and unnecessarily complex. Astri Suhrke's main thesis is that the international project itself contains serious tensions and contradictions that significantly contributed to the lack of progress. As a result, the deepening involvement proved dysfunctional: massive international support has created an extreme version of a rentier state that is predictably weak, corrupt and unaccountable; US-led military operations undercut the peacebuilding agenda, and more international aid and monitoring to correct the problems generate Afghan resentment and evasion. Continuing these policies will only reinforce the dynamic. The alternative is a less intrusive international presence, a longer time-frame for reconstruction and change, and negotiations with the militants that can end the war and permit a more Afghan-directed order to emerge.

The Soviet Union's last war was played out against the backdrop of dramatic change within the USSR. This is the first book to study the impact of the war on Russian politics and society. Based on extensive use of Soviet official and unofficial sources, as well as work with Afghan veterans, it illustrates the way the war fed into a wide range of other processes, from the rise of grassroots political activism to the retreat from globalism in foreign policy.

In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September 1961, President John F. Kennedy told his audience that "every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads." In this sweeping, immersive, and now chillingly relevant history of nuclear confrontation, eminent historian and diplomat Rodric Braithwaite offers the tale of that slender thread, a tale that spans from the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 into the present. Here is an account of treaties and summits, of life-and-death strategy among nations, featuring a vast and varied cast of individuals--scientists, spies, diplomats, generals, politicians, shamans, writers, geniuses, the hight-minded and the crackpot--all ow whom played their part in shaping the Nuclear Age. As [this book] shows, containing atomic weapons has been a central preoccupation of global politics and policy for the last seven decades. In the years after World War II, atomic weapons were initially controlled only by the superpowers, first the United States, followed shortly by the former Soviet Union (mainly by having infiltrated the Manhattan Project), then developed in succession by England, France, China, India, and Pakistan. In recent years, North Korea has developed a nuclear weapons program and is now developing the means of delivering them. Nuclear proliferation has long dominated and even obsessed international diplomacy and policy, particularly as the capacity to unleash catastrophic destruction became widespread. Braithwaite offers an overview of policy from the Cold war reliance on what was termed "Deterrence," a policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), to the "Armageddon theology" of Ronald Reagan, to the de-alerting of nuclear weapons promised by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, to the fire and fury driving the current war of tweeted insults. For nearly three-quarters of a century, nuclear weapons have shadowed human existence, moving from crisis to quiescence and back to crisis. Armageddon and Paranoia comes at a time when tensions are mounting once more. Though we cannot un-invent the atomic bomb, Braithwaite's clear-sighted and illuminating history provides a deeper understanding of how it has shaped the world in which we live. -- Dust jacket.

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 this follow-up to his much-praised book Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, Frank Ledwidge argues that Britain has paid a heavy cost - both financially and in human terms - for its involvement in the Afghanistan war. Ledwidge calculates the high price paid by British soldiers and their families, taxpayers in the United Kingdom, and, most importantly, Afghan citizens, highlighting the thousands of deaths and injuries, the enormous amount of money spent bolstering a corrupt Afghan government, and the long-term damage done to the British military's international reputation. In this hard-hitting exposé, based on interviews, rigorous on-the-ground research, and official information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Ledwidge demonstrates the folly of Britain's extended participation in an unwinnable war. Arguing that the only true beneficiaries of the conflict are development consultants, international arms dealers, and Afghan drug kingpins, he provides a powerful, eye-opening, and often heartbreaking account of military adventurism gone horribly wrong."--

The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a grueling debacle that has striking lessons for the twenty-first century. In The Great Gamble, Gregory Feifer examines the conflict from the perspective of the soldiers on the ground. In gripping detail, he vividly depicts the invasion of a volatile country that no power has ever successfully conquered. A riveting account as seen through the eyes of the men who fought in the war, The Great Gamble tells an unforgettable story full of drama, action, and political intrigue whose relevance in our own time is greater than ever.