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Games without rules : the often interrupted history of Afghanistan / Tamim Ansary.

by Ansary, Mir Tamim.

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New York : PublicAffairs, c2012.

Military occupation -- History.

British -- Afghanistan -- History.

Russians -- Afghanistan -- History.

Americans -- Afghanistan -- History.

Afghanistan -- History.

Afghanistan -- History, Military.

Afghanistan -- Strategic aspects.

Afghanistan -- Politics and government.

9781610390941 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1610390946 (hardcover : alk. paper)

xvi, 397 p. : maps ; 25 cm.

Afghanistan becomes a country. Founding father ; Ahmad Shah's Afghanistan ; Farangis on the horizon ; Between the lion and the bear ; Auckland's folly ; The second coming of Dost Mohammed ; Eight or ten good years ; Interrupted again -- One country, two worlds. A time of blood and iron ; Starting fresh ; King of the radicals ; King's law versus God's law ; Things fall apart -- Kabul rules. After the storm ; Nonaligned nation ; Development, no brakes ; The democracy era ; Rise of the left ; Change by decree ; The Soviet occupation -- Old Afghanistan erupts. The Mujahideen ; Cold war endgame ; From horror to chaos ; Out of the camps ; Taliban versus Mujahideen ; Al Qaeda ; America enters the picture -- The struggle resumes. The Bonn project ; Kabul spring ; The persistence of trouble ; Drugs and corruption ; Talibanism ; The tipping point ; Obama's surges ; All that glitters -- Postscript.

Five times in the last two centuries. some great power has tried to invade, occupy, or otherwise take control of Afghanistan. And as Tamim Ansary shows in this illuminating history, every intervention has come to grief for much the same reason: the intervening power has failed to understand that Afghanistan has a story of its own, a story that continues to unfold between--and despite--the interventions. Drawing on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, and Western and Afghan sources, Ansary weaves an epic that moves from a universe of village republics--the old Afghanistan--through a tumultuous drama of tribes. factions, and forces, to the current struggle. Ansary paints a richly textured portrait of a nation that began to form around the same time as the United States but is still struggling to coalesce; a nation driven by its high ambitions but undermined by its own demons, while every forty to sixty years a great power crashes in and disrupts whatever progress has been made.--From publisher description.

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