Download Little America: The War within the War for Afghanistan AudioBook Free
From your award-winning writer of Imperial Life in the Emerald City comes a riveting, personal bank account of America's stressed conflict in Afghanistan. When Chief executive Barack Obama ordered the surge of troops and aid to Afghanistan, Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran used. He found your time and effort sabotaged not only by Afghan and Pakistani malfeasance, but by infighting and incompetence within the American federal government: a conflict cabinet caught by vicious bickering among top countrywide security aides; diplomats and aid workers who didn't deliver on their grand guarantees; generals who dispatched troops to the incorrect places; and headstrong military services leaders who searched for a far more expansive campaign than the White House needed. Through their bungling and quarreling, they wound up squandering the first season of the surge. Chandrasekaran explains the way the United States has never understood Afghanistan - and probably never will. Through the Cold Conflict, American engineers undertook an enormous development job across southern Afghanistan in an attempt to woo the country from Soviet effect. They built dams and irrigation canals, and they founded a "comfortable" personal community known only a small amount America, with a Western-style institution, a coed community pool, and a plush clubhouse - all of which embodied American and Afghan hopes for a glowing future and an in depth relationship. However in the late 1970s - after growing Afghan level of resistance and a Communist coup - the Americans abandoned the region to warlords and poppy farmers. In a single revelatory picture after another, Chandrasekaran uses American efforts to reclaim the very same territory from the Taliban. On the way, we meet an Army general whose experience as the top military officer responsible for Iraq's Green Area couldn't prepare him for the bureaucratic knots of Afghanistan, a Marine commander whose prefer to charge into remote control hamlets conflicted with civilian priorities, and a war-seasoned diplomat frustrated in his drive for a scaled-down but long-term American determination. Their challenges show how Obama's trust of the good conflict, and the Pentagon's desire to have a resounding success, shriveled on the arid plains of southern Afghanistan. Meticulously reported and hugely revealing, Little America can be an unprecedented study of a failing conflict - and an eye-opening go through the complex relationship between America and Afghanistan.
