- Published: 05/07/2012
- ISBN: 9781846274312
- 129x20mm
- 448 pages
Ghosts of Afghanistan
Jonathan Steele
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.
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.
£9.99
With a 30-year experience of reporting in Afghanistan, no-one has studied this extraordinary country more closely than Jonathan Steele, nor charted so meticulously how outside intervention has worsened internal discord. His is a sobering essay on the empire of folly.
Simon Jenkins
Jonathan Steele has covered the sweep of 30 years of history in Afghanistan and chronicled the lessons of first the Russian, and then the American-led occupations. They are lessons President Obama and his allies have still not fully grasped. This excellent book is a painfully honest account of successive unwinnable wars. It is the book Mr Obama and others will need if Afghanistan is ever to be left to find its own peace and prosperity.
Jon Snow, C4 News
Drawing on more than three decades of reporting from and on Afghanistan, Jonathan Steele offers the best account yet of why, in ignoring the lessons of the Soviet intervention, the Americans are condemned to make many of the same mistakes. A brilliant and disturbing book by one of the most acute and best informed contemporary observers of Afghanistan.
