EAN: 9780691238562

AFGHANISTAN - THOMAS J BARFIELD KARTONIERT (TB)

A major history of Afghanistan and its changing political culture Afghanistan traces the
historic struggles and the changing nature of political authority in this volatile region of
the world  from the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century to the Taliban resurgence today.
Thomas Barfield introduces readers to the bewildering diversity of tribal and ethnic groups in
Afghanistan  explaining what unites them as Afghans despite the regional  cultural  and
political differences that divide them. He shows how governing these peoples was relatively
easy when power was concentrated in a small dynastic elite  but how this delicate political
order broke down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Afghanistan's rulers mobilized
rural militias to expel first the British and later the Soviets. Armed insurgency proved
remarkably successful against the foreign occupiers  but it also undermined the Afghan
government's authority and rendered the country ever more difficult to govern as time passed.
Barfield vividly describes how Afghanistan's armed factions plunged the country into a civil
war  giving rise to clerical rule by the Taliban and Afghanistan's isolation from the world. He
examines why the American invasion in the wake of September 11 toppled the Taliban so quickly 
and how this easy victory lulled the United States into falsely believing that a viable state
could be built just as easily. Afghanistan is essential reading for anyone who wants to
understand how a land conquered and ruled by foreign dynasties for more than a thousand years
became the graveyard of empires for the British and Soviets  and why the United States failed
to avoid the same fate.

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