Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia
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 | Product Details: Audio Cassette Release Date: 03 June 2008 Publisher: Brilliance Audio Unabridged Lib Ed ISBN: 1423368053 Rating:   Sales Rank: 4731867 | | Look for similar books by subject: | | Customers who bought this item also bought:
| | Customer Reviews: Ahmed Rashid the Lion Heart (17 March 2010)I am not going to say much about the book apart from telling you that if you are someone who prides him/herself on being well informed and especially if you are from the US, Pakistan, Afghanistan or India then you would be making a huge blunder in not reading this book not to mention owning a copy. The contents are chilling, mind boggling and will leave you like the sheeted dead squeaking and gibbering ere the mighty Ceasar fell. The import of my message is: Even in today's dollar driven world, there are still people like Ahmed Rashid who put their life on the line everyday by simply doing their work. I am from India and I really dont know why the ISI havent either assasinated Ahmed Rashid or atleast maimed him so that he cant continue his work. God forbid this should happen but read the book and you will find out that the man has earned the ire of the ISI. The amazing thing is he lives in Lahore!!! He is truly one Lion Hearted guy. His pen is startlingly unbiased and his passion shines forth as a truly concerned citizen of the region and not just Pakistan. His love for Afghanistan seems very evident in fact. A truly altruistic man, a Pakistani I lift my hat off to, a man I would love to meet, shake his hand, ask his autograph and tell him that night and day I pray for his safety and the continuation of his work. God bless you Ahmed Rashid. The frustrations of Afghanistan (23 February 2010)This important book has recently been added to the U.S. Marine Corps Commandants list as required reading for senior officers. It is a hard but needed read. You will soon find yourself emeshed in tribal lore, corruption and desperation. But that comes with the territory. Most people will not be able to read every page with understanding but by the time you put this book down you will know how desperate the situation is in Afghanistan and how absolutely fruitless it is for us to be trying to establish a Western Type goverent there. Many will say it is too harsh on the Bush Administration but facts are facts and this author is an expert on this area. Don't fool yourself this is a hard read but one well worth the effort. Descent Into Chaos (19 February 2010)Although chaos may be an apt description of the subject of this book, South and Central Asia, it also characterizes the book itself, which is a disorganized mishmash of truth, obfuscation, conjecture and falsehoods. Divided haphazardly into four parts there is no unifying theme within each of the book's separate sections. While easy to follow the author hasn't constructed his book well to support his argument that Afghanistan needs a Marshall Plan-like investment to bring peace and prosperity to the world. The author presents all of the stories of the Afghan War that everyone is familiar with, the rise and fall of the Talib tribes, occupation and withdrawal of Russian forces in Afghanistan, the Daniel Perl beheading, the Abu Grab and rendition scandals, the Afghan elections, etc., with no more depth than a newspaper article. He doesn't make any attempt to explain the region in regards to the dynamics of the groups that make up South and Central Asia. He doesn't explain the people of Afghanistan well, whose hearts and minds he wants the west to win. All of the events are presented to validate certain preconceived notions supporting US intervention. The author is careful not to offend these supporters. The book is frequently contradictory. In an earlier chapter he explains how great the Afghan elections were only to criticize them as corrupt towards the end of the book. He applauds the initial US invasion of Afghanistan citing its cost as under a billion dollars but then cites figures hundreds of times more later in the book. I noticed this a lot. When not contradicting himself the author sometimes makes stuff up. He recounts a meeting with a State Department official who he asked for a comment about Donald Rumsfeld's announcement of Afghan troop withdrawals. He said the official looked up, and from the one look he writes several hundred words of reaction. I don't object to the use of unnamed sources, but I do object to putting words into the mouths of unnamed sources. I'm not sure if there is a language or translation problem but the author consistently relates events as if they happened chronologically when the later events actually happened years before. The oddest occurrence of this is when he says he met a man who died fighting. While that particular passage was odd, most of the time the author was arguing a cause and effect relationship, saying that later events caused the former events. The book is loose with it's facts. The author identifies the group that hijacked a Pakistani airliner. After identifying them, he continues to refer to them as Al Queda. They are not. He does the same thing when identifying the group arrested for plotting to attack a US military installation in Germany. I think the book fails for the most part because the author isn't able to understand US foreign policy or consider that US interests are not the same as Pakistani interests. The author is a Pakistani. Pakistan is a major trading partner with Afghanistan. The more money that pours into Afghanistan, the more Pakistan benefits. The book is mostly whining and complaining, not valid reasons why the US-Pakistani interests should align. Useful information, but flawed analysis (10 February 2010)Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist who has written many books and articles about developments in Central Asia, including Afghanistan and Pakistan itself. His book on the Taliban (Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia) was much read after the terrorist attacks of '9/11', and as a result, his newest publication titled "Descent Into Chaos" has been a bestseller. Rashid is very well informed about the region and sheds great light on the complicated matter of its political and economic contradictions. Moreover, he does so in a readily accessible, journalistic style which will enable many readers to learn a lot in a short time about this war-torn part of the world. He gives a short history of Afghanistan as well as Pakistan, explains the interrelatedness of the two countries through the strategy of the Pakistani military class to support the islamists, points out the Pashtun prevalence in both countries, describes the connections with the rest of Central Asia (particularly Uzbekistan), and finally deals with the extensive American-led Western involvement in the area including the current occupation. In addition, he provides much critical commentary. Some of this is good, and some of it is not. The main lines of the book are very worth listening to. The main lesson is that it is not worthwhile to invade a country like Afghanistan, no matter how bad its current government, if you're not going to be willing to sacrifice a great deal of funds and time as well as ground troops in rebuilding it in one's own image. Another important lesson is that one cannot deal with Afghanistan without dealing with Pakistan, which means the military class there must give up its dictatorial rule under pretext of fighting India, and that the 'tribal' areas of Pakistan must be decolonized and brought under the domain of Pakistan's regular laws and political structures. Only a serious democratization in Pakistan can really combat islamism in the 'tribal' areas, and this in turn is the prerequisite for combating islamism in Afghanistan as well as Kashmir. Many people will not like Rashid's support for 'nation-building', but surely he is right in stating that if one is going to undertake regime change in countries with terrible tyrannical governments, it immediately becomes the responsibility of the regime changer(s) to assure that country's reconstruction. Otherwise, the benefits will be minimal and the destruction and chaos maximal. He also emphasizes the important lesson that although islamism is not at all popular in either Afghanistan or Pakistan, its latent support comes from its ability to create stability and legitimate rule in areas wracked by warlords and clan systems and where no central government operates, or where the central government is too corrupt and negative to be supportable. This means that Western support for tyrannical secular governments such as that of Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan, with the aim of combating islamism in this manner, is always counterproductive. The same goes for the current policy of using warlords as the main political leaders at regional level in Afghanistan, which will surely lead to trouble in the future. There are however also serious flaws in his book. Precisely because Rashid knows many of the people involved, he has many personal preconceived notions about the leading figures involved, which distort the narrative. For example, Ahmad Shah Massoud and Hamid Karzai are both depicted as generally 'good' figures, which can surely be doubted (in fact Massoud is explicitly considered a heroic patriot, in exactly those terms). Rashid also constantly involves himself in the narrative and puffs up his own importance in these affairs, including through his friendship with the well-known American specialist in Afghan affairs, Barnett Rubin. In all these things he works precisely the opposite way from the excellent approach of Robert Fisk, who always relativizes his own importance and describes the individual figures through their actions and what they tell him, without needing to give his own commentary on how patriotic they are or not. Finally, the book is fairly repetitive and seems padded out, with a lot more detail involved than is strictly needed for a journalistic overview of the recent events. It is all the more dubious for this reason that his use of sources is arbitrary and ineffective - he only uses footnotes randomly, and many statements and even quotations are entirely unsourced, even if they are remarkable. In this way, Rashid's superficiality and partisanship get in the way of what is an informative and useful narrative. Descent into Chaos (07 February 2010)The last chapter in the book was obviously not written by Ahmed Rashid. The author of the last chapter evidently had a nefarious agenda to promulgate. I abhor deception. | |
