Showing results for "Without History" in Asia

Today, most Westerners still see the war in Afghanistan as a contest between democracy and Islamist fanaticism. That war is real, but it sits atop an older struggle between Kabul and the countryside, between order and chaos, between a modernist impulse to join the world and the pull of an older Afghanistan - a tribal universe of village republics permeated by Islam. Now, Tamim Ansary draws on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, and Western and Afghan sources to explain history from the inside out and to illuminate the long, internal struggle that the outside world has never fully understood.

When Bhagat Singh was executed by the British after a sham trial for his involvement in the Lahore Conspiracy Case at the age of 23, he was glorified by the Indians as a martyr for his youth, his defiance and his reckless bravery. It was only many years later, after Independence in 1947, that his writings came to light. Today, it is these that set Bhagat Singh apart and reveal him as not just a hot-headed revolutionary who believed in the cult of the bomb but a widely-read intellectual inspired by the writings of Marx and Lenin.

In this classic account of the French war in Indochina, Bernard B. Fall vividly captures the sights, sounds, and smells of the savage eight-year conflict in the jungles and mountains of Southeast Asia from 1946 to 1954. The French fought well to the last, but even with the lethal advantages of airpower, they could not stave off the Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists, who countered with a hit-and-run campaign of ambushes, booby traps, and nighttime raids. Defeat came at Dien Bien Phu, in 1954, setting the stage for American involvement and opening another tragic chapter in Vietnam's history.

Weak, corrupt, and politically unstable, the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are dismissed as isolated and irrelevant to the outside world. But are they? This hard-hitting book argues that Central Asia is in reality a globalization leader with more extensive involvement in economics, politics, and security dynamics beyond its borders than any other world region. Yet Central Asia's international activities are mostly hidden from view, with disturbing implications for world security.

A Wall Street Journal national security reporter takes readers into the lives of U.S. Special Forces on the front lines against the Taliban and Islamic State, where a new and covert war is keeping Afghanistan from collapse. “Powerful, important, and searing." —General David Petraeus, U.S...