The author, expert in British colonial history, explains the inevitability of the rout of the US/British-installed regime in Afghanistan in 2021 by the Taliban, in terms of the ways in which corruption, drug trafficking, pillage of international aid, war-lordism and non-payment of police and military personnel had been allowed to flourish over the past twenty years.
George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: my years in the CIA (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), p. 225.
2.
Julien Mercille, Cruel Harvest: US intervention in the Afghan drug trade (London: Pluto Press, 2013), p. 5.
3.
John Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 231.
4.
Tim Bird and Alex Marshall, Afghanistan: how the West lost its way (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 128, 223.
5.
Sandy Gall, War against the Taliban: why it all went wrong in Afghanistan (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 144.
6.
Sherard Cowper-Coles, Cables from Kabul: the inside story of the West’s Afghanistan campaign (London: Harper Collins, 2011), pp. 81, 82, 83.
7.
Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: why corruption threatens global security (New York: Norton and Co, 2015), pp. 43, 62, 64, 152. More recently, Chayes has published a powerful account of corruption in the USA: Everybody Knows: corruption in America (London: Hurst, 2020). She sees the spread of corruption as very much a global phenomenon and obviously Britain today is very much part of this, with London having become a global centre for money laundering, with privatisation and outsourcing, and, most recently, the awarding of contracts during the Covid pandemic, right down to the prime minister’s free holidays.
8.
Chayes, Thieves of State, pp. 6, 42, 61, 63, 143,153.
9.
Joshua Partlow, A Kingdom of Their Own: the family Karzai and the Afghan disaster (New York and London: Vintage, 2016), p. 128.
10.
Vanda Felbab Brown, Aspiration and Ambivalence: strategies and realities of counterinsurgency and state building in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013), pp. 53, 54, 82, 85, 105.
11.
Scott Horton, Fool’s Errand: time to end the war in Afghanistan (Austin: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017), p. 114.
12.
Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: a secret history of the war (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021), p. 126. This indispensable volume is based on over a thousand interviews with US veterans of the conflict, military, diplomatic and official, that he got access to after a three-year legal battle.
13.
Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers, p. 185.
14.
Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 257.
15.
Ben Anderson, No Worse Enemy (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2011), p. 15.
16.
Ronald Neumann, The Other War: winning and losing in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2009), p. 74.
17.
See Antonio Giustozzi, The Army of Afghanistan: a political history of a fragile institution (London: Hurst, 2016).
18.
Horton, Fool’s Errand, p. 122.
19.
Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers, p. 186.
20.
BarryBen, Blood, Metal and Dust: how victory turned into defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2020), pp. 426−27.
