Books

Book Review: A Small Key Opens Big Doors

by Michael Hancock-Parmer
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Chen, Jay, ed. A Small Key Opens Big Doors. 50 Years of Amazing Peace Corps Stories, Volume Three: The Heart of Eurasia. Travelers Tales: Palo Alto, 2011.336 pages, includes Foreword, Preface, Introduction, Acknowledgments. Disclosure: Jay Chen is a friend and fellow Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV). We served in the same group in Kazakhstan starting in [...]

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Ouch

by Joshua Foust

The failure to find bin Laden was a seminal moment in the history of the war in Afghanistan. And it was a catastrophe. From that moment—the moment he escaped his apparent hideout in Tora Bora and went on to make his sneering speeches and send them out to the world—from that moment everything about the [...]

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The Emptiness of Expertise

by Joshua Foust

My friend Manan Ahmed has a brilliant essay in The National, on the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s rejection of expertise: Both [Rory] Stewart and [Greg] Mortenson illustrate one particular configuration of the relationship between knowledge and the American empire – the “non-expert” insider who can traverse that unknown terrain and, hence, become an “expert”. Even [...]

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Many Thanks

by Joshua Foust

Thanks to those of you who’ve gone out and bought my book, Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. Long term readers will find much that is familiar, though I’ve noticed, leafing through it, that having it packaged in a book makes the story of the war in Afghanistan make a tiny bit more sense. CJ Chivers [...]

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Book Review: Hurramabad

by Christian Bleuer

I rarely read fiction anymore, so this book is one of the rare exceptions: Andrei Volos, Hurramabad, Moscow: GLAS Publishers, 2001. Translated by Arch Tait. Hurramabad is a collection of short stories on the theme of ethnic Russians in Tajikistan. The Russians of Tajikistan, who arrived as Soviet administrators and skilled workers, emigrated en masse [...]

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Registan.net Goes Analog

by Joshua Foust

As I’m sure many of you blog (but not RSS!) readers have noticed, I have a book coming out this month with Just World Books. Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net is an edited compilation of the last four years of blogging in this space: starting with my trip there last year with the Human Terrain [...]

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Incomprehensible Reading

by Joshua Foust

I always hate reading lists. They usually lend insight to the lister, rather than the subject the list is ostensibly about. That being said, this Afghanistan Politics reading list—for Foreign Affairs, of all places!—by Zalmay Khalilzad is just bizarre: A Thousand Splendid Suns. By Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead, 2007. The Places in Between. By Rory Stewart. [...]

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Wonks vs. Nerds

by Joshua Foust

Back in January, Drew Conway, Thomas Zeitzoff, and I co-wrote a response to a high-profile study on ecologies of conflict. Our primary complaint wasn’t that quantitative study per se was wrong—after all, Thomas and Drew are primarily quantitative in their work—but that it requires a lot of context and understanding to give the numbers meaning [...]

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Book Review: The KGB’s Fascination With Potions

by Joshua Foust

Originally posted to Steve LeVine’s excellent Oil and Glory blog. It can be difficult to stand out in the somewhat crowded field of Russian scare-books. Whether arguing for the resumption of a “new cold war” or whatever conspiracy happens to be topical, recent years have seen an avalanche of books arguing that Russia is not [...]

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Doctor Who? Craig Murray

by Joshua Foust
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(via Siberian Light) David Tennant, the British actor most famous for playing the revitalized Dr. Who (which is pretty enjoyably campy, truth be told), has apparently recorded a radio drama about Craig Murray. Recording finished last week on the Hare adaptation of Murray’s book, Murder in Samarkand, for Radio 4. The script had originally been [...]

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Book Review: Decoding the New Taliban, Antonio Giustozzi editor

by Asher Kohn

I’m usually pretty hestitant to give wholehearted “Read This Book” recommendation to anything. But read this book. Giustozzzi has taken time away from writing two books to edit this collection. I really like what he did. He got 12 writers (plus himself) to come together and have everyone write 15-40 pages about their focus in [...]

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