The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan
Author: Robert D Crews
The Taliban remain one of the most elusive forces in modern history. A ragtag collection of clerics and madrasa students, this obscure movement emerged out of the rubble of the Cold War to shock the world with their draconian Islamic order. The Taliban refused to surrender their vision even when confronted by the United States after September 11, 2001. Reinventing themselves as part of a broad insurgency that destabilized Afghanistan, they pledged to drive out the Americans, NATO, and their allies and restore their "Islamic Emirate."
The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan explores the paradox at the center of this challenging phenomenon: how has a seemingly anachronistic band of religious zealots managed to retain a tenacious foothold in the struggle for Afghanistan's future? Grounding their analysis in a deep understanding of the country's past, leading scholars of Afghan history, politics, society, and culture show how the Taliban was less an attempt to revive a medieval theocracy than a dynamic, complex, and adaptive force rooted in the history of Afghanistan and shaped by modern international politics. Shunning journalistic accounts of its conspiratorial origins, the essays investigate broader questions relating to the character of the Taliban, its evolution over time, and its capacity to affect the future of the region.
Offering an invaluable guide to "what went wrong" with the American reconstruction project in Afghanistan, this book accounts for the persistence of a powerful and enigmatic movement while simultaneously mapping Afghanistan's enduring political crisis.
Publishers Weekly
Observers in the 1990s marveled to see the Taliban bring order to a chaotic Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. Admiration vanished as the Taliban proceeded to oppress men as well as women and massacre opponents. When they refused to surrender Osama bin Laden after 9/11, the U.S. invasion helped sweep them from power. Then dismissed as reactionary zealots, the Taliban have since been revived and are now steadily expanding their influence. Historian Crews and reporter Tarzi have assembled eight revealing essays on this widely reviled movement. The Taliban are ethnic Pashtuns who make up perhaps half the country's population and whose elite have traditionally ruled the country. This ragtag army of Islamic clerics and religious students presented itself as a superior alternative to ruling Pashtun elites and successfully manipulated tribal politics. Despite accusations of being a medieval throwback, the Taliban are Islamic "counter modernists." Their use of mass spectacle, surveillance, the media and even their strict regulation of gender roles is consistent with other modern totalitarian movements. The authors' 58-page introduction adds additional clarity and context to Afghanistan's tortured history, making for an engrossing read that is more accessible than most academic collections. (Feb.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationTimo Noetzel - World Today
The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan is of great value and highly welcome...Historically, successful counter-insurgency depends on striking political deals with parts of the insurgency. For that to happen, NATO needs to know its enemy. This volume makes a great contribution towards understanding the Taliban and the insurgency.
Table of Contents:
Maps viiNote on Transliteration ix
Introduction Robert D. Crews Amin Tarzi 1
Explaining the Taliban's Ability to Mobilize the Pashtuns Abdulkader Sinno 59
The Rise and Fall of the Taliban Neamatollah Nojumi 90
The Taliban, Women, and the Hegelian Private Sphere Juan R. I. Cole 118
Taliban and Talibanism in Historical Perspective M. Nazif Shahrani 155
Remembering the Taliban Lutz Rzehak 182
Fraternity, Power, and Time in Central Asia Robert L. Canfield 212
Moderate Taliban? Robert D. Crews 238
The Neo-Taliban Amin Tarzi 274
Epilogue: Afghanistan and the Pax Americana Atiq Sarwari Robert D. Crews 311
Notes 359
Contributors 419
Acknowledgments 421
Index 423
Book about: The Coming Economic Collapse or Political Science
Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History
Author: Denise Gess
A riveting account of a monster firestorm -- the rarest kind of catastrophic fire -- and the extraordinary people who survived its wrath.
On October 8, 1871 -- the same night as the Great Chicago Fire -- an even deadlier conflagration was sweeping through the lumber town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, 260 miles north of Chicago. The five-mile-wide wall of flames, borne on tornado-force winds of 100 miles per hour, tore across more than 2,400 square miles of land, obliterating Peshtigo in less than one hour and killing more than 2,000 people.
Firestorm at Peshtigo places the reader at the center of the blow-out. Through accounts of newspaper publishers Luther Noyes and Franklin Tilton, lumber baron Isaac Stephenson, parish priest Father Peter Pernin, and meteorologist Increase Lapham -- the only person who understood the unusual and dangerous nature of this fire -- Denise Gess and William Lutz re-create the story of the people, the politics, and the place behind this monumental natural disaster, delivering it from the lost annals of American history.
Drawn from survivors' letters, diaries, interviews, and local newspapers, Firestorm at Peshtigo tells the human story behind America's deadliest wildfire.
author of Fire on the Mountain - John N. Maclean
A vivid telling of the most spectacular epic in American wildfire. New material and the best of the historical record make for an authoritative, fresh account of an overlooked epic.
Book Magazine
People will always associate October 8, 1871, with the Great Chicago Fire, in which 300 people lost their lives. It is barely remembered now that the deadliest fire in American history occurred that same night, 260 miles to the north, in Peshtigo, Wisconsin: In just an hour, 2,000 people burned to death in a cyclone of flames that reduced that logging town to ash. From survivors' letters, diaries and newspaper accounts, Gess and Lutz have pieced together a terrifying account of Peshtigo's last weeks and the many warning signs its residents failed to heed. The great North Woods had been smoldering for months due to an unprecedented drought; where they didn't ignite the dry trees like kindling, flames often traveled literally under the feet of loggers—spreading, silent and unnoticed, under the carpet of pine needles, but filling the air with ominous smoke. The encroaching fires received scant mention in Peshtigo's newspaper, remaining buried amid cheerful community news and advertising. By the time Peshtigo's citizens grasped their peril, there was no way out. This is a riveting and wrenching book about nature's fury, human folly and a forgotten American disaster. Author—Eric Wargo
Book Magazine
People will always associate October 8, 1871, with the Great Chicago Fire, in which 300 people lost their lives. It is barely remembered now that the deadliest fire in American history occurred that same night, 260 miles to the north, in Peshtigo, Wisconsin: In just an hour, 2,000 people burned to death in a cyclone of flames that reduced that logging town to ash. From survivors' letters, diaries and newspaper accounts, Gess and Lutz have pieced together a terrifying account of Peshtigo's last weeks and the many warning signs its residents failed to heed. The great North Woods had been smoldering for months due to an unprecedented drought; where they didn't ignite the dry trees like kindling, flames often traveled literally under the feet of loggers—spreading, silent and unnoticed, under the carpet of pine needles, but filling the air with ominous smoke. The encroaching fires received scant mention in Peshtigo's newspaper, remaining buried amid cheerful community news and advertising. By the time Peshtigo's citizens grasped their peril, there was no way out. This is a riveting and wrenching book about nature's fury, human folly and a forgotten American disaster.
Publishers Weekly
In American history books, October 8, 1871, marks the massive fire that consumed Chicago. But as Gess (Good Deeds) and Lutz (Doublespeak) document in this thorough historical narrative, it was also the night a fledgling Wisconsin mining town endured a worse fate a story often overlooked in the annals of fire. Peshtigo, with a population of nearly 2,000, was obliterated in less than an hour that night by a freakish convergence of rampant forest fires and tornado-force winds. Gess and Lutz draw on a wealth of local sources, including diaries, interviews with survivors and newspaper accounts, to enliven their story and forge a cast of main characters. While the authors go into far too much detail in describing the town's founding and its politics, they render a chilling, absorbing account of the hellish events of the night itself, perhaps due to Gess's background as a novelist: " `Faster than it takes to write these words' is the phrase every survivor used. They used it to describe the speed of a fireball hitting a house and setting it into instant flames; they used it to describe the speed with which one house was lifted from its foundation, then thrown through the air `a hundred feet' before it detonated midflight and sent strips of flaming wood flying like shrapnel.... They used it to describe the sight of a small boy, separated from his family, and how he knelt to the ground, crouching in prayer before fire lit his body." The images of the catastrophe are often as unpleasant as they are vivid, but readers will sense that they are necessary and that Gess and Lutz have done an overdue service to those who suffered. (Aug.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
The same day as the Great Chicago Fire, October 8, 1871, a huge conflagration swept through the lumber town of Peshtigo, WI, north of Green Bay on Lake Superior. A summer's drought, a windy day, and possibly a tornado combined to create a firestorm. The fire destroyed 2400 square miles of timber and farmland, demolishing several towns and killing some 2000 people. Peshtigo was remote, and earlier fires had destroyed telegraph lines, so although the scale of the disaster was considerably larger than Chicago's, the loss was relatively little known and quickly forgotten. Novelist Gess (Red Whiskey Blues) and Lutz (English, Rutgers Univ.; Doublespeak) gather information from letters, diaries, interviews, and local newspapers to tell the story of this disaster. In increasingly overheated language, they re-create the politics, the economic realities of a lumber town, and the special meteorological circumstances that combined to destroy an area larger than Rhode Island. Despite the somewhat turgid writing, this work is mildly recommended for libraries with subject collections in fire prevention, disaster recovery, and regional history. Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, KS Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An ominous and quietly thrilling account of the 1871 fire that burned thousands of square miles and likely killed more than 2,000 people in a Wisconsin lumber town. It had been a long, dry summer, write Gess (Fiction Writing/Univ. of North Carolina) and Lutz (English/Rutgers). Peshtigo stood hard by woods so thick with white pine you had to feel your way through the forest from trunk to trunk. It had more than its fair share of sawdust from the mills; slash, duff, and sap were everywhere. Fires had been cooking throughout the region for weeks before making their way to Peshtigo. They came slithering around the bases of trees, "red-headed and golden-tongued threads, moving fast, coiling back on themselves before they disappeared again, darting under the cedar needles." Working from newspaper reports, letters, diaries, and meteorological reports, the authors recreate the genesis of the firestorm that exploded in Peshtigo and the surrounding sugar bush, killing more than 1,800 of the town's 2,000 inhabitants and many more in the backcountry. It was a fire so fierce it whipped up a tornado, so incandescent that "hot sand had been spun into a glass sheet around a tree trunk." Human beings simply spontaneously combusted where they stood. And this thriving town, rich in churches and saloons, jewelers and lawyers, had no fire department. Gess and Lutz do an excellent job of telling the personal stories of numerous town inhabitants, from factory owners to the man and woman on the street, and in chronicling the aftermath, when a plague of army worms and parasitic flies descended on the survivors. Yet they well know the main player was the firestorm, an elemental wild character whose hot breathcomes off the page. Chicago's more famous fire on the same day overshadowed Peshtigo's tragedy, but Gess and Lutz restore it to historical memory with an operatic quality it richly deserves.
What People Are Saying
Maclean
A vivid telling of the most spectacular epic in American wildfire. New material and the best of the historical record make for an authoritative, fresh account of an overlooked epic.
— author of Fire on the Mountain
Neil Hanson
A gripping, thought-provoking read. Gess and Lutz tell their terrifying tale in forensic detail, setting the often heart-breaking stories of the individuals and small communities engulfed by the firestorm against the human cupidity and stupidity of a "natural" disaster that was at least partly man-made.
— author of The Custom of the Sea and The Great Fire of London in that Apocalyptic Year 1666
Robert V. Remini
This is truly an exciting and marvelously told story of an incredible firestorm that swept through a lumber town in Wisconsin in 1871, the same night as the more famous Chicago fire. Thoroughly researched and written with attention to the many individuals who struggled to save their town, a reader is quickly caught up in this riveting story and until the final page is locked into discovering what happened next. In view of the horror that is engulfing Colorado today this book has a special relevance for our time.
David Cowan
Finally an account has been written that accurately chronicles our country's deadliest natural disaster. Not only does this long overdue book do justice to the victims of the Peshtigo fire, it closes what up to now had been a gaping void in the annals of American history.
— author of Great Chicago Fires and To Sleep with the Angels: The Story of a Fire
David Bradley
This is history, accurate and well-researched. It's also story-telling, rich and intricate. But it's also a fable for our time, a tragic metaphor of thoughtless greed and heedless growth and natural retribution.
— author of The Chaneysville Incident
Philip Gerard
Firestorm at Peshtigo captures the reader's imagination like a fine novel and doesn't let go: The story is not only haunting but devastatingly true-- a heartbreaking tale of memorable, real characters facing the challenge of their lives, written in a clean, deft, and lyrical style. You do not just read this book-- you experience the heat and fear, as if watching the fiery horizon sweep down over your own life. Masterfully done.
— author of Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War II's Heroic Army of Deception
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