Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World

by Christina Lamb

Overview

From the award-winning co-author of I Am Malala, this book asks just how the might of NATO, with 48 countries and 140,000 troops on the ground, failed to defeat a group of religious students and farmers? How did the West’s war in Afghanistan and across the Middle East go so wrong?

Farewell Kabul tells how the West turned success into defeat in the longest war fought by the United States in its history and by Britain since the Hundred Years War. It is the story of well-intentioned men and women going into a place they did not understand at all. And how, what had once been the right thing to do had become a conflict that everyone wanted to exit. It has been a fiasco which has left Afghanistan still one of the poorest and most dangerous nations on earth.

The leading journalist on the region with unparalleled access to all key decision makers, Christina Lamb is the best-selling author of ‘The Africa House’ and I Am Malala, co-authored with Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. This revelatory and personal account is her final analysis of the realities of Afghanistan, told unlike anyone before.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780008171278
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/03/2016
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishers
Format:	eBook
Pages:	640
File size:	20 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Christina Lamb is Chief Foreign Correspondent at The Sunday Times. She has since been awarded Foreign Correspondent of the Year five times as well as Europe’s top war reporting prize, the Prix Bayeux and was recently given the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society of Editors. She is the bestselling author of ten books including Farewell Kabul, The Africa House, and The Sewing Circles of Herat and co-wrote the international bestseller I am Malala with Malala Yousafzai and The Girl from Aleppo with Nujeen Mustafa. Her last book Our Bodies, Their Battlefields won the first Pilecki Institute award for war reporting and was shortlisted for Britain's top non-fiction award, the Baillie Gifford Prize, as well as the Orwell Prize and the New York Public Library Bernstein award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, an Honorary Fellow of University College Oxford and was made an OBE in 2013.

Hometown:

London, England and Estoril, Portugal

Date of Birth:

May 15, 1965

Place of Birth:

London, England

Education:

M.A., Politics and Philosophy, Oxford University, 1987

Table of Contents

Maps xii

The Leaving 1

Part I Getting In

1 Rule Number One 15

2 Sixty Words 24

3 Making - and Almost Killing - a President 43

4 Ground Zero 63

5 Losing bin Laden - the Not So Great Escape 72

6 A Tale of Two Generals 96

7 Taliban Central 112

8 Merchants of Ruin - the Return of the Warlords 130

9 Theatre of War 154

10 A Tale of Two Wars 178

11 Voting With Mullah Omar 202

Part II War

12 Ambush 225

13 Bringing Dolphins to Helmand 239

14 Tethered Goats 269

15 The President in His Bloody Palace 294

16 Whose Side Are You On? 325

17 The Snake Bites Back 352

18 The Weathermen of Kandahar 372

19 We'll Always Have Kabul 395

20 Death of a Poet 411

21 Meeting Colonel Imam 433

Part III The Good War

22 The View From Washington 457

23 All About the Politics 470

24 The Butcher of Mumbai 480

25 Losing the Moral High Ground in Margaritaville 493

26 Chairman Mullen and the Cadillac of the Skies 512

Part IV Getting Out

27 Killing bin Laden 543

Postscript: War Never Leaves You 573

Appendix: The Costs of War 600

Acknowledgements 601

Notes 605

Select Bibliography 613

Illustration Credits 617

Index 619

Editorial Reviews

Christina Lamb…stands out…as one of the premier explainers and explorers of Afghanistan…Although the countless mistakes and policy blunders that were made have been documented elsewhere, Lamb connects dots in a way that few others manage…Farewell Kabul will help its readers understand Afghanistan a little better—or at least give them a glimpse of its deepest fault lines. They may even come to understand how a place can be so beautiful and so hideous at once. Like a journey through the war-torn country itself, Lamb's 640-page book may take some time to get through, but it ends up being more rewarding than one could have ever imagined.

The New York Times Book Review - Ilene Prusher

‘Afghanistan looked to be a noble cause… But it didn't work. What went wrong? Christina Lamb has been there from the start. She knows. When you read Farewell Kabul, you will too’ Lieutenant General (Ret) Daniel Bolger, author Why We Lost

‘As a personal account of this sad, twisted story, Lamb's book is unlikely to be surpassed; gracious and humane, she always gives a fair hearing, while her observation is always needle sharp. It is one of the most rewarding and thought-provoking books by any journalist of my acquaintance’ Evening Standard

‘This is a journey through more than a decade of hell and futility, written vividly, with emotion but mercifully shorn of polemic … in this most captivating of war journals’ Observer

‘A spellbinding synthesis of analysis and highly personal reportage … Lamb's grasp of the back story enables her to weave illuminating historical context into the narrative’ Independent

‘She records with a clear eye and a longer perspective her successive encounters with the Afghans and their occupiers …she writes with sympathy and understanding … For anyone who wants to understand how Britain's road to Helmand was paved with well-meant but ill-founded intentions this magisterial memoir is the book to read and enjoy’ The Times

‘A brave and exceptional book … if you had to recommend one book on Afghanistan then ‘Farewell Kabul’ should be it" Daily Telegraph

‘Lamb's account is an ambitious mix of analysis and anecdote’ James Rubin, Sunday Times

‘Authoritative, wide-ranging and thoroughly readable, Lamb's knowledge and understanding of the region and its central players are impressively profound … Highly recommended’ Literary Review

‘A very good book … that sits with distinction in a growing library about where we – both Afghans and the international community – went wrong … Lamb has a forensic understanding of how things work and why they don’t. An impassioned, at moments anguished, love letter to Afghanistan’ New Statesman

From the Publisher