A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster Audiobook (Free)

The main element to understanding the calamitous Afghan war is the complex, ultimately failed relationship between your powerful, duplicitous Karzai family and america, brilliantly portrayed here with the former Kabul bureau chief for The Washington Post.

The United States went to Afghanistan on a straightforward objective: avenge the Sept 11 attacks and drive the Taliban from power. This took significantly less than two months. During the period of the next decade, the ensuing fight for power and cash- in regards to a Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster supplied to one of the poorest countries on the planet, in ever-greater amounts-left the region even more dangerous than prior to the first troops appeared.

At the guts of this tale may be the Karzai family. President Hamid Karzai and his brothers began the battle as icons of a fresh Afghanistan: moderate, informed, fluent in the ethnicities of East and Western, as well as the antithesis from the brutish and backward Taliban routine. The siblings, from a prominent political family close to Afghanistan’s former ruler, had been thrust into exile with the Soviet war. While Hamid Karzai lived in Pakistan and worked with the resistance, others relocated to the United States, finding work as waiters and managers before opening their very own restaurants. After September 11, the brothers came back home to help restore Afghanistan and reshape their homeland with ambitious plans.

Today, with the country in shambles, these are in open discord with one another and their Traditional western allies. Joshua Partlow’s clear-eyed analysis reveals the mistakes, squandered expectations, and wasted possibilities behind the moments of a would-be politics dynasty. Nothing at all illustrates the arc from the battle and America’s relationship with Afghanistan-from optimism to despair, camaraderie to enmity-as neatly as the storyplot of the Karzai family members itself, told within its entirety for the first time.