The Taliban are synonymous with the war in Afghanistan. Doughty, uncompromising fighters, they plant IEDs, deploy suicide bombers and wage guerrilla warfare. While much has been written about their military tactics, media strategy and harsh treatment of women, the cultural and sometimes less overtly political representation of their identity, the Taliban's other face, is often overlooked. Most Taliban fighters are Pashtuns, a people who cherish their vibrant poetic tradition, closely associated with that of song. The poems in this collection are meant to be recited and sung; and this is the manner in which they are enjoyed by the wider Pashtun public today. From audiotapes traded in secret in the bazaars of Kandahar, to mp3s exchanged via bluetooth in Kabul, to video files downloaded in Dubai and London, Taliban poetry has an appeal that transcends the insurgency. For the Taliban today, these poems, or ghazals, have a resonance back to the 1980s war against the Soviets, when similar rhetorical styles, poetic formulae and tricks with metre inspired mujahideen combatants and non-combatants alike. The poetry presented here includes 'classics' of the genre from the 1980s and 1990s as well as a selection from the odes and ghazals of today's conflict . Veering from nationalist paeans to dirges replete with religious symbolism, the poems are organised under four headings - - War, Pastoral, Religious and Love - - and cover many themes and styles. The political is intertwined with the aesthetic, the celebratory cry is never far from the funeral dirge and praise of martyrs lost. Two prefatory essays introduce the cultural and historical context of the poetry. The editors discuss its importance to the Pashtuns and highlight how poetic themes correspond to the past thirty years of war in Afghanistan. Faisal Devji comments on what the poetry reveals of the Taliban's emotional and ethical hinterland.

War in Afghanistan will never be understood without getting to grips with the small places - the provinces, districts, and villages - where most of the fighting occurred, away from the cities, in hundreds of hamlets, valleys, and farms amid a vast landscape. Those small places and their people were the frontlines, and it is only there that we can truly find answers to the questions that lay at the heart of the war: why people supported the Taliban, whether intervention brought peace, whether a better outcome was ever possible. Garmser is a small place that has seen much violence; a single district within one of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. Its 150,000 people inhabit a fertile strip along the Helmand River no more than 6 miles wide and 45 miles long. Carter Malkasian spent years in Garmser district as the political officer for the US Department of State. He tells the history of thirty years of war, from 1979 to 2012, explaining how the Taliban movement formed in Garmser; how, after being routed in 2001, they re- turned stronger than ever in 2006; and how Afghans, British, and Americans fought with them between 2006 and 2012. He describes the lives of Afghans who endured and tried to build some kind of order out of war. While Americans and British came and went, they carried on, year after year, inhabitants of a small place.

Beyond the Legend is the authorised biography of William (Bill) Speakman,who was awarded one of only four Victoria Crosses for action in the Korean War. It covers his sometimes controversial life, from his childhood in Altrincham, Cheshire, to his later life in South Africa - about which little has been known previously. Authors Derek Hunt and John Mulholland also explore the myth of the 'beer bottle VC' (in which Speakman was said to have fended off the Chinese Communist Army by throwing empty beer bottles at them after they ran out of grenades), bringing to light what really happened on United Hill in November 1951. Speakman held the attacking Chinese army at bay for over four hours and led a final charge that allowed his company to withdraw from the hill. After Korea, he saw active service in Malaya, Borneo and Aden before retiring from the army, with the rank of sergeant, in 1968. Bill Speakman is one of only two surviving VC holders of the British Army and a true British hero.

Warlords are charismatic military leaders who exploit weak central authorities in order to gain control of sub-national areas. Notwithstanding their bad reputation, warlords have often participated in state formation. In Empires of Mud Giustozzi analyses the dynamics of warlordism in Afghanistan within the context of such debates. He approaches this complex task by first analysing aspects of the Afghan environment that might have been conductive to the fragmentation of central authority and the emergence of warlords and then accounts for the emergence of warlordism in the 1980s and subsequently. He accounts for the phenomenon from the 1980s to today, considering Afghanistan's two foremost warlords, Ismail Khan and Abdul Rashid Dostum, and their political, economic, and military systems of rule. Despite the intervention of Allied forces in 2001, both of these leaders continue to wield considerable power. The author also discusses Ahmad Shah Massoud, whose 'system' incorporated elements of rule not dissimilar from that of the warlords. Giustozzi reveals common themes in the emergence of warlordism, particularly the role of local military leaders and their gradual acquisition of 'class consciousness,' which over time evolves into a more sophisticated, state-like, or political party-like, structure.

There is a widespread belief that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are in many respects synonymous, that their ideology and objectives are closely intertwined and that they have made common cause against the West for decades. Such opinions have been stridently supported by politicians, media pundits and senior military figures, yet they have hardly ever been scrutinised. This is all the more surprising given that the West's present entanglement in Afghanistan is commonly predicated on the need to defeat the Taliban in order to forestall further terrorist attacks worldwide. The relationship between the two groups and the individuals who established them is undeniably complex, and has remained so for many years. Links between the Taliban and al-Qaeda were retained in the face of a shared enemy following the invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks, an adversary that was selected by al-Qaeda rather than by the Taliban, and which led the latter to become entangled in a war that was not of its choosing. This book is the first to examine in detail the relationship from the Taliban's perspective based on Arabic, Dari and Pashtu sources, drawing on the authors' many years experience in southern Afghanistan, the Taliban's heartland. They also interviewed Taliban decision-makers, field commanders and ordinary fighters while immersing themselves in Kandahar's society. Van Linschoten and Kuehn's forensic examination of the evolution of the two groups allows the background and historical context that informed their respective ideologies to come to the fore. The story of those individuals who were to become their key decision-makers, and the relationships among all those involved, from the mid-1990s onwards, reveal how complex the interactions were between the Taliban and al-Qaeda and how they frequently diverged rather than converged. An Enemy We Created concludes that there is room to engage the Taliban on the issues of renouncing al-Qaeda and guaranteeing that Afghanistan will deny sanctuary to international terrorists. Yet the insurgency is changing, and it could soon be too late to find a political solution. The authors contend that certain aspects of the campaign, especially night raids and attempts to fragment and decapitate the Taliban, are transforming the resistance, creating more opportunities for al-Qaeda and helping it to attain its goals.

The Western-led efforts to establish a new post-Taliban order in Afghanistan are in serious trouble, and in this book Suhrke sets out to explain why. She begins with the dynamic of the intervention and its related peace-building mission. What were the forces shaping this grand international project? What explains the apparent systemic bias towards a deeper and broader international involvement? Many reasons have been cited for its limited achievements and ever-growing difficulties, the most common explanation being that the national, regional, and international contexts were unfavourable. But many policies were misguided while the multinational operation itself was extraordinarily and unnecessarily complex. Astri Suhrke's main thesis is that the international project itself contains serious tensions and contradictions that significantly contributed to the lack of progress. As a result, the deepening involvement proved dysfunctional: massive international support has created an extreme version of a rentier state that is predictably weak, corrupt and unaccountable; US-led military operations undercut the peacebuilding agenda, and more international aid and monitoring to correct the problems generate Afghan resentment and evasion. Continuing these policies will only reinforce the dynamic. The alternative is a less intrusive international presence, a longer time-frame for reconstruction and change, and negotiations with the militants that can end the war and permit a more Afghan-directed order to emerge.