Taliban The Unknown Enemy James Fergusson by James Fergusson 9780306820342, 030682034X instant download after payment.

This book is written from a deep conviction that we must
change tack. The insurgency is still expanding and Afghans have
lost confidence in our ability to stem it, as well as in our ability
to establish an alternative government in Kabul that is truly
worthy of their support. A negotiated settlement with the Taliban
looks increasingly like the West’s only way out of the mess.Our strategy to date has been dominated by military rather than
civilian thinking, and it is failing in large part because we
continue to misunderstand the nature of the opposition.‘There are those who are propagating war based on an
extreme, perverted view of Islam. Those people are not
reconcilable,’ the former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
once remarked.1 Yet if the problem is the ‘perversion’ of Islam
– a characterization of their religion, incidentally, that a great
many Afghans, not just the Taliban, would dispute – is
reconciliation not more likely to be achieved through theological
debate rather than military force? The Taliban are the
representatives of an ideology as much as they are an army. It
follows that we need to win arguments with them, not just
battles – and we can’t do that without talking to them. How
much, in the end, do we really know about the Taliban and
their motives? Not nearly enough, I would suggest. And yet
according to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, the famous ancient
Chinese text still taught in Nato staff colleges, ‘know your
enemy’ is one of the first precepts of successful warfare.