AFGHANISTAN

Graveyard of Empires
by David Isby
Contact David Isby at:
Phone: 347-202-3360
[email protected]

AFGHANISTAN
Graveyard of Empires
A New History of the Borderland

David Isby
ISBN 978-1-60598-9 Cloth $28.95 6 x9 xxii, 440 pages Map

The war in Afghanistan is still winnable, but only if both the US

and Afghans make immediate and forceful changes to enable them do
what is necessary to prevent the Taliban from winning by default by
waiting until the world loses patience. The hope for a better life that led
Afghans of all ethnolinguistic groups to support the overthrow of the
Taliban in 2001 has deteriorated and needs to be revived through a
cohesive strategy. This is the conclusion of Afghanistan, Graveyard of
Empires, A History of the Borderlands, a new book by David Isby,
published by Pegasus Books in New York.
 AFGHANISTAN
Graveyard of Empires
by David Isby
The author, who has studied the conflicts in Afghanistan since the
Soviet invasion in 1979, has published three previous books on
Afghanistan, written extensively in journals such as USA Today, The
Washington Times, Jane’s Intelligence Review, Jane’s Defense Weekly and
other publications, testified before House and Senate committees as an
independent expert, and has appeared discussing Afghanistan on CNN,
Fox and Friends, PBS News Hour, the McLaughlin Group, C-SPAN, the
BBC, the Voice of America and many other broadcasts.

This is a book about Afghanistan, the Afghans and conflicts that

have come to define them both. The author sees Afghanistan as having
become a country defined by five distinct but interconnected conflicts
that are currently shaping its future, conflicts against the international
terrorism of Al Qaeda, that against the insurgents, especially the Taliban
movement; that against narcotics cultivation and trafficking (Afghanistan
produces the vast majority of the world’s supply of illicit opium), and,
finally, Afghanistan’s multifaceted internal conflicts. Pointedly, the fifth
conflict that will shape the future of Afghanistan is not in that country at
all, but in Pakistan, where the insurgency is essentially part of a single
trans-border conflict including Afghanistan. Pakistan’s internal
instability threatens the future of its neighbors as well.

The book sees Afghanistan’s conflicts as having a direct impact on

the US. Al Qaeda planned and trained for the 9/11 attacks in Taliban-
controlled Afghanistan. The Taliban insurgents the US are fighting
represent a movement that has the potential to destabilize the three
strategic reasons bordered by Afghanistan: Pakistan and the
subcontinent, Iran and the Gulf and central Asia. A Taliban resurgence
would present a model of how Western influence can be forced out of an
Islamic country by a radicalized minority with access to external support,
here delivered through sanctuaries in Pakistan.

While the book sees the long-running conflicts in Afghanistan as still

winnable, losing – allowing the insurgents to achieve their goals –
remains a real possibility unless US and Afghans alike change. US
disengagement from Afghanistan would be unlikely to reduce the impact
of subsequent success by Al Qaeda and the Taliban and prevent future
threats both to the US and to the stability of the regions.
 AFGHANISTAN
Graveyard of Empires
by David Isby

The author has spent much time on the ground in Afghanistan

and Pakistan, starting in the 1980s. He has met, talked, argued with
and listened to many of the leading figures on all sides of each of today’s
conflicts, as well as those from all walks of life. While the conflicts are
about many things, none is more important than what happens to the
hope that Afghanistan had in such abundance when the Taliban fell in
2001. What happens to that hope for a better future, whether it can be
revived or if what remains of it will turn to dust and Afghanistan will face
a future of seemingly limitless conflict, is the central issue of Afghanistan,
Graveyard of Empires.
.
For review copies or further information, contact:
Jessica Case
Pegasus Books
80 Broad Street
5th Floor
New York, NY, 10004
212-504-2924
[email protected]
 AFGHANISTAN
Graveyard of Empires
by David Isby
Contact David Isby at:
Phone: 347-202-3360
[email protected]

About the Author

David Isby

DAVID C. ISBY is a veteran observer of Afghanistan and Afghan

wars. He is the author of three previous books on Afghanistan: WAR IN
A DISTANT COUNTRY: AFGHANISTAN, INVASION AND RESISTANCE,
WAR IN AFGHANISTAN: THE SOVIET EMPIRE AT HIGH TIDE; and
RUSSIA'S WAR IN AFGHANISTAN. He is also the author of, among other
works, of books on the forces that fought in Afghanistan, WEAPONS AND
TACTICS OF THE SOVIET ARMY and ARMIES OF NATO’S CENTRAL
FRONT (with Charles Kamps). He has written over 350 articles on
national security in International Defense Review, USA Today, The
National Interest Online, Military Intelligence, Jane’s Defense Weekly,
Defense News, CTC Terrorism Sentinel, Jamestown Terrorism Monitor, and
many other publications. He was an editor for Strategy & Tactics
magazine and has designed several award-winning conflict simulations.

A former congressional staff member and a Washington-based attorney

and consultant on national security issues, he has testified before both
House and Senate committees as an independent expert on Afghanistan
and frequently appears in print and electronic media, including PBS
NewsHour, CNN, VoA, C-Span, the McLaughlin Group, Fox and Friends
and others. He has lectured at staff colleges and other institutions on
Afghanistan.
 AFGHANISTAN
Graveyard of Empires
by David Isby
Contact David Isby at:
Phone: 347-202-3360
[email protected]

Quotes and Reviews – David Isby

“David Isby is …a scholar with a broad understanding of both military

history and the current situation”. The Washington Times

“An accomplished author”. – Ralph Peters

“David C. Isby, an American defense expert, attorney and pilot” – British

Army Review

“David Isby gives his readers [in Leave no Man Behind] one of the most
thoroughly researched and well-written accounts to date of the high risk
subset of Special Operations” – Journal of Military History

“Isby has written a volume that superbly analyzes the past with a clear
look to the future”. – Infantry [on Leave No Man Behind].
 AFGHANISTAN
Graveyard of Empires
by David Isby
Contact David Isby at:
Phone: 347-202-3360
[email protected]

Sample Interview Questions

for David Isby
Is Afghanistan worth a US commitment with its attendant cost in lives
and money?

Is Afghanistan going to be Obama’s Vietnam?

Have the Taliban split from Al Qaeda? Is there any reason to assume
that Al Qaeda would be able to use Taliban-controlled parts of
Afghanistan to plan and train for terrorism as they did before 2001?

Do the Afghans resent the US and foreign presence in their country?

What changes have you seen in Afghanistan recently compared with the
immediate post-Taliban period?

Are the five conflicts you talk about in Afghanistan primarily military?

Do we need more troops in Afghanistan?

Why has corruption become a major problem in Afghanistan and what

can be done about it?

Opium cultivation - what can be done about it?

What has been your most memorable experience in Afghanistan?

What have your experiences with Afghans been like?

How did you become interested in Afghanistan?

 AFGHANISTAN
Graveyard of Empires
by David Isby
Contact David Isby at:
Phone: 347-202-3360
[email protected]

An Interview with David Isby

Author of Afghanistan,
Graveyard of Empires

What’s really going on in Afghanistan?

The insurgency in Afghanistan absorbs the vast majority of coalition

troops and resources. But at the same time, threats from transnational
terrorism, narcotics trafficking and Afghanistan’s internal conflicts
undercut many of the policies that an effective counter-insurgency
strategy requires. All of these conflicts also are affecting Pakistan.
Insurgency, terrorism, and a set of internal crises can to turn Pakistan
into the ultimate bad-dream scenario, a nuclear-armed failed state.
Multiple conflicts in two countries ensure policies effective against any
one are likely to be counterproductive against the others.

What matters most about the current conflict in Afghanistan?

The US, the UK, Canada and others are fighting a long and costly war, in
terms of both casualties and money. No end is in sight. But the
fundamental fact is that this war is about Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s
conflicts have their roots in events that took place long before the US
military intervention in 2001, after 9/11. In my book, I tried to always
keep the focus on Afghanistan and the Afghans and, as far as it shapes
the future of Afghanistan, Pakistan as well. Afghans, rather than the
White House, the Pentagon, or the Congress, will have to put together the
eventual solution.
 AFGHANISTAN
Graveyard of Empires
by David Isby

What should be the US policy objective in Afghanistan?

Afghanistan is a war that needs to be won. What is at stake is much

greater than preventing another 9/11 attack being prepared in
Afghanistan. Losing in Afghanistan would not be like losing in Vietnam.
The US forced to retreat like the Soviets would be a victory for
transnational terror. It would make them the wave of the future to
people throughout the Islamic world. The narrative that the Americans
came after us, but they could not beat us and now, we’re back and
they’ve gone home would be a compelling one.

What should the US be doing to win the war in Afghanistan?

Even the best US soldiers or the most caring aid workers can only do so
much. The most important thing Afghanistan needs from the US is to
keep the neighbors – especially Pakistan – from fighting out their own
proxy wars in Afghanistan. Aid to rebuild the infrastructure and human
resources and create a functional private sector economy has too often
been absent since 2001.

What do you think about the US policy debate regarding

Afghanistan?

Many policy arguments are really about the US rather than Afghanistan.
To some, Afghanistan is another Vietnam, an open-ended foreign war
that threatens plans for widespread and expensive domestic social
reforms. Others invoke the US withdrawals from Lebanon in the 1980s
and Somalia in the 1990s as potential lessons. There, the local
population felt the effects, rather than people in the US. In Afghanistan,
Americans may not be as fortunate. People tend to make up the
Afghanistan that best supports their own preferences in the highly
polarized US political environment rather than trying to come to grips
with unclear and often contradictory reality.

Why should Americans care about Afghanistan?

Afghanistan is a great place. The Afghans are wonderful people. Neither

deserves what is happening. Yet United States policy towards
Afghanistan must be considered in terms of national interest. The US
disengagement from Afghanistan in the 1990s proved to be disastrous
 AFGHANISTAN
Graveyard of Empires
by David Isby
from that standpoint – it helped create the vacuum Al Qaeda filled – as
well as for the Afghans. The US supported countries such as the
Republic of Korea and Israel back when they were poor and weak. Today,
they are neither. Afghanistan may never make it to their level. America
fought a bloody war in Korea, while Israel has never required US forces.
US commitment helps them prosper despite neighbors that are
adversaries and creates a world order where conflicts do not directly
affect the life of the average American. The 9/11 attacks, planned in
Afghanistan, aimed at destroying this order.

--30--
 AFGHANISTAN
Graveyard of Empires
by David Isby
Contact David Isby at:
Phone: 347-202-3360
[email protected]

Why I Wrote This Book:

Afghanistan: Graveyard of
Empires
David Isby

The children seemed not to know what to make of it. But they could see
that their parents were happy and so they decided to smile and chatter
with each other. There were cameras and foreigners and much talking,
and their parents seemed to think that great good would come of that
day’s events. It was 21 March 2002; in Afghanistan, Nawroz (New Year’s
Day) of the year 1423 A.H.. The schools were reopening throughout the
country on the traditional first day of spring classes.

The parents smiled at of the happy children, now clutching aid-donated

books and pencils handed them for the benefit of the cameras. ,To
others at the ceremony, the children were evidence of how much
Afghanistan had changed in the few months since the US and its
coalition allies, through the use of a few hundred special operations
forces personnel and intelligence agents, supported by the judicious use
of airpower, had enabled Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance to topple the
Afghan Taliban regime and their Al Qaeda patrons and drive them over
the border into Pakistan. While they were in power, the Taliban had
 AFGHANISTAN
Graveyard of Empires
by David Isby
barred girls from attending school throughout most of Afghanistan as
anathema to their fundamentalist vision of Islam. Boys’ education had
been cut back. But today, boys and girls would go to school together in
Afghanistan. The donated notebooks were an earnest of the promise of
outside aid, making education available to them all. That was what had
made their parents happy. Surely, the parents thought, with the Taliban
gone and the conflicts that had embroiled Afghanistan since 1978 finally
over, a bright future seemed to be opening up that morning along with
the schools.

The reopening of Afghanistan’s schools on Nawroz in 2002 was the first

act by an Afghan government that had been accepted and implemented
countrywide in Afghanistan since 1978. Then, the Communist putsch
had been the first step in a long chain of events that plunged the country
into the start what was to become decades of conflict. Since then,
Afghanistan had always been a country at war. But on Nawroz, 2002,
with the children clutching their donated books and going off to school,
Afghanistan was a country full of hope. Afghans of all ethnolinguistic
groups were happy to see the end of the Taliban. They were sure that
the international intervention that had brought it about was going to be
the start of a new and better era for Afghanistan.

Today, some eight years later, there are over six million Afghan children
in school (up from 750,000 in 2001), with a third of the primary school
children being girls. But Afghanistan’s hope, so bright and strong on the
day the schools reopened, has faded. Afghanistan is once again a
country at war. Schools are burned by the Taliban as the creations of an
infidel invader, 1,089 in 2005-07 alone, more have since been destroyed.
Teachers are killed or scared away as agents of a puppet government.
Afghanistan has a lot of conflict and not much hope.

The story of how Afghanistan went from a country at war to a country

with hope and has now gone back again – and whether this can be halted
or reversed – is the subject of my new book, Afghanistan: Graveyard of
Empires. A History of the Borderlands published by Pegasus Books in
New York.

This is the fourth book I have written about Afghanistan at war. I have
been studying Afghanistan and its conflicts for almost thirty years. I
have also written reference books on the armed forces of the Soviet Union
and NATO that both, to their own surprise, have ended up fighting there
in conflicts that will determine their ultimate success or failure. Over the
 AFGHANISTAN
Graveyard of Empires
by David Isby
years, I have traveled many times to Afghanistan and Pakistan. I shared
the hope that was so abundant on Nawroz, 2002.

It took a lot to go from the hope-filled Afghanistan of 2002 to the looming

crises and multiple, overlapping conflicts of the present day. I wanted to
show how Afghanistan got there. . The Pakistanis offered a sanctuary to
the Taliban and much of Al Qaeda, seeing them as a way to influence the
new Afghanistan and hoping that, if they focused their aggression
against the government in Kabul, they would not turn on that in
Islamabad. Drawing on the “Taliban culture” that had taken root there
since the 1980s, a revived Taliban insurgency was able to bring a
minority of Afghanistan’s Pushtun population into arms against the new
government by 2005-06. Al Qaeda joined forces with Pakistan-based
terrorist organizations, previously limited to the conflict in Kashmir, and
rallied them to strike back at infidels worldwide.

I had seen the Afghans in bad times and, having shared their optimism
in 2002, to see things go back again was a painful personal blow. The
Afghans were willing to take the short-term, self-interested view time and
again. The Afghans, while proud of the constitution they created, ended
up practicing a divisive approach to internal politics that led to a culture
of corruption.

In 2009, the security situation around Kabul had deteriorated. The

Afghan presidential election was tainted by corruption. In the US, the
bipartisan consensus on Afghanistan that had endured since 2001
crumbled in the first nine months of the new administration. In the US,
UK, Canada and other countries with troops in Afghanistan, the
electorate is losing patience with the casualties and cost of a
commitment that is little understood and seems to offer nothing but
unending frustration.

So I wrote this book to explain how, with Afghanistan filled with hope, on
the day the schools reopened in 2002, today hope is in danger of drying
up and blowing away. How we – the US, the Afghans, everyone – went
from the hope-filled Afghanistan of March 2002 to the hope-imperiled
Afghanistan of today was at the heart of what I wanted to tell But
Afghanistan is not lost past redemption or repair, even in the most
insurgent-plagued districts or in the most corrupt ministries.

It is important that hope be kept alive in Afghanistan, important not only

for the Afghans but for the countries in the regions that border them and
also for people in the US. Afghanistan has a real potential to affect their
 AFGHANISTAN
Graveyard of Empires
by David Isby
lives. If the average American saw, when the recession went global in
2008, how interlinked economies are, this conflict is showing threats of
fundamentalism and terrorism, unlike armies, cannot be contained
across oceans. Afghanistan was allowed to function as a haven for
international terrorism under the Taliban. It was where Al Qaeda trained
for and planned the 9/11 attacks. But even if Al Qaeda never came back
to Afghanistan, if the Taliban insurgents end up back in power, it would
not only be dreadful for the people of Afghanistan it would encourage all
those that believe that the US, the West and their Moslem allies cannot
stand up to radicalism. Terrorists will see a success greater than 9/11.
The Muslim world will see that armed fundamentalism can triumph over
western-supported democracy. This will have an impact throughout the
world. That I why I believe it is important to revive Afghanistan’s hope.

Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires. A History of the Borderlands is

published by Pegasus Books in New York. It is available at bookstores
nationwide as well as on-line at Amazon.Com, Barnes & Noble,
Powells.com and elsewhere.

--30--
 AFGHANISTAN
Graveyard of Empires
by David Isby