Ghost Wars
The Ghost Wars is a literary science fiction work focused on identity, diversity and the spiritual underpinnings of the nature of good and evil. Set in Vancouver, Canada; our protagonist RCN Captain Billington sees the world from a higher vantage point of a world in which money is no longer man's ruler, where the health of the planet and the body politic trump all. Alternating between three interconnecting lives, Jason Bowen, Cole Billington and Cecil Smith each have their own individual experiences of being the outlier in their world. Jason's autistic neurology has found creative expression through the development of an intricately layered inner world. Cole's bicultural heritage as a despised alien species with a lifespan of five centuries gives him an inherent sense of how autistics view the world. Cole's war torn childhood on Garconer Colony has left him with his own dislocated inner aspects. Sucked up by a spatial-temporal gravity well; Cole was torn out of his own time and has been working with the Commonwealth Protection Bureau since its inception in nineteen ten. Born in nineteen hundred; Cecelia Smith began working at the CPB in nineteen twenty eight, going by the name Cecil. Cecil's life as a transgender man parallels Jason's own gender queer one. The Ghost Wars aims to bring readers a new understanding of the issues surrounding gender variation, atypical neurology and spirituality with a futuristic twist.
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11recommend
13mentions
11people
2007–2021years
92% recommend8% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- There's a whole bunch of books about the CIA and the lead up to and aftermath of 9/11:
- Currently absorbed in Ghost Wars in audiobook format. Won a Pulitzer. All about the CIA and their dealing with their Pakistani counterpart ISI and the Afghan war lords. Lots of great cowboy stories and incredible amount of detail.
- The Targeter by Nada Bakos
- On another topic, you might enjoy The Spy on Netflix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spy_(TV_series) about Eli Cohen working as a spy in Syria.
- Highly recommend Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 and the sequel Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are long but very detailed and really lays out the complex relationships between the CIA, Pakistani ISI, and the various groups that came and went leading up to 9/11 in the first book, and post 9/11 in the second.
Descent into Chaos: The United States & the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan & Central Asia and In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan are also great reads about Afghanistan.
Not as on topic, but still good would include The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth about how the CIA shifted towards more targeting operations and the military shifted to more intelligence gathering and how that has blurred the lines between the two. And The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One about how insurgencies work, how local people are recruited and coopted by globally minded jihadists using local problems, and how a counter insurgency operation requires understanding and addressing local dynamics and issues, and breaking the connection between locally focused fighters and global jihadists.
- > Most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event.
This is just plain false. A nice book that I can recommend on the actual history of it is Ghost Wars by Steve Coll.
- >Afganistan is probably the best example. It was never easy to govern, but after the US trained a guerilla resistance to the Soviet invasion it became impossible. Most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event.
I disagree, but with some context. If you just go back to the cold war, you would be correct, but in a longer time-frame context, I would posit instead it was mostly at the British backing of the Saud's that created the later environment exploited in the 80s and then again later. I recently read a book, sorry I can't remember the name right now, written by an AQ guy turned intel-asset who actually spent time inside the Afghan camps. He mentioned enough times for it to stick in my mind how the funding came from SA, and how the more powerful people in the groups (trainers, etc) were either from SA or Wahhabists. That sent me on a journey of reading up on SA that left me really feeling a lot of it was due to Britain wanting to maintain the tendrils of Empire, not taking into account the possibility of blowback later, or rather, finding it an acceptable price to pay.
Mark Curtis wrote a book that I found most illuminating on the subject, "Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam":
"As Britain withdrew its military forces from the Middle East in the late 1960s, Islamist forces such as the Saudi regime and, once again, the Muslim Brotherhood, were often seen as proxies to maintain British interests in the region, to continue to destabilise communist or nationalist regimes or as ‘muscle’ to bolster pro-British, right-wing governments. By the 1970s, Arab nationalism had been virtually defeated as a political force, partly thanks to Anglo–American opposition; it was largely replaced by the rising force of radical Islam, which London again often saw as a handy weapon to counter the remnants of secular nationalism and communism in key states such as Egypt and Jordan."..." Britain continued to see some of these groups as useful, principally as proxy guerilla forces in places as diverse as Bosnia, Azerbaijan, Kosovo and Libya; there,they were used either to help break up the Soviet Union and secure major oil interests or to fight nationalist regimes," ... "Whitehall not only tolerated but encouraged the development of ‘Londonistan’–the capital acting as a base and organising centre for numerous jihadist groups –even as this provided a de facto ‘green light’to that terrorism.I suggest that some elements, at least, in the British establishment may have allowed some Islamist groups to operate from London not only because they provided information to the security services but also because they were seen as useful to British foreign policy, notably in maintaining a politically divided Middle East –a long-standing goal of imperial and postwar planners –and as a lever to influence foreign governments’ policies."... "Churchill later wrote that 'my admiration for him [Ibn Saud] was deep, because of his unfailing loyalty to us'"
Yes, as another commenter said, I can also recommend Ghost Wars as one of my favorite books on Afghanistan, and Steve Colls more recent work Directorate S is also extremely well written in the same vein.
- > But even the supposed best are so bad that it makes no difference.
I disagree. And I think there’s empirical data to back me up.
We can pick one politician, and look them up on Politifact.
https://www.politifact.com/personalities/joe-biden/
https://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/
Do you really believe Fox News does a better job of fact-checking? Or your media organization of choice.
Politifact is solid. Pro Publica is solid.
Attempting to reduce it to “all are equally bad, or so bad it doesn’t matter” is disingenuous and actually furthers attempts to deceive the public by undermining sources which are actually trustworthy.
Distrust everyone, and you’ll believe anyone.
Of course this doesn’t mean you get to turn off your thinking cap - we always have to exercise our own judgement, even when reading information from sources we believe to be trustworthy.
If you genuinely believe what you are saying then I encourage you to broaden your sources. For example, ‘Ghost Wars’, which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and has been broadly acclaimed, covers the CIA and all the stuff it did / has been doing in Afghanistan since 9/11.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Wars
There are plenty of good books on domestic politics too. Books will help broaden your perspective and better evaluate these journalism or media organizations we are talking about.
If you’re not engaging in this discussion with good intention, and your goal is to deceive and generally undermine people’s confidence in reputable sources of information because you believe it furthers your own political beliefs, well, then you should feel ashamed of yourself.
I’m being honest - I don’t know which one is the case.
What you say, however, is demonstrably untrue and a falsehood.
- If you're interested in learning more about Pakistani Intelligence, I can highly recommend Steve Coll's Directorate S. It's the sequel to the pulitzer-prize winning Ghost Wars, but it can be read on its own.
