Author: Peter L. Bergen File Type: mobi Ten years have passed since the shocking attacks on the World Trade Center, and after seven years of conflict, the last US combat troops left Iraqonly to move into Afghanistan, where the ten-year-old fight continues the war on terror rages with no clear end in sight. In The Longest War Peter Bergen offers a comprehensive history of this war and its evolution, from the strategies devised in the wake of the 911 attacks to the fighting in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond. Unlike any other book on this subject, here Bergen tells the story of this shifting wars failures and successes from the perspectives of both the United States and al-Qaeda and its allies. He goes into the homes of al-Qaeda members, rooting into the source of their devotion to terrorist causes, and spends time in the offices of the major players shaping the U.S. strategic efforts in the region. At a time when many are frustrated or fatigued with what has become an enduring multigenerational conflict, this book will provide an illuminating narrative that not only traces the arc of the fight but projects its likely future. Weaving together internal documents from al-Qaeda and the U.S. offices of counterterrorism, first-person interviews with top-level jihadists and senior Washington officials, along with his own experiences on the ground in the Middle East, Bergen balances the accounts of each side, revealing how al-Qaeda has evolved since 911 and the specific ways the U.S. government has responded in the ongoing fight. Bergen also uncovers the strategic errors committed on both sidesthe way that al-Qaedas bold attack on the United States on 911 actually undermined its objective and caused the collapse of the Taliban and the destruction of the organizations safe haven in Afghanistan, and how al-Qaeda is actually losing the war of ideas in the Muslim world. The book also shows how the United States undermined its moral position in this war with its actions at Guantanamo and coercive interrogationsincluding the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar, who was kidnapped by the CIA in Milan in 2003 and was tortured for four years in Egyptian prisons his case represents the first and only time that CIA officials have been charged and convicted of the crime of kidnapping. In examining other strategic blunders the United States has committed, Bergen offers a scathing critique of the Clinton and Bush administrations inability to accurately assess and counter the al-Qaeda threat, Bushs deeply misguided reasons for invading Iraqincluding the story of how the invasion was launched based, in part, on the views of an obscure academic who put forth theories about Iraqs involvement with al-Qaedaand the Obama administrations efforts in Afghanistan. At a critical moment in world history The Longest War provides the definitive account of the ongoing battle against terror. **Amazon.com Review Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2011 At nearly a decade and counting, and with tens of thousands of American troops still at war in Afghanistan and Iraq--and with Osama bin Laden still at large--we remain well within the post-911 era, almost to the point where we take its conditions for granted. Many of the aspects of the ongoing, often indirect battles between America and al-Qaeda have been well covered, but there hasnt until now been a full overview of the conflict, and few are more qualified to write it than Peter Bergen, the print and television journalist who, as a CNN producer, arranged bin Ladens first interview with the Western press in 1997. He has been on the story ever since, as the author of Holy War, Inc., and The Osama bin Laden I Know, but in The Longest War he synthesizes his knowledge for the first time into an insightful portrait of both sides in this asymmetrical struggle between superpower and shadowy scourge. Readers of reporters like Lawrence Wright, Thomas Ricks, and Bob Woodward will be familiar with much of the story, especially on the American side, but Bergens rare understanding of bin Ladens world--often based on personal interviews with present and former jihadists--along with his sharp assessments of each sides successes and failures (he considers the 911 attacks to have been more of a failure than a success for their perpetrators), make it necessary reading for anyone wanting to understand our times. --Tom Nissley From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Bergen (The Osama bin Laden I Know), CNNs national security analyst, revisits the personality and career of the al-Qaeda leader and his immediate circle, while delving into the conflict between al-Qaeda and associates and the U.S. and its coalition. Much of the narrative conforms in outline to other recent books on the conflict, but Bergen adds much detail and contour to his analyses. He finds serious miscalculations on the part of the terrorist organization, and sees the surge in Iraq signaling a larger decline in al-Qaedas potency. At the same time, he argues that the widespread backlash in the Middle East against the September 11 attacks confirms it is mainstream Islam that poses the greatest ideological threat to al-Qaeda. The U.S., meanwhile, has let incompetence and a misguided obsession with Iraq undermine its efforts to extinguish al-Qaeda and the enduring influence of bin Laden, who, Bergen argues, is still alive. Drawing on vast firsthand knowledge of the region and mining a huge stock of primary and secondary material, including his own interviews with combatants, the books depth of detail and breadth of insight make it one of the more useful analyses of the ongoing conflict. (Jan.) (c) PWxyz, LLC.

Author: Patrick Modiano File Type: epub In 1988 Patrick Modiano stumbles across an ad in the personal columns of the New Years Eve 1941 edition of Paris Soir Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15, height 1 m 55, oval-shaped face, gray-brown eyes, gray sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes. Placed by the parents of Dora, who had run away from her Catholic boarding school, the ad sets Modiano off on a quest to find out everything he can about her and why, at the height of German reprisals, she ran away from the people hiding her. There is only one other official mention of her name on a list of Jews deported from Paris to Auschwitz in September 1942. What little Modiano discovers about Dora in official records and through remaining family members becomes a meditation on the immense losses of the periodlost people, lost stories, and lost history. Modiano delivers a moving account of the ten-year investigation that took him back to the sights and sounds of Paris under the Nazi Occupation and the paranoia of the Petain regime. In his efforts to exhume her from the past, Modiano realizes that he must come to terms with the specters of his own troubled adolescence. The result, a montage of creative and historical material, is Modianos personal rumination on loss, both memoir and memorial.**Amazon.com ReviewIn 1988, French novelist Patrick Modiano happened upon a notice in a 1941 Paris newspaper placed by the parents of a 15-year-old Jewish girl, Dora Bruder, who had disappeared from the Catholic boarding school where she was being hidden. The notice stuck in Modianos memory, and it launched him on a quest for information about the girls life that resulted in Dora Bruder. Modianos lengthy investigation turned up only tiny scraps of information about Dora--but every scrap made the mystery of her disappearance more haunting. Most strikingly, Modiano found her name on a list of Jews deported from Paris to Auschwitz in 1942. It takes time for what has been erased to resurface, Modiano explains. It took me four years to discover her exact date of birth 25 February 1926. And a further two years to find out her place of birth Paris, 12th arondissement. But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain. Eventually Modianos search forces him to come to terms with his own difficult adolescence. Yet this book defies categorization in both history and memoir. It is something more complex, and harder--a poetic acknowledgment and a philosophical refutation of common and terrifying human fates being isolated, forgotten, and lost. --Michael Joseph GrossFrom Kirkus Reviews A hauntingly fetching book, centered on one teenage girls avoidable death. Modianos novel Out of the Dark (1998) is also a short, nostalgic work fixated on a woman. This work is even darker, in that it weaves research, logical speculation, and emotive imagination around a Jewish girl who runs away from the convent school that is hiding her and soon disappears in Auschwitz via Drancy. Modianos obsessive search began about ten years ago when he saw an old 1941 newspaper notice about a missing 15-year-old girl named Dora Bruder. Using the powerful description that makes him a noted novelist in his native France (codethe black interminable wall, the penumbra beneath the metro arches), Modiano goes to the listed address and to many uncooperative offices to follow the paper trail, the bureaucratic banality of evil, that leads to Bruders bolting from her tedious but safe hiding place during the Nazi occupation. The tragedy took place in parts of Paris familiar to the author, though much has changed in 50 years,codeand it takes time for what has been erased to resurface. What resurfaces through months of patient investigation are details about Doras parents and his own Jewish father, who abandoned the family, with speculation placing Dora and his father in the same predicament. Beyond the guesswork, like describing Mr. Bruders likely battles during five years with the French Foreign Legion, Modiano comes up with a few photos of Dora and her family and interviews a few survivors that knew the family. The author combines empathy and facts to see the suicidal ecstasy of Dora running away and hiding out on the wintry Parisian streets until her documented arrest and transport to oblivion. Not a Holocaust memoir or historical fiction but a skillful reconstruction of a life that strides the two genres. (3 b&w photos, 2 maps) -- 1999, Kirkus Associates, LP.