Afghanistan (the links will come from Syrian page on the left)

"Daniel Ellsberg, the famous journalist who released the Pentagon Papers, described Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald’s latest book Crossing Zero: The Afpak War At The Turning Point of American Empire as “a ferocious, iron-clad argument about the institutional failure of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

“No border,” write Gould and Fitzgerald, “has been more contentious than the one today separating Pakistan from Afghanistan, known as the Durand line but referred to by the military and intelligence community as Zero line.” As the authors point out, by “crossing Zero” the Obama administration’s AfPak strategy has accelerated the CIA’s illegal secret war in Pakistan which has had the antipodal effect of fanning violent Islamic extremism while violating America’s values and principles.

Using the dismantling of Al Qaeda as a pretense, the U.S. approach has been nothing more than an extension of British policy employed during the 19th century’s Great Game in Central Asia, driven by private enterprise and the West’s “Christian zeal” to “carry the light” to the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan – bearing resemblance to the British East India Company’s exploitation of the region which began in the 1600s.  This work is unique in the way it portrays how the legacy of colonialism continues to haunt the present, including British regulations imposed on Pashtuns and other indigenous people in the border regions. The authors explain:

“The British then re-enacted a set of legal rules known as the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR). The FCR were imported and adapted from the Irish Penal codes, a series of English laws and rules introduced into Ireland beginning in 1366 (Statutes of Kilkenny), for the purposes of keeping the Anglo-Norman population from intermarrying with the native Irish. After centuries of legal evolution, the FCR had transformed from a severe code developed by a Protestant Christian Empire to subjugate the Catholic Irish into a set of harsh rules selectively applied to Muslim Pashtuns and Baluchs.” From a Review by Michael Hughes - Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire, 2011, Gould & Fitzgerald  

 

Andre Vltchek: “The people of Afghanistan have had truly enough of Western imperialist barbarism”, 12 Sep 2017

 

[Our] "book’s purpose is — as stated by Afghan expert Selig Harrison — to correct five decades of biased journalistic and academic writing about Afghanistan. (...) Kenneth J. Cooper’s review is a perfect example of what American journalism has become and what it can no longer be in order to be called journalism." Invisible History, Afghanistan’s Untold Story Is no Conspiracy Theory!, 2009, Fitzgerald & Gould