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Afghanistan

What Everyone Needs to Know

by Barnett R. Rubin

Narrator David Stifel

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Length 11 hours 33 minutes

Language English

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Summary
About the author
About the narrator

Afghanistan, a landlocked country in Central Asia, has improbably been at the center of international geopolitics for four decades. After the Soviet Union invaded in 1980, Afghanistan descended into an unending conflict that featured at various points most of the world's major powers. In the mid-1990s, the country entered a new phase, when the Taliban took power and imposed order based on a harsh, repressive version of Islamic law. Infamously, the sheltered Osama bin Laden, whose attack on 9/11 Towers ushered in the Global War on Terror, drew tens of thousands of American troops to the country, where they remain today.

In Afghanistan: What Everyone Needs to Know®, leading scholar Barnett R. Rubin provides an overview of this complicated nation. After providing a concise history of Afghanistan, he explores the various peoples and cultures of the country and its relations with neighbors like Pakistan and Iran. He also provides an authoritative overview of the conflicts that have plagued the country since the Soviet invasion. Both wide-ranging and pithy, this book explains why Afghanistan matters and what its possible future might look like.

History Politics & Economy Nonfiction

Barnett R. Rubin is senior fellow and associate director of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Regional Project, Center for International Cooperation, New York University. He also served in the Obama Administration as senior advisor to Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Rubin is the author of The Fragmentation of Afghanistan and Afghanistan from the Cold War through the War on Terror.

David Stifel was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. Bitten early by the acting bug, he studied his craft at the Yale School of Drama. After graduation, he found himself in the usual array of interesting day jobs such as casino porter at Lake Tahoe, ESL teacher in Iran, and Egypt, and video game programmer in the Atari/Intellivision era. Concurrently he worked in films and TV shows for such directors as Steven Spielberg (Minority Report), Danny Boyle (A Life Less Ordinary), and Joel Schumacher (The Number 23). David entered the audiobook field in 2011, when he launched a long-term podcast of serializations of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Today he is a multi-award-winning narrator with more than 125 audiobooks to his credit. His growing catalog of audiobooks is strong on thrillers, horror, sci-fi, and mysteries. David's rich baritone voice also lends itself very well to nonfiction memoirs and history-popular and academic. His classical acting training makes him very strong with heightened literary language. Pegged as a "character actor" from youth, his facility with numerous characters is frequently praised by reviewers and listeners.