Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field - Softcover

"An outstanding and important collection-just the sort of locally specific, openly debatable, scholarly analysis...that will be required more and more if the international community is ever to understand the insurgents....As up-to-date as scholarship can be."--Pullitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll in The New Yorker

"Far removed from the usual clichés and hasty generalisations, Decoding the New Taliban offers the reader a keen, first-hand sense of field research in Afghanistan, with all its uncertainties and contradictions. the authors, working on different regions or themes, offer new data andthought-provoking analyses. this book is an important step in understanding our failure in the current war."--Gilles Dorronsoro, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Revolution Unending: Afghanistan 1979 to the Present

"Giustozzi has succeeded in drawing together an excellent collection of perceptive essays from eminent and distinguished contributors. The focus on developments in diverse Afghan localities ensures that there is much in the volume that is novel, and instructive for both specialist and general readers."--Professor William Maley, author of Rescuing Afghanistan

While the 'New Taliban' looms large in the global media, little is known about how it functions as an organisation. How united is it? Are its structures relatively strong, or surprisingly brittle? Are personal relations and networking based on traditional ties of kin and ethnicity the sum total of its organisational capabilities, or are efforts underway to build more institutionalised chains of command? How united is the New Taliban, and how does it maintain whatever degree of unity it has, given the attrition it has suffered in the field? And to what extent is its leadership able to impose switches in strategy among the rank-and- file, given Afghanistan's difficult geography and poor communications? These are among the questions answered in this book by a renowned cast of practitioners, journalists and academics, all of whom have long field experience of the latest phase of the New Taliban's insurgency in Afghanistan.Decoding the New Taliban includes a number of detailed studies of specific regions or provinces, which for different reasons are especially significant for the Taliban and for understanding their expansion. Alongside these regional studies, the volume includes thematic analyses of negotiating with the Taliban, the Taliban's propaganda effort and its strategic vision.