Native name	د افغانستان اسلامي جمهوریت (}}

)جمهوری اسلامی افغانستان (}}) |conventional_long_name=Islamic Republic of Afghanistan |common_name=Afghanistan |image_flag=Flag of Afghanistan.svg |image_coat=Afghanistan COA Transparent.svg |p1 = Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan |flag p1 = Flag of Taliban.svg |year_start = 1996 |life_span = 1996-2001 |symbol_type=Emblem |image_map=Afghanistan_(orthographic_projection).svg |national_motto= |national_anthem=Afghan National Anthem |official_languages= Pashto and Dari (Persian) |GDP_PPP_rank= |GDP_PPP_per_capita=$1,000 It is bordered by Pakistan in the south and east, Iran in the west, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the north, and China in the far northeast. The territories now comprising Afghanistan have been an ancient focal point of the Silk Road and human migration. Archaeologists have found evidence of human habitation from as far back as 50,000 BCE. Urban civilization may have begun in the area as early as 3000 to 2000 BC.

The country sits at an important geostrategic location which connects the Middle East with Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, which has been home to various people through the ages. The land has witnessed military conquests since antiquity, including by Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and many others.

The political history of modern Afghanistan begins in the 18th century with the rise of the Pashtun tribes (known as Afghans in Persian language), when in 1709 the Hotaki dynasty rose to power in Kandahar and Ahmad Shah Durrani established the Durrani Empire in 1747. The capital of Afghanistan was shifted in 1776 from Kandahar to Kabul and part of its territory was ceded to neighboring empires by 1893. In the late 19th century, Afghanistan became a buffer state in the "Great Game" between the British and Russian empires. On August 19, 1919, following the third Anglo-Afghan war and the signing of the Treaty of Rawalpindi, the nation regained control over its foreign policy from the British.

Since the late 1970s, Afghanistan has experienced a continuous state of war, including major foreign occupations in the forms of the 1979 Soviet invasion, Pakistani military interference in favour of the Taliban in the late 1990s and the October 2001 US-led invasion that overthrew the Taliban government. In December 2001, the United Nations Security Council authorized the creation of an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to help maintain security and assist the Karzai administration. The country is being rebuilt slowly with support from the international community while dealing with the Taliban insurgency and widespread political corruption.

Etymology

The name Afghānistān, Persian: افغانستان , means the "Land of Afghans", originating from the word Afghan.

Origin of the name

The first part of the name "Afghan" designates the Pashtun people since ancient times, the founders and the largest ethnic group of the country. This name is mentioned in the form of "Abgan" in the 3rd century CE and as "Avagana" in the 6th century CE.

The Encyclopædia Iranica states:

A people called "Afghans" are mentioned several times in a 10th century geography book, Hudud al-'alam. Al-Biruni referred to them in the 11th century as various tribes living on the western frontier mountains of the Indus River, which would be the Sulaiman Mountains. Ibn Battuta, a famous Moroccan travelling scholar visiting the region in 1333, writes:

Muhammad Qasim Hindu Shah (Ferishta) explains extensively about Afghans in the 16th century. For example, he writes:

By the 17th century AD, it seems that some Pashtuns themselves were using the term as an ethnonym - a fact that is supported by traditional Pashto literature, for example, in the writings of the 17th-century Pashto poet Khushal Khan Khattak:

The last part of the name, -stān is a Persian suffix for "place", prominent in many languages of the region. The name "Afghanistan" is described by the 16th century Mughal Emperor Babur in his memoirs as well as by later Mughal scholar Firishta, both referring to the territories south of Kabul that were inhabited by Pashtuns (called "Afghans" by both authors). Until the 19th century the name was used for the traditional lands of the Pashtuns only, while the kingdom as a whole was known as the Kingdom of Kabul, as mentioned by the British statesman and historian Mountstuart Elphinstone. In 1857, in his review of J.W. Kaye's The Afghan War, Friedrich Engels describes "Afghanistan" as:

Other parts of the country were at certain periods recognized as independent kingdoms, such as the Kingdom of Balkh in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. With the expansion and centralization of the country, Afghan authorities adopted and extended the name "Afghanistan" to the entire kingdom, after its English translation had already appeared in various treaties between the British Raj and Qajarid Persia, referring to the lands subject to the Pashtun Barakzai dynasty of Kabul. It became the official internationally recognized name in 1919 after the Treaty of Rawalpindi was signed to regain full independence over its foreign policy from the British, and was confirmed as such in the nation's 1923 constitution.

Geography

A landlocked and mountainous country, with plains in the north and southwest, Afghanistan is variously described as being located within South Asia, Central Asia and sometimes Western Asia (or the Middle East). Its highest point is Nowshak, at 7,485 m (24,557 ft) above sea level. The climate varies by region and tends to change quite rapidly. Large parts of the country are dry, and fresh water supplies are limited. The endorheic Sistan Basin is one of the driest regions in the world.

The nation has a continental climate with very harsh winters in the central highlands, the glaciated northeast (around Nuristan) and the Wakhan Corridor, where the average temperature in January is below , and hot summers in the low-lying areas of Sistan Basin of the southwest, the Jalalabad basin of the east, and the Turkistan plains along the Amu River of the north, where temperatures average over in July. The country is frequently subject to minor earthquakes, mainly in the northeast of Hindu Kush mountain areas. Some 125 villages were damaged and 4,000 people killed by the May 31, 1998, earthquake.

At , Afghanistan is the world's 41st largest country (after Burma). It shares borders with Pakistan in the East, Iran in the west, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the north, and China in the far east. The country does not face any water shortage because it receives huge amounts of snow during winter. Once that melts, the water runs into rivers, lakes, and streams, but most of its national water flows to neighboring states. The state needs around $2 billion to rehabilitate its irrigation systems so that the water is properly used.

The nation's natural resources include gold, silver, copper, zinc, and iron ore in the Southeast; precious and semi-precious stones (such as lapis, emerald, and azure) in the Northeast; and potentially significant petroleum and natural gas reserves in the North. The country also has uranium, coal, chromite, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, and salt.

History

Though the modern state of Afghanistan was established in 1747, the land has an ancient history and various timelines of different civilizations. Excavation of prehistoric sites by Louis Dupree, the University of Pennsylvania, the Smithsonian Institution and others suggest that humans were living in what is now Afghanistan at least 50,000 years ago, and that farming communities of the area were among the earliest in the world.

An important site of early historical activity, Afghanistan is a country at a unique nexus point where numerous civilizations have interacted and often fought. The region has been home to various peoples through the ages, among them Ancient Iranian peoples who established the dominant role of Indo-Iranian languages in the region. In certain stages of the history, the land was conquered and incorporated within large empires, among them the Achaemenid Empire; the Macedonian Empire; the Indian Maurya Empire; the Muslim Arab Empire; the Sasanid Empire, and a number of others. Many dynasties and kingdoms have also risen to power in what is now Afghanistan, such as the Greco-Bactrians; Kushans; Indo-Sassanids; Kabul Shahis; Saffarids; Samanids;, Ghaznavids; Ghurids; Kartids; Timurids; Mughals, and finally the Hotaki and Durrani dynasties that marked the political beginning of modern Afghanistan.

Pre-Islamic period

, Aria and Bactria were the ancient satraps of the Persian Achaemenid Empire that made up most of what is now Afghanistan during 500 B.C. Some of the inhabitants of Arachosia were known as Pactyans, whose name possibly survives in today's Pakhtuns / Pashtuns.]] Archaeological exploration done in the 20th century suggests that the geographical area of Afghanistan has been closely connected by culture and trade with the neighboring regions to the east, west, and north. Artifacts typical of the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron ages have been found in Afghanistan. Urban civilization may have begun as early as 3000 BC, and the early city of Mundigak (near Kandahar in the south of the country) may have been a colony of the nearby Indus Valley Civilization. Many of these settlers were Indo-Iranians (speakers of Indo-Iranian languages), the area was called Ariana.

The ancient Zoroastrianism religion is believed by some to have originated in what is now Afghanistan between 1800 to 800 BCE, as its founder Zoroaster is thought to have lived and died in Balkh. Ancient Eastern Iranian languages may have been spoken in the region around the time of the rise of Zoroastrianism. By the middle of the 6th century BCE, the Achaemenid Persian Empire overthrew the Medes and incorporated the region (known as Arachosia, Aria, and Bactria in Ancient Greek) within its boundaries. An inscription on the tombstone of King Darius I of Persia mentions the Kabul Valley in a list of the 29 countries he had conquered. . Buddhism was introduced for the first time during the Maurya Empire (322 BC–185 BC).]] In addition, Hinduism in Afghanistan has existed for almost as long as Hinduism itself, as Greater Persia overlapped with Greater India in the Hindu Kush and Pamir mountains. The religion was widespread in the region until the Islamic conquest of Afghanistan.

Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army arrived to the area of Afghanistan in 330 BCE after defeating Darius III of Persia a year earlier at the Battle of Gaugamela.|Strabo|64 BC–24 AD}} The Mauryans brought Buddhism from India and controlled southern Afghanistan until about 185 BCE when they were overthrown. The late Kushans were followed by the Kidarite Huns who, in turn, were replaced by the short-lived but powerful Hephthalites, as rulers of the region in the first half of the 5th century. The Hephthalites were defeated by the Sasanian king Khosrau I in CE 557, who re-established Sassanid power in Persia. However, in the 6th century CE, the successors of Kushans and Hepthalites established a small dynasty in Kabulistan called Kabul Shahi.

Islamic conquests and Mongol invasion

in 750 CE.]] From the Middle Ages to the 19th century much of today's Afghanistan was recognized as Khorasan. Two of the four main capitals of Khorasan (i.e. Balkh, Merv, Nishapur and Herat) are now located in modern Afghanistan, while Kandahar, Ghazni and Kabul formed the frontier region between Khorasan and Hindustan. The land inhabited by the Afghan tribes (i.e. ancestors of modern Pashtuns) was called Afghanistan, which loosely covered the area between the Hindu Kush and the Indus River, but principally around the Sulaiman Mountains.

Arab Muslims brought the religion of Islam to the western area of what is now Afghanistan during the 7th century and began spreading eastward from Khorasan and Sistan, some accepting it while others revolted. Prior to the introduction of Islam, Afghanistan was mostly Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Hindu, with unknown population of Jews and others. The Kabul Shahi rulers lost their capital, Kabul, in around 870 AD after it was conquered by the Saffarids of Zaranj. Later, the Samanids extended their Islamic influence into the Hindu Kush area from Bukhara in the north. Afghanistan at that stage still had non-Muslims who lived side by side with Muslims.|Istahkrí|921}} By the 11th century the Ghaznavids had finally made all of the remaining non-Muslim areas become fully Islamized, with the exception of the Kafiristan region. Afghanistan at that point became the center of many important empires such as the Tahirids, Saffarids, Samanids, Ghaznavids, Ghurids, and Timurids.

The region was overrun in 1219 by Genghis Khan and his Mongol barbarians, who devastated much of the land. His troops are said to have annihilated the ancient Khorasan cities of Herat and Balkh. The destruction caused by the Mongols depopulated major cities and caused much of the locals to revert to an agrarian rural society. Their rule continued with the Ilkhanate, and was extended further following the invasion of Timur who established the Timurid dynasty. The periods of the Ghaznavids, Ghurids, and Timurids are considered some of the most brilliant eras of Afghanistan's history as they produced fine Islamic architectural monuments The Persians refused to recognize the Afghan ruler, and after the massacre of thousands of Persian religious scholars, nobles, and members of the Safavid family, the Hotaki dynasty was eventually ousted from Persia during the Battle of Damghan.

In 1738, Nader Shah and his army, which included Ahmad Khan and four thousand of his Abdali Pashtuns, captured Kandahar from the last Hotak ruler; in the same year he occupied Ghazni, Kabul and Lahore. In June 1747, Nadir Shah was assassinated by one of his officers and his kingdom fell apart. Ahmad Shah Abdali called for a loya jirga ("grand assembly") to select a leader among his people, and in October 1747 the Pashtuns gathered near Kandahar and chose him as their new head of state. Ahmad Shah Durrani is often regarded as the founder of modern Afghanistan. After the inauguration, Ahmad Shah adopted the title padshah durr-i dawran ('King, "pearl of the age") and the Abdali tribe became known as the Durrani tribe there after. By 1751, Ahmad Shah Durrani and his Afghan army conquered the entire present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Khorasan and Kohistan provinces of Iran, along with Delhi in India. He defeated the Sikhs of the Maratha Empire in the Punjab region nine times; one of the biggest battles was the 1761 Battle of Panipat. In October 1772, Ahmad Shah retired to his home in Kandahar where he died peacefully and was buried at a site now adjacent to the Mosque of the Cloak of the Prophet Mohammed. He was succeeded by his son, Timur Shah Durrani, who transferred the capital of their Afghan Empire from Kandahar to Kabul. Timur died in 1793 and was finally succeeded by his son Zaman Shah Durrani.

Zaman Shah and his brothers had a weak hold on the legacy left to them by their famous ancestor. They sorted out their differences through "round robin of expulsions, blindings and executions", which resulted in the deterioration of the Afghan hold over far-flung territories, such as Attock and Kashmir. Durrani's other grandson, Shuja Shah Durrani, fled the wrath of his brother and sought refuge with the Sikhs.

After Durrani Vizier Fateh Khan was defeated at the Battle of Attock, he fought off an attempt by Ali Shah, the ruler of Persia, to capture the Durrani province of Herat. He was joined by his brother, Dost Mohammad Khan, and rogue Sikh Sardar Jai Singh Attarwalia. Once they had captured the city, Fateh Khan attempted to remove the ruler Mahmud Shah – a relation of his superior – and rule in his stead. In the attempt to take the city from its Durrani ruler, Dost Mohammad Khan's men forcibly took jewels from a princess and Kamran Durrani, Mahmud Shah's son, used this as a pretext to remove Fateh Khan from power, and had him tortured and executed. While in power, however, Fateh Khan had installed 21 of his brothers in positions of power throughout the Durrani Empire. After his death, they rebelled and divided up the provinces of the empire between themselves. During this turbulent period, Kabul had many temporary rulers until Fateh Khan's brother, Dost Mohammad Khan, captured Kabul in 1826.

The Sikhs, under Ranjit Singh, rebelled in 1809 and eventually wrested from the Afghans a large part of the Kingdom of Kabul (present day Pakistan, but not including Sindh). Hari Singh Nalwa, the Commander-in-Chief of the Sikh Empire along its Afghan frontier, invaded the Afghan territory as far as the city of Jalalabad. In 1837, the Afghan Army descended through the Khyber Pass on Sikh forces at Jamrud. Hari Singh Nalwa's forces held off the Afghan offensive for over a week – the time it took reinforcements to reach Jamrud from Lahore.

Barakzai dynasty and European influence

(1839–42). William Brydon was the sole survivor of a group of 3,600 soldiers of the British 44th Regiment of Foot and 12,400 camp followers, who were attacked between Kabul and Jalalabad while heading to what is now Pakistan.]] at Berlin in February 1928. His 1927-28 European tour initiated an alliance between Afghanistan and Germany.]] and wife with US President John F. Kennedy and sister Eunice in the United States]] During the 19th century, following the Second Anglo-Afghan War and the ascension of the Barakzai dynasty, Afghanistan saw much of its territory and autonomy ceded to British India. Ethnic Pashtun territories were divided by the 1893 Durand Line, an action which would lead to strained relations between Afghanistan and British India (later the new state of Pakistan). The United Kingdom exercised a great deal of influence, and it was not until the reign of King Amanullah Khan in 1919 that Afghanistan re-gained independence over its foreign affairs after the signing of the Treaty of Rawalpindi.

King Amanullah moved to end his country's traditional isolation in the years following the Third Anglo-Afghan War. He established diplomatic relations with major states and, following a 1927-28 tour of Europe and Turkey, introduced several reforms intended to modernize his nation. A key force behind these reforms was Mahmud Tarzi, an ardent supporter of the education of women. He fought for Article 68 of Afghanistan's first constitution (declared through a Loya Jirga), which made elementary education compulsory. Some of the reforms that were actually put in place, such as the abolition of the traditional Muslim veil for women and the opening of a number of co-educational schools, quickly alienated many tribal and religious leaders. Faced with overwhelming armed opposition, Amanullah Khan was forced to abdicate in January 1929 after Kabul fell to rebel forces led by Habibullah Kalakani. Prince Mohammed Nadir Shah, Amanullah's cousin, in turn defeated and killed Habibullah Kalakani in October 1929, and was declared King Nadir Shah. He abandoned the reforms of Amanullah Khan in favor of a more gradual approach to modernisation. In 1933, however, he was assassinated in a revenge killing by a Kabul student.

Mohammed Zahir Shah, Nadir Shah's 19-year-old son, succeeded to the throne and reigned from 1933 to 1973. Until 1946 Zahir Shah ruled with the assistance of his uncle, who held the post of Prime Minister and continued the policies of Nadir Shah. Another of Zahir Shah's uncles, Shah Mahmud Khan, became Prime Minister in 1946 and began an experiment allowing greater political freedom, but reversed the policy when it went further than he expected. In 1953, he was replaced by Mohammed Daoud Khan, the king's cousin and brother-in-law. Daoud sought a closer relationship with the Soviet Union and a more distant one towards Pakistan. Afghanistan remained neutral and was not a participant in World War II, nor aligned with either power bloc in the Cold War. However, it was a beneficiary of the latter rivalry as both the Soviet Union and the United States vied for influence by building Afghanistan's main highways, airports and other vital infrastructure. By the late 1960s many western travelers were using these as part of the hippie trail. In 1973, Zahir Shah's brother-in-law, Daoud Khan, launched a bloodless coup and became the first President of Afghanistan while Zahir Shah was on an official overseas visit. Daoud Khan tried to implement some much needed reforms especially in the economic sector.

Saur revolution and Soviet war

, the day after Saur Revolution on April 28, 1978.]] In 1978, a prominent member of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), Mir Akbar Khyber, was allegedly killed by the Daoud government. Leaders of the PDPA feared that Daoud was planning to dismantle them because many were being arrested. Hafizullah Amin along with other PDPA members managed to remain at large and organised an uprising. The PDPA, led by Nur Mohammad Taraki, Babrak Karmal and Hafizullah Amin, overthrew the regime of Mohammad Daoud, who was assassinated along with his family during the April 1978 Saur Revolution. Taraki was declared President, Prime Minister and General Secretary of the PDPA. Once in power, the PDPA implemented a socialist agenda. It moved to carry out an ill-conceived land reform, which was misunderstood by virtually all Afghans. They also imprisoned, tortured or murdered thousands of members of the traditional elite, the religious establishment, and the intelligentsia. and made a number of statements on women's rights, by declaring equality of the sexes but more recent reports state that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia provided as much as up to $40 billion in cash and weapons, which included over two thousand FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missiles, for building up Islamic groups against the Soviet Union. The U.S. handled most of its support through Pakistan's ISI. Saudi Arabia was also providing financial support. Leaders such as Ahmad Shah Massoud received only minor aid compared to Hekmatyar and some of the other parties, although Massoud was named the "Afghan who won the cold war" by the Wall Street Journal.

The 10-year Soviet occupation resulted in the killings of between 600,000 and two million Afghans, mostly civilians. About 6million fled as Afghan refugees to Pakistan and Iran, and from there over 38,000 made it to the United States and many more to the European Union. Faced with mounting international pressure and great number of casualties on both sides, the Soviets withdrew in 1989. Their withdrawal from Afghanistan was seen as an ideological victory in America, which had backed some Mujahideen factions through three U.S. presidential administrations to counter Soviet influence in the vicinity of the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The USSR continued to support President Mohammad Najibullah (former head of the Afghan secret service, KHAD) until 1992.

Foreign interference and civil war

1992-1996 After the fall of the communist Najibullah-regime in 1992, the Afghan political parties agreed on a peace and power-sharing agreement (the Peshawar Accords). The Peshawar Accords created the Islamic State of Afghanistan and appointed an interim government for a transitional period. According to Human Rights Watch: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar received operational, financial and military support from Pakistan. Afghanistan expert Amin Saikal concludes in Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival: In addition, Saudi Arabia and Iran - as competitors for regional hegemony - supported Afghan militias hostile towards each other. According to Human Rights Watch, Iran was assisting the Shia Hazara Hezb-i Wahdat forces of Abdul Ali Mazari, as Iran was attempting to maximize Wahdat's military power and influence. Saudi Arabia supported the Wahhabite Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and his Ittihad-i Islami faction.}}

Due to the sudden initiation of the war, working government departments, police units or a system of justice and accountability for the newly-created Islamic State of Afghanistan did not have time to form. Atrocities were committed by individuals of the different armed factions while Kabul descended into lawlessness and chaos as described in reports by Human Rights Watch and the Afghanistan Justice Project. Because of the chaos, some leaders increasingly had only nominal control over their (sub-)commanders. For civilians there was little security from murder, rape and extortion. Mullah Omar started his movement with fewer than 50 armed madrassah students in his hometown of Kandahar. Massoud tried to initiate a nationwide political process with the goal of national consolidation and democratic elections, also inviting the Taliban to join the process. The Taliban declined. Many analysts like Amin Saikal describe the Taliban as developing into a proxy force for Pakistan's regional interests which the Taliban decline. The Taliban seized Kabul on September 27, 1996, and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They imposed on the parts of Afghanistan under their control their political and judicial interpretation of Islam issuing edicts forbidding women to work outside the home, attend school, or to leave their homes unless accompanied by a male relative. The Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) analyze: After the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on September 27, 1996, Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abdul Rashid Dostum, two former archnemesis, created the United Front (Northern Alliance) against the Taliban that were preparing offensives against the remaining areas under the control of Massoud and those under the control of Dostum. see video The United Front included beside the dominantly Tajik forces of Massoud and the Uzbek forces of Dostum, Hazara factions and Pashtun forces under the leadership of commanders such as Abdul Haq, Haji Abdul Qadir, Qari Baba or diplomat Abdul Rahim Ghafoorzai.

According to Human Rights Watch, in late May 1997, some 3,000 captive Taliban soldiers were summarily executed in and around Mazar-i-Sharif by Dostum's Junbish forces and members of the Shia Hazara Hezb-i Wahdat faction. The Taliban defeated Dostum's Junbish forces militarily by seizing Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998. Dostum went into exile. According to a 55-page report by the United Nations, the Taliban, while trying to consolidate control over northern and western Afghanistan, committed systematic massacres against civilians. U.N. officials stated that there had been "15 massacres" between 1996 and 2001. The documents also reveal the role of Arab and Pakistani support troops in these killings. The report by the United Nations quotes eyewitnesses in many villages describing Arab fighters carrying long knives used for slitting throats and skinning people. In total there were believed to be 28,000 Pakistani nationals fighting inside Afghanistan. The estimated 25,000 Taliban regular force thus comprised more than 8,000 Pakistani nationals. A 1998 document by the U.S. State Department confirms that "20-40 percent of [regular] Taliban soldiers are Pakistani." From 1996 to 2001 the Al Qaeda of Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri became a state within the Taliban state. Bin Laden sent Arab recruits to join the fight against the United Front. Of roughly 45,000 Pakistani, Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers fighting against the forces of Massoud only 14,000 were Afghan.

Ahmad Shah Massoud remained the only leader of the United Front in Afghanistan. In the areas under his control Massoud set up democratic institutions and signed the Women's Rights Declaration. Human Rights Watch cites no human rights crimes for the forces under direct control of Massoud for the period from October 1996 until the assassination of Massoud in September 2001. In total, estimates range up to one million people fleeing the Taliban. National Geographic concluded in its documentary "Inside the Taliban": : In early 2001 Massoud addressed the European Parliament in Brussels asking the international community to provide humanitarian help to the people of Afghanistan.

Recent history (2001–present)

of Ahmad Shah Massoud is a national visiting site located in the Panjshir Valley, north of the capital Kabul.]] Chinook helicopters on their way to Bagram Air Base]] , including the ANA Commando Battalion standing in the front.]] On September 9, 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud died in a suicide attack by two Arab suicide bombers in the Afghan province of Takhar. Two days later 3,000 people died on U.S. soil in the attacks of September 11, 2001. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks the U.S. government identified Osama Bin Laden alongside Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the faces behind the attacks. When the Taliban refused to hand over Osama Bin laden to U.S. authorities and refused to disband Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, the U.S. and British air forces began bombing al-Qaeda and Taliban targets inside Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. On the ground, American and British special forces along with CIA Special Activities Division units worked with commanders of the United Front (Northern Alliance) to launch a military offensive against the Taliban forces. These attacks led to the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul in November 2001, as the Taliban and al-Qaida retreated toward the mountainous Durand Line border with Pakistan. In December 2001, after the Taliban government was toppled and the new Afghan government under Hamid Karzai was formed, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was established by the UN Security Council to help assist the Karzai administration and provide basic security to the Afghan people.

From 2002 onward, the Taliban began regrouping while more coalition troops entered the escalating US-led war with insurgents. Meanwhile, NATO assumed control of ISAF in 2003 and the rebuilding of Afghanistan began, which is funded by the international community especially by USAID and other U.S. agencies. The European Union, Canada and India also play a major role in reconstruction. The Afghan nation was able to build democratic structures and to make some progress in key areas such as health, economy, educational, transport, agriculture and construction sector. It has also modernized in the field of technology and banking. NATO, mainly the United States armed forces through its Army Corps of Engineers, is rebuilding and modernizing the nation's military as well its police force. Between 2002 and 2010, over five million Afghan expatriates returned with new skills and capital. Still, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries due to the results of 30 years of war, corruption among high level politicians and the ongoing Taliban insurgency backed by Pakistan. U.S. officials have also accused Iran of providing limited support to the Taliban, but stated it was "at a small level" since it is "not in their interests to see the Taliban, a Sunni ultra-conservative, extremist element, return to take control of Afghanistan". Iran has historically been an enemy of the Taliban.

NATO and Afghan troops in recent years led many offensives against the Taliban, but proved unable to completely dislodge their presence. By 2009, a Taliban-led shadow government began to form complete with their own version of mediation court. In 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama deployed an additional 30,000 soldiers over a period of six months and proposed that he will begin troop withdrawals by 2012. At the 2010 International Conference on Afghanistan in London, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he intends to reach out to the Taliban leadership (including Mullah Omar, Sirajuddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar). Supported by senior U.S. officials Karzai called on the group's leadership to take part in a loya jirga meeting to initiate peace talks. According to the Wall Street Journal, these steps have been reciprocated so far with an intensification of bombings, assassinations and ambushes. Many Afghan groups (including the former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh and opposition leader Dr. Abdullah Abdullah) believe that Karzai's plan aims to appease the insurgents' senior leadership at the cost of the democratic constitution, the democratic process and progess in the field of human rights especially women's rights. Dr. Abdullah stated: :"I should say that Taliban are not fighting in order to be accommodated. They are fighting in order to bring the state down. So it's a futile exercise, and it's just misleading. ... There are groups that will fight to the death. Whether we like to talk to them or we don't like to talk to them, they will continue to fight. So, for them, I don't think that we have a way forward with talks or negotiations or contacts or anything as such. Then we have to be prepared to tackle and deal with them militarily. In terms of the Taliban on the ground, there are lots of possibilities and opportunities that with the help of the people in different parts of the country, we can attract them to the peace process; provided, we create a favorable environment on this side of the line. At the moment, the people are leaving support for the government because of corruption. So that expectation is also not realistic at this stage." According to a report by the United Nations, the Taliban were responsible for 76 % of civilian casualties in 2009. Afghanistan is currently struggling to rebuild itself while dealing with the above mentioned problems and challenges.

Government and politics

standing next to Faisal Ahmad Shinwari and others after winning the 2004 presidential election. The last king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah is sitting at the right.]]

Politics in Afghanistan has historically consisted of power struggles, bloody coups and unstable transfers of power. With the exception of a military junta, the nation has been governed by nearly every system of government over the past centuries, including a monarchy, republic, and theocracy. The constitution ratified by the 2003 Loya jirga restructured the government as an Islamic republic consisting of three branches, executive, legislative and judicial.

The nation is currently led by the Karzai administration with Hamid Karzai as the President and leader since December 2001. The current parliament was elected in September 2010, and among the elected officials are former mujahideen, Islamic fundamentalists, warlords, communists, reformists, and several Taliban associates. In 2005, 28% of the delegates elected were women, three points more than the 25% minimum guaranteed under the constitution. This made Afghanistan, long known under the Taliban for its oppression of women, 30th amongst nations in terms of female representation. Construction for a new parliament building began on August 29, 2005.

The Supreme Court of Afghanistan is currently led by Chief Justice Abdul Salam Azimi, a former university professor who had been legal advisor to the president. The previous court, appointed during the time of the interim government, had been dominated by fundamentalist religious figures, including Chief Justice Faisal Ahmad Shinwari. The court issued several rulings, such as banning cable television, seeking to ban a candidate in the 2004 presidential election and limiting the rights of women, as well as overstepping its constitutional authority by issuing rulings on subjects not yet brought before the court. The current court is seen as more moderate and led by more technocrats than the previous court.

Elections and parties

in 2006]] The 2004 Afghan presidential election, in which Hamid Karzai won in the first round with 55.4% of the votes, went relatively smoothly. However, the 2009 presidential election was characterized by lack of security, low voter turnout and widespread electoral fraud. The vote, along with elections for 420 provincial council seats, took place in August 2009, but remained unresolved during a lengthy period of vote counting and fraud investigation.

Two months later, under U.S. and ally pressure, a second round run-off vote between Karzai and remaining challenger Abdullah was announced for November 7, 2009, but on the 1st of November Abdullah announced that he would no longer be participating in the run-off because his demands for changes in the electoral commission had not been met, and claimed a transparent election would not be possible. A day later, officials of the election commission cancelled the run-off and declared Hamid Karzai as President of Afghanistan for another 5-year term. A number of government ministries are believed to be rife with corruption, including the Interior, Education and Health. President Karzai vowed to tackle the problem in November 2009, when he stated that "individuals who are involved in corruption will have no place in the government." A January 2010 report published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime revealed that bribery consumes an amount equal to 23 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the nation. Citizens are forced by corrupt government culture to pay more than a third of their income in bribes.

Political divisions

Afghanistan is administratively divided into 34 provinces (wilayats), with each province having a capital and a governor in office. The provinces are further divided into about 398 smaller provincial districts, each of which normally covers a city or a number of villages. Each provincial district is represented by a sub-governor, usually called a district governor.

The provincial governors as well as the district governors are voted into office during the nation's presidential election, which takes place every five years. The provincial governors are representatives of the central government in Kabul and are responsible for all administrative and formal issues within their provinces. The provincial Chief of Police is appointed by the Ministry of Interior in Kabul and works together with the provincial governor on law enforcement for all the districts within the province.

There is an exception in the capital city of Kabul where the Mayor is selected directly by the President, and is completely independent from the Governor of Kabul.

The following is a list of all the 34 provinces of Afghanistan in alphabetical order and on the right is a map showing where each province is located: and every province is further divided into a number of districts]]

Badakhshan Badghis Baghlan Balkh Bamyan Daykundi Farah Faryab Ghazni Ghor Helmand Herat Jowzjan Kabul Kandahar Kapisa Khost

Konar Kunduz Laghman Logar Nangarhar Nimruz Nurestan Oruzgan Paktia Paktika Panjshir Parvan Samangan Sare Pol Takhar Wardak Zabol

Foreign relations and military

The Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs is responsible for managing the foreign relations of Afghanistan. The nation has maintained good relations with the United States and other members of NATO since at least the 1920s. Afghanistan joined the United Nations on November 19, 1946, and has been a member since. In 2002, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan was established to help rebuild the country. Today, more than 22 NATO nations deploy over 100,000 troops in Afghanistan as a part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Apart from close military links, Afghanistan also enjoys strong economic relations with NATO members and other allies. The United States is the largest donor to Afghanistan, followed by Japan, United Kingdom, Germany, India and others. . Afghanistan-United States relations go back to at least the early 1920s.]]

Relations between Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan often fluctuate and tensions between the two countries have existed since 1947. During the Taliban 1996 to 2001 rule, Pakistan was supporting the Taliban leaders against the Iranian-backed Northern Alliance. Though Pakistan maintains strong security and economic links with Afghanistan, dispute between the two countries remain due to Pakistani concerns over growing influence of rival India in Afghanistan and the continuing border dispute over the poorly marked Durand Line. Relations between the two strained further after the 2007 border skirmishes when Afghan officials alleged that Pakistani intelligence agencies were involved in some terrorist attacks on Afghanistan. Pakistan is a participant in the reconstruction of Afghanistan, pledging $250 million in various projects across the country.

Afghanistan has close historical, linguistic and cultural ties with neighboring Iran as both countries were part of Greater Persia before 1747. Afghanistan-Iran relations formally initiated after 1935 between Zahir Shah and Reza Shah, which soured after the rise of radical Sunni Taliban regime in 1997 but rebounded after the establishment of Karzai government. Iran has also actively participated in the Afghan reconstruction efforts but is accused at the same time by American and British politicians of secretly funding the Taliban against NATO-Afghan officials. Afghanistan also enjoys good relations with neighboring Central Asian nations, especially Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

Relations between Afghanistan and India also go a long away back. India is often regarded as one of Afghanistan's most influential allies. Since 2002, India has extended more than $1.2 billion in military and other aid to Afghanistan. There are military ties between the two nations, some Afghan security forces are getting counter-insurgency training in India. India is also considering the deployment of some troops in Afghanistan.

The military of Afghanistan is under the Ministry of Defense, which includes the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Army Air Force. It currently has about 134,000 members and is expected to reach 260,000 in the coming years. They are trained and equipped by NATO countries, mainly by the United States armed forces. The ANA is divided into 7 major Corps, with the 201st Selab ("Flood") in Kabul being the main one. The ANA also has a special commando brigade which was started in 2007. The National Military Academy of Afghanistan serves as the main education institute for the militarymen of the country. A new $200 million Afghan Defense University (ADU) is under construction near the capital.

Economy

weavers in Herat Province]] Afghanistan is a member of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). It is an impoverished and least developed country, one of the world's poorest. As of 2009, the nation's GDP exchange rate stands at $14 billion and the GDP per capita is $1,000. Its unemployment rate is 35% and roughly 36% of its citizens live below the poverty line. About 42 percent of the population live on less than $1 a day, according to USAID. The economy has suffered greatly from the 1978 to the present conflict, while severe drought added to the nation's difficulties in 1998–2001. However, due to the infusion of multi-billion dollars in international assistance and investments, as well as remittances from expats, the economy has steadily improved, growing at approximately 12 percent per year during the past six years. It is also due to improvements in agricultural production, which is the backbone of the nation's economy since over 75% of its citizens are involved in this line of work.

Afghanistan is known for producing some of the finest pomegranates, grapes, apricots, melons, and several other fresh and dry fruits, including nuts. According to the World Bank, "economic growth has been strong and has generated better livelihoods" since late 2001. As much as one-third of the nations's GDP came from growing illicit drugs during the mid 2000s. Opium production in Afghanistan has soared to a record in 2007 with some 3.3 million Afghans reported to be involved in the business but then declined significantly in the years following. The Afghan government began programs to reduce the cultivation of poppy and by 2010 it was reported that 24 out of the 34 provinces are free from poppy cultivation.

One of the main drivers for the current economic recovery is the return of over 5 million Afghan expatriates, who brought with them fresh energy, entrepreneurship and wealth-creating skills as well as much needed funds to start up businesses. The Afghan rugs have become a popular product again and this gives the large number of rug weavers in the country a chance to earn more income. While the country's current account deficit is largely financed with the donor money, only a small portion is provided directly to the government budget. The rest is provided to non-budgetary expenditure and donor-designated projects through the United Nations system and non-governmental organizations.

The Afghan Ministry of Finance is focusing on improved revenue collection and public sector expenditure discipline. Since 2003, over sixteen new banks have opened in the country, including Afghanistan International Bank, Kabul Bank, Azizi Bank, Pashtany Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, First Micro Finance Bank, and others. Da Afghanistan Bank serves as the central bank of the nation and the "Afghani" (AFN) is the national currency, with an exchange rate of 50 Afghanis to 1 US dollar.

Energy and mining

According to recent U.S. Geological Surveys that were funded by the Afghan Ministry of Mines and Industry, Afghanistan may be possessing up to of natural gas, of petroleum and up to of natural gas liquids. Other recent reports show that the country has huge amounts of gold, copper, coal, iron ore and other minerals. In 2010, U.S. Pentagon officials along with American geologists revealed the discovery of nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan. Some have stated, including Afghan President Hamid Karzai, that the untapped minerals could be as high as $3 trillion. The government of Afghanistan is preparing deals to extract its copper and iron reserves, which will earn billions of dollars in royalties and taxes every year for the next 100 years. These untapped resources could mark the turning point in Afghanistan's reconstruction efforts. Energy and mineral exports could generate the revenue that Afghan officials need to modernize the country's infrastructure, and expand economic opportunities for the beleaguered and fractious. If the Aghan state could generate even $10 billion per year from its mineral deposits, the country's gross national product would double and provide long-term funding for Afghan security forces and other critical needs.

Transport and communications

Ariana Afghan Airlines is the national airlines carrier, with domestic flights between Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-e Sharif. International flights include to Dubai, Frankfurt, Istanbul and a number of other Asian destinations. There are also limited domestic and international flight services available from the locally owned Kam Air, Pamir Airways and Safi Airways.

The country has limited rail service with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in the north. There are two other railway projects currently in progress with neighboring nations, one is between Herat and Iran while another is to connect with Pakistan Railways.

Most citizens who travel far distances use long traveling bus services. Newer automobiles have recently become more widely available after the rebuilding of roads and highways. Vehicles are imported from the United Arab Emirates through Pakistan and Iran. Postal and package delivery services such as FedEx, DHL and others exist in major cities and towns.

Telecommunication services in the country are provided by Afghan Wireless, Etisalat, Roshan, MTN Group and Afghan Telecom. In 2006, the Afghan Ministry of Communications signed a 64.5 million agreement with ZTE for the establishment of a countrywide optical fiber cable network. As of 2008, the country has 460,000 telephone lines, 8.45 million mobile phone users and around 500,000 people (1.5% of the population) have internet access.

Demographics

As of July 2010, the population of Afghanistan is around 28,395,716, but it is unknown if the 3 million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan and Iran are included or not. A 2009 UN estimate shows that the Afghan population was 28,150,000 and a 2009–2010 nationwide statistical survey conducted by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) of Afghanistan has put it at 26 million but not counting some parts of the country due to insecurity.

A partial census conducted in 1979 showed roughly 15.5 million people living in the country. The Statistical Yearbook published in 1983 by the Babrak Karmal government claimed a total population of 15.96 million for 1981-82. Between 600,000 to 2 million Afghans were killed during the various 1979-2001 wars, majority of them during the Soviet war in the 1980s.

The only city in Afghanistan with over two million residents is its capital, Kabul. The other major cities in the country are, in order of population size, Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-e Sharif, Jalalabad, Ghazni, Kunduz, Farah. Urban areas are experiencing rapid population growth following the return the return of over 5 million Afghan expats from Pakistan and Iran.

Ethnic groups

groups of Afghanistan]] Afghanistan is a multiethnic society. The population of the country is divided into a wide variety of ethnolinguistic groups. Because a systematic census has not been held in the nation in decades, exact figures about the size and composition of the various ethnic groups are unvailable. In this regard, the Encyclopædia Britannica states:}} An approximate distribution of the nation's total ethnic groups is shown in the line chart below: {| class="wikitable sortable" style="width:70%; float:left;" |+Ethnic groups in Afghanistan |- ! style="background:#ddf; width:15%;"|Ethnic group ! style="background:#ddf; width:20%;"| ! style="background:#ddf; width:20%;"| |- | Pashtun | align=center|42% | align=center|38-44 percent |- | Tajik | align=center|27% | align=center|25-26.3% (of this 1% are Qizilbash) |- | Hazara | align=center|9% | align=center|10-19 percent |- | Uzbek | align=center|9% | align=center|6-8% percent |- | Aimak | align=center|4% | align=center|500,000 to 800,000 |- | Turkmen | align=center|3% | align=center|2.5 percent |- | Baloch | align=center|2% | align=center|100,000 |- | Others (Pashai, Nuristani, Arab, Brahui, Pamiri, Gujjar, etc.) | align=center|4% | align=center|6.9 percent |}

The percentage numbers in the chart at the bottom are from recent national opinion polls aimed at knowing how Afghan citizens feel about the 2001–present US-led war, the current political situation, as well as the economic and social issues affecting their daily lives. One was conducted in 2006 by the Asia Foundation (with technical assistance by the Indian Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and the Afghan Center for Socio-economic and Opinion Research) and the other between 2004 to 2009 by a combined effort of the broadcasting companies NBC News, BBC, and ARD.

The 2006 Asia Foundation survey involved 6,226 randomly selected Afghan citizens from 32 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. However, Uruzgan Province (representing 1.1 percent) and Zabul Province (representing 1.2 percent) were excluded from the survey because of security concerns. The margin of sampling error in that survey is 2.5 percent.

To questions about their ethnicity at the end of the questionnaires, the results of the total 7,760 Afghan citizens came as: {| class="wikitable sortable" style="width:55%; float:left;" |- ! style="background:#ddf; width:15%;"|Ethnic group ! style="background:#ddf; width:10%;"| Persian has always been the prestige language and as the main means of inter-ethnic communication it has maintained its status of lingua franca. Persian is the native tongue of various Afghan ethnic groups including the Tajiks, Afghanistan's second largest ethnic group, the Hazara, Aimak and Kizilbash. Pashto is the native tongue of the Pashtuns, the single largest ethno-linguistic group within Afghanistan. Other languages, such as Uzbek, Turkmen, Balochi, Pashayi and Nuristani languages (Ashkunu, Kamkata-viri, Vasi-vari, Tregami and Kalasha-ala), are used as native tongue by minority groups across the country and have official status in the regions where they are widely spoken. Minor languages also include Pamiri (Shughni, Munji, Ishkashimi and Wakhi), Brahui, Hindko, Kyrgyz, etc. A fair number of Afghans can also speak and understand Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi and English. Until the 1890s, the region around Nuristan was known as Kafiristan (land of the kafirs) because of its inhabitants: the Nuristani, an ethnically distinctive people who practiced animism, polytheism and shamanism.

Up until the mid-1980s, there were possibly about 50,000 Hindus and Sikhs living in different cities, mostly in Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad, and Ghazni.

There was also a small Jewish community in Afghanistan who emigrated to Israel and the United States by the end of the last century, and only one individual, Zablon Simintov, remains today.

Health and education

According to the Human Development Index, Afghanistan is the second least developed country in the world. Every half hour, an average of one woman dies from pregnancy-related complications, another dies of tuberculosis and 14 children die, largely from preventable causes. Before the start of the wars in 1978, the nation had an improving health system and a semi-modernized health care system in cities like Kabul. Ibn Sina Hospital and Ali Abad Hospital in Kabul were two of the leading health care institutions in Central Asia at the time. Following the Soviet invasion and the civil war that followed, the health care system was limited only to urban areas and was eventually destroyed. The Taliban government made some improvements in the late 1990s, but health care was not available for women during their six year rule. An estimated 80,000 citizens of the country have lost limbs, mainly as a result of landmines.

The nation's health care system began to improve dramatically since 2002, which is due to international support on the vaccination of children, training of medical staff. According to USAID, infant mortality rate has dropped by 33 percent and approximately 64 percent of the total population now has access to some form of health care. Most Afghans live within one hour travel to a health facility. Many hospitals and clincs have been built in the country over the last decade, with the most advanced treatments being available in Kabul. The French Medical Institute for Children and Indira Gandhi Childrens Hospital in Kabul are the leading children's hospitals in Afghanistan. The Jinnah Hospital in Kabul is also under construction at the moment, which is funded by the Government of Pakistan. There are also a number of well-equipped regional hospitals across the country that were built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers and are run by the Afghan National Army.

Non-governmental charities such as Mahboba's promise assist orphans in association with governmental structures. According to Reuters, "Afghanistan's healthcare system is widely believed to be one of the country's success stories since reconstruction began." The nation has the highest infant mortality rate in the world – 257 deaths per 1,000 live births – and 70 percent of the population lacks access to clean water. The Afghan Ministry of Public Health has ambitious plans to cut the infant mortality rate to 400 from 1,600 for every 100,000 live births by 2020.

One of the oldest schools in the country is the Habibia High School in Kabul. It was established by King Habibullah Khan in 1903 and helped educate students from the nation's elite class. In the 1920s, the German-funded Amani High School opened in Kabul, and about a decade later two French lycées (secondary schools) began, the AEFE and the Lycée Esteqlal. During the same period the Kabul University opened its doors for classes. Education was improving in the country by the late 1950s, during the rule of King Zahir Shah. However, after the Saur Revolution in 1978 until recent years, the education system of Afghanistan fell apart due to the wars. It was revived in the early months of 2002 after the US removed the Taliban and the Karzai administration came to power.

As of 2009 more than five million male and female students were enrolled in schools throughout the country. However, there are still significant obstacles to education in Afghanistan, stemming from lack of funding, unsafe school buildings and cultural norms. Furthermore, there is a great lack of qualified teachers, especially in rural areas. A lack of women teachers is another issue that concerns some Afghan parents, especially in more conservative areas. Some parents will not allow their daughters to be taught by men.

UNICEF estimates that more than 80 percent of females and around 50 percent of males lack access to education centers. According to the United Nations, 700 schools have been closed in the country because of poor security. Literacy of the entire population is estimated at 34%. Female literacy is 10%.

Approximately 17 percent of them test positive for illegal drugs. In some areas of the country, crimes have gone uninvestigated because of insufficient police or lack of equipment. In 2009, President Karzai created two anti-corruption units within the nation's Interior Ministry. Former Interior Minister Hanif Atmar told reporters that security officials from the U.S. (FBI), Britain (Scotland Yard) and the European Union will train prosecutors in the unit.

Helmand, Kandahar, and Oruzgan are the most dangerous provinces in Afghanistan due to its distance from Kabul as well as the drug trade that flourishes there. The Afghan Border Police are responsible for protecting the nation's borders, especially the Durand Line border, which is often used by criminals and terrorists. Every year many Afghan police officers are killed in the line of duty.

Culture

Afghans display pride in their religion, country, ancestry, and above all, their independence. Like other highlanders, Afghans are regarded with mingled apprehension and condescension, for their high regard for personal honor, for their clan loyalty and for their readiness to carry and use arms to settle disputes. As clan warfare and internecine feuding has been one of their chief occupations since time immemorial, this individualistic trait has made it difficult for foreign invaders to hold the region.

Afghanistan has a complex history that has survived either in its current cultures or in the form of various languages and monuments. However, many of the country's historic monuments have been damaged in recent wars. The two famous statues of Buddha in Bamyan Province were destroyed by the Taliban, who regarded them as idolatrous. Other famous sites include the cities of Kandahar, Herat, Ghazni and Balkh. The Minaret of Jam, in the Hari River valley, is a UNESCO World Heritage site. A cloak reputedly worn by Muhammad is stored inside the famous Mosque of the Cloak of the Prophet Mohammed in Kandahar City.

Buzkashi is a national sport in Afghanistan. It is similar to polo and played by horsemen in two teams, each trying to grab and hold a goat carcass. Afghan hounds (a type of running dog) also originated in Afghanistan.

Although literacy levels are very low, classic Persian poetry plays a very important role in the Afghan culture. Poetry has always been one of the major educational pillars in Iran and Afghanistan, to the level that it has integrated itself into culture. Persian culture has, and continues to, exert a great influence over Afghan culture. Private poetry competition events known as "musha’era" are quite common even among ordinary people. Almost every homeowner owns one or more poetry collections of some sort, even if they are not read often.

Many of the famous Persian poets of the 10th to 15th centuries stem from what is now known as Afghanistan (then known as Khorasan), such as Jalal al-Din Muhammad Balkhi (also known as Rumi or Mawlānā), Rābi'a Balkhi (the first poetess in the history of Persian literature), Khwaja Abdullah Ansari (from Herat), Nasir Khusraw (born near Balkh, died in Badakhshan), Jāmī of Herāt, Alī Sher Navā'ī, Sanā'ī Ghaznawi, Daqiqi Balkhi, Farrukhi Sistani, Unsuri Balkhi, Anvari, and many others. Moreover, some of the contemporary Persian language poets and writers, who are relatively well-known in Persian-speaking world, include Khalilullah Khalili, Sufi Ashqari, Sarwar Joya, Qahar Asey, Parwin Pazwak and others.

In addition to poets and authors, numerous Persian scientists and philosophers were born or worked in the region of present-day Afghanistan. Most notable was Avicenna (Abu Alī Hussein ibn Sīnā) whose paternal family hailed from Balkh. Ibn Sīnā, who travelled to Isfahan later in life to establish a medical school there, is known by some scholars as "the father of modern medicine". George Sarton called ibn Sīnā "the most famous scientist of Islam and one of the most famous of all races, places, and times." His most famous works are The Book of Healing and The Canon of Medicine, also known as the Qanun. Ibn Sīnā's story even found way to the contemporary English literature through Noah Gordon's The Physician, now published in many languages.

Al-Farabi was another well-known philosopher and scientist of the 9th and 10th centuries, who, according to Ibn al-Nadim, was from the Faryab Province in Afghanistan. Other notable scientists and philosophers are Abu Rayhan Biruni (a notable astronomer, anthropologist, geographer, and mathematician of the Ghaznavid period who lived and died in Ghazni), Abu Zayd Balkhi (a polymath and a student of al-Kindi), Abu Ma'shar Balkhi (known as Albumasar or Albuxar in the west), and Abu Sa'id Sijzi (from Sistan).

Before the Taliban gained power, the city of Kabul was home to many musicians who were masters of both traditional and modern Afghan music, especially during the Nauroz-celebration. Kabul in the middle part of the 20th century has been likened to Vienna during the 18th and 19th centuries.

There are an estimated 60 major Pashtun tribes. The tribal system, which orders the life of most people outside metropolitan areas, is potent in political terms. Men feel a fierce loyalty to their own tribe, such that, if called upon, they would assemble in arms under the tribal chiefs and local clan leaders. In theory, under Islamic law, every believer has an obligation to bear arms at the ruler's call.

Heathcote considers the tribal system to be the best way of organizing large groups of people in a country that is geographically difficult, and in a society that, from a materialistic point of view, has an uncomplicated lifestyle. Nomads contribute importantly to the national economy in terms of meat, skins and wool.

Media

The Afghan media began in the early 20th century, with the first newspaper being published in 1906. By the 1920s, Radio Kabul was broadcasting local radio services. Afghanistan National Television was launched in 1974 but was closed in 1996 when the media was tightly controlled by the Taliban. Since 2002, press restrictions were gradually relaxed and private media diversified. Freedom of expression and the press is promoted in the 2004 constitution and censorship is banned, though defaming individuals or producing material contrary to the principles of Islam is prohibited. In 2008, Reporters Without Borders listed the media environment as 156 out of 173, with 1st being most free. 400 publications are now registered, at least 15 local Afghan television channels and 60 radio stations. Foreign radio stations, such as Voice of America and BBC World Service, also broadcast into the country.

Notes

{| |- |valign="top"|a. |valign="top"|Other terms that can be used as demonyms are Afghani and Afghanistani. |- |valign="top"|b. |valign="top"|The Government of India also considers Afghanistan to be a bordering country. This is because it considers the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir to be a part of India including the portion bordering Afghanistan. A ceasefire sponsored by the United Nations in 1948 froze the positions of Indian and Pakistani-held territory. As a consequence, the region bordering Afghanistan is in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. |}

See also

Afghanistanism

Bibliography of Afghanistan

International rankings of Afghanistan

List of Afghanistan-related topics

References

Bibliography

External links

Category:Central Asian countries Category:Iranian Plateau Category:Islamic republics Category:Landlocked countries Category:Least Developed Countries Category:Organisation of the Islamic Conference members Category:Middle Eastern countries Category:Persian-speaking countries and territories Category:South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation member states Category:South Asian countries Category:Southwest Asian countries Category:States and territories established in 1919 Category:Territories under military occupation

Name	Syed Zaid Zaman Hamid
Birth date	March 14, 1964
Residence	Rawalpindi
Nationality	Pakistan
Other names	Syed Zaid Zaman Hamid
Known for	BrassTacks TV Series
Occupation	Security Consultant & Political commentator
Religion	Islam
Website	Official Site Profile Page

Syed Zaiduzzaman Hamid, better known as Zaid Hamid, is a Pakistani security consultant and political commentator. His byline in newspaper articles has been Zaid Zaman.

Early life and education

Zaid was born in Karachi, in 1964. His father, Col. (Retd) Zaman Hamid has served in the Pakistan Army. Zaid's early life was spent in Karachi. He received a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) degree in Computer Systems Engineering from NED University, Karachi in 1980's.

Political views

Through his TV programmes, Hamid has claimed that a nexus between India's RAW, the CIA and Israel's Mossad is responsible for the destabilization of Pakistan. He also claims that the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, were part of a plan hatched by "Hindu Zionists" and "Western Zionists", and that it was "an attempt by the Indians to stage an attack just like the Americans, who executed the September 11 attacks perfectly". have criticized Hamid and have described his views on politics and security as conspiracy theories. Hamid has been referred to by some critics as "Pakistan's answer to Glenn Beck".

References

External links

BrassTacks website

Brass Tacks Security Consultancy website

Category:9/11 conspiracy theorists Category:Conspiracy theorists Category:Living people Category:Pashtun people Category:Pakistani scholars Category:International relations scholars Category:1964 births Category:People from Karachi Category:NED University of Engineering and Technology alumni

Region	Western Philosophy Psychoanalysis
Era	20th- / 21st-century philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Image name	Slavoj Zizek in Liverpool cropped.jpg
Name	Slavoj Žižek
Birth date	March 21, 1949
Birth place	Ljubljana, SR Slovenia, SFR Yugoslavia
School tradition	HegelianismPsychoanalysisMarxism
Main interests	OntologyFilm theoryPsychoanalysisIdeologyTheologyMarxism
Influences	Hegel Kant Schelling Lacan Marx Adorno Althusser Freud Lenin Mao Jacques Derrida
Influenced	Michael Hardt Alenka Zupančič Tahir Musa Ceylan

Slavoj Žižek (pronounced ; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian continental philosopher and critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis.

Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School. He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia, London Consortium, Princeton, New York University, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the University of Michigan. He is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.

Žižek uses examples from popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy and Marxist economic criticism to interpret and speak extensively on immediately-current social phenomena, including the current ongoing financial crisis of global capitalism. In a 2008 interview with Amy Goodman on the New York City radio show Democracy Now! he described himself as a "communist in a qualified sense," giving arguments tinged with left communism and similar ideas, and in another appearance on the show in October 2009 he described himself as a "radical leftist". Žižek is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of the radical left.

It was not until the 1989 publication of his first book written in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, that Žižek achieved international recognition as a social theorist. Since then, he has continued to develop his status as a confrontational intellectual.

He writes on many topics including subjectivity, ideology, capitalism, fundamentalism, racism, tolerance, multiculturalism, human rights, ecology, globalization, the Iraq War, revolution, utopianism, totalitarianism, postmodernism, pop culture, opera, cinema, political theology, and religion.

Life

Žižek was born in Ljubljana, Socialist Republic of Slovenia, SFR Yugoslavia to a middle-class family. His father Jože Žižek was an economist and civil servant from the region of Prekmurje in eastern Slovenia, his mother Vesna, native of the Brda region in the Slovenian Littoral, was an accountant in a state enterprise . He spent most of his childhood in the coastal town of Portorož. The family moved back to Ljubljana when Slavoj was a teenager. His parents were both atheists. Debenjak taught the philosophy of German idealism at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana, and his reading of Marx's Das Kapital from the perspective of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind influenced many future Slovenian philosophers, including Žižek.

Žižek frequented the circles of dissident intellectuals, including the Heideggerian philosophers Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbančič, He spent the next few years undertaking national service in the Yugoslav army in Karlovac.

After four years of unemployment, Žižek gained a job as a recording clerk at the Slovenian Marxist Center. At the same time, he became involved with a group of Slovene scholars, among whom were Mladen Dolar and Rastko Močnik, whose theoretical focus was on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. In 1979, he was hired as a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Ljubljana with the help of philosopher Ivan Urbančič. Between 1988 and 1990, he was actively involved in several political and civil society movements which fought for the democratization of Slovenia, most notably the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights. In the first free elections in 1990, he ran as candidate for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution abolished in the constitution of 1991) for the Liberal Democratic Party. In a 2008 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "communist in a qualified sense," and in another appearance in October 2009 he described himself as a "radical leftist".

However, this claim about the role of the philosopher/theorist is complicated by how Žižek frequently derides the consumerist fashionability of postmodern cultural criticism while affirming his universal emancipatory stance and love for "grand explanations" (Žižek, 2008). In contrast to Parker, Adrian Johnston's book Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity argues against the position that Žižek's thought has no consistency or underlying project. Specifically, Johnston claims in his Preface that beneath "what could be called 'the cultural studies Žižek'" is a singular "philosophical trajectory that runs like a continuous, bisecting diagonal line through the entire span of his writing (i.e. the retroactive Lacanian reconstruction of the chain Kant-Schelling-Hegel)." Žižek's affirmation of this claim suggests that like his predecessor Hegel, Žižek's work is better described as rigorous in the sense of systematic rather than as comprising a single, all-encompassing "system."

Žižek wrote text to accompany Bruce Weber photos in a catalog for Abercrombie & Fitch. Questioned as to the seemliness of a major intellectual writing ad copy, Žižek told the Boston Globe: "If I were asked to choose between doing things like this to earn money and becoming fully employed as an American academic, kissing ass to get a tenured post, I would with pleasure choose writing for such journals!" He is widely regarded as a fiery and colorful lecturer who does not shy away from controversial remarks. His three-part documentary The Pervert's Guide to Cinema was broadcast on British television by the More4 channel in July 2006 and is available on DVD. Žižek has been publishing on a regular basis in journals such as Lacanian Ink and In These Times in the United States, the New Left Review and The London Review of Books in the United Kingdom, and with the Slovenian left liberal magazine Mladina and newspapers Dnevnik and Delo. He co-operates also with the influential Polish leftist magazine Krytyka Polityczna, regional South-East European left-wing journal Novi Plamen, and serves on the editorial board of the psychoanalytical journal Problemi.

He is a fluent speaker of Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, English, French and German. He also has basic knowledge of Italian He was formerly married to Slovenian philosopher Renata Salecl and to Argentine model Analia Hounie.

Astra Taylor's 2005 documentary Žižek! documented its title subject, and Žižek also appeared in her 2008 Examined Life. The International Journal of Žižek Studies was launched in 2007, and since 2005, Žižek has been an associate member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

He is a returning professor at New York University where he has taught alongside the deconstructionist Avital Ronell in the place of the late Jacques Derrida during the fall semester.

Thought

Ontology

Žižek's ontology posits a return to the category of the Cartesian subject, a return to the category of ideology, and a return to the notion of the Lacanian Real.

# The defense of the category of the subject involves first a vindication of the notion of subjectivity for an adequate descriptive political theory. Žižek argues that hegemonic regimes function by interpellating individuals into social roles and mandates within a given polity: we cannot understand how power functions without some account of the psychology of political subjects. Secondly, there is the vindication of the "category of the subject". Following Lacan, Žižek contends that subjectivity corresponds to a lack (manque) that always resists full inscription into the mandates prescribed to individuals by hegemonic regimes. # In his deployment of the category of "ideology", Žižek finds the notions of ideology in Karl Marx "The German Ideology"—which center on the notion of "false consciousness"—to be irrelevant in a period of unprecedented subjective reflexivity and cynicism as to the motives and workings of those in authority (see The Sublime Object of Ideology). It can be argued however that Žižek's most original aspect comes from its insistence that a Lacanian model of the barred or split subject, because of its stipulation that individuals' deepest motives are unconscious, can be used to demonstrate that ideology has less become irrelevant today than revealed its deeper truth (see Matthew Sharpe, Slavoj Žižek.) # In a contentious extension of the referential scope of ideology, Žižek maintains that dominant ideologies wholly structure the subject's senses of reality. Yet, The Real is not equivalent to the reality experienced by the subjects as a meaningfully ordered totality. To him, the Real names points within the ontological fabric knitted by the hegemonic systems of representation and reproduction that nevertheless resist full inscription into its terms, and which may as such attempt to generate sites of active political resistance.

In The Parallax View (2006), Žižek stages confrontations between idealist and materialist understandings of various aspects of ontology. One such confrontation between idealism and materialism is expressed in Lacanian terms between an idealism's purported ability to theorize the All versus a Materialism's understanding that an apparent All is really a non-All. His penchant for staging a confrontation between idealism and materialism leads him to describe his work in such paradoxical terms as a "materialist theology." Žižek offers that reality is fundamentally open and a materialist "minimal difference"—the gap that appears in reality between a reductionist description of physical process and one's experience of existence—is the real of human life and the crucial domain that an ontology must attempt to theorize. Žižek equates the gap with the Freudian death drive, as the negative and mortifying "thing that thinks." Although biological psychology might one day be able to completely model a person's brain, there would still be something left over that could not be explained. This "remainder" formally corresponds precisely to the Freudian death drive and Schellingian/Hegelian self-reflecting negativity or "Night of the World," all of which Žižek formulates as the zero-level of subjectivity. It is death drive which takes this role, not the limit-function to pleasure called the pleasure principle, thus it is the negative aspect of consciousness that breaks and offers judgment on the unrepresentable totality. Žižek points to the fact that consciousness is opaque. Taking his cue from Descartes' problem of the possible automaton in hat & coat and the Husserlian failure to fully account for the selfhood of the other (through resort to the metaphor of "empathy"), Žižek claims a primary characteristic of consciousness is that one cannot ever know if an apparently conscious being is truly conscious or merely an effective mime.

Žižek's metaphysics are, to a certain extent an anti-metaphysics, because he believes it is absurd to theorize the All, because something will always remain untheorized. This can be explained in Lacanian terms, in terms of the relationship between the Symbolic and the Real. For Žižek, we can view a person in several ways, but these ways are mutually exclusive. For example, we can see a person as either an ethical being with free will or a determined biological creature but not both. These are the Symbolic interpretations of the Real, ways of using language to understand that which is non-All, that which cannot be totally understood by description. For Žižek, however, the Real is not a thing which is understood in different ways depending on how you decide to look at it (person as ethical being versus person as biological being); the Real is instead the movement from one vantage point to another—the "parallax view". Žižek sidesteps relativism by claiming that there is a diagonal ontological cut across apparently incommensurable discourses, which points to their intersubjectivity. This means that although there are multiple Symbolic interpretations of the Real, they are not all relatively "true." Žižek identifies two instances of the Real; the abject Real, which cannot be symbolized, and the symbolic Real (see On Belief), a set of signifiers that can never be properly integrated into the horizon of sense of a subject. The truth is revealed in the process of transiting the contradictions; or the real is a "minimal difference", the gap between the infinite judgement of a reductionist materialism and experience as lived.

The formation of the subject

Žižek argues that Descartes' cogito is the basis of the subject. However, whereas most thinkers read the cogito as a substantial, transparent and fully self-conscious "I" which is in complete command of its destiny, Žižek proposes that the cogito is an empty space, what is left when the rest of the world is expelled from itself. The Symbolic Order is what substitutes for the loss of the immediacy of the world and it is where the void of the subject is filled in by the process of subjectivization. The latter is where the subject is given an identity and where that identity is altered by the Self.

Once the Lacanian concepts of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are grasped, Žižek, in philosophical writings such as his discussion of Schelling, always interprets the work of other philosophers in terms of those concepts. This is so because "the core of my entire work is the endeavour to use Lacan as a privileged intellectual tool to reactualize German idealism". (See The Žižek Reader) The reason Žižek thinks German idealism (the work of Hegel, Kant, Fichte and Schelling) needs reactualizing is that we are thought to understand it in one way, whereas the truth of it is something else. The term "reactualizing" refers to the fact that there are different possible ways to interpret German idealism, and Žižek wishes to make "actual" one of those possibilities in distinction to the way it is currently realized. At its most basic, German idealism believes that the truth of something could be found in itself. For Žižek, the fundamental insight of German idealism is that the truth of something is always outside it. So the truth of our experience lies outside ourselves, in the Symbolic and the Real, rather than being buried deep within us. We cannot look into our selves and find out who we truly are, because who we truly are is always elsewhere.

Our selves are somewhere else in the Symbolic formations which always precede us and in the Real which we have to disavow if we are to enter the Symbolic order.

To Žižek, Lacan's proposition that self-identity is impossible becomes central in structuration of the subject. The identity of something, its singularity or "oneness", is always split. There is always too much of something, an indivisible remainder, or a bit left-over which means that it cannot be self-identical (e.g., the meaning of a word can never be found in the word itself, but rather in other words; its meaning therefore is not self-identical). This principle of the impossibility of self-identity is what informs Žižek's reading of the German idealists. In reading Schelling, for example, the Beginning is not actually the beginning at all—the truth of the Beginning lies elsewhere, it is split or not identical to itself.

How, precisely, does the Word discharge the tension of the rotary motion, how does it mediate the antagonism between the contractive and the expansive force? The Word is a contraction in the guise of its very opposite of an expansion—that is, in pronouncing a word, the subject contracts his being outside himself; he "coagulates" the core of his being in an external sign. In the (verbal) sign, I—as it were—find myself outside myself, I posit my unity outside myself, in a signifier which represents me ("The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters").

The subject of enunciation is the "I" who speaks, the individual doing the speaking; the subject of the enunciated is the "I" of the sentence. "I" is not identical to itself—it is split between the individual "I" (the subject of enunciation) and the grammatical "I" (the subject of the enunciated). Although we may experience them as unified, this is merely an Imaginary illusion, for the pronoun "I" is actually a substitute for the "I" of the subject. It does not account for me in my full specificity; it is, rather, a general term I share with everyone else. In order to do so, my empirical reality must be annihilated or, as Lacan avers, "the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing". The subject can only enter language by negating the Real, murdering or substituting the blood-and-sinew reality of self for the concept of self expressed in words. For Lacan and Žižek, every word is a gravestone, marking the absence or corpse of the thing it represents and standing in for it. It is partly in the light of this that Lacan is able to refashion Descartes' maxim "I think, therefore I am" as "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I think not".

The "I think" here is the subject of the enunciated (the Symbolic subject) whereas the "I am" is the subject of the enunciation (the Real subject). What Lacan aims to disclose by rewriting the Cartesian cogito in this way is that the subject is irrevocably split, torn asunder by language

The concept of vanishing mediator is one that Žižek has consistently employed since For They Know Not What They Do. A vanishing mediator is a concept which somehow negotiates and settles—hence mediating—the transition between two opposed concepts and thereafter disappears. Žižek draws attention to the fact that a vanishing mediator is produced by an asymmetry of content and form. As with Marx's analysis of revolution, form lags behind content, in the sense that content changes within the parameters of an existing form, until the logic of that content works its way out of the latter and throws off its husk, revealing a new form in its stead. "The passage from feudalism to Protestantism is not of the same nature as the passage from Protestantism to bourgeois everyday life with its privatized religion. The first passage concerns "content" (under the guise of preserving the religious form or even its strengthening, the crucial shift—the assertion of the ascetic acquisitive stance in economic activity as the domain of manifestation of Grace—takes place), whereas the second passage is a purely formal act, a change of form (as soon as Protestantism is realized as the ascetic acquisitive stance, it can fall off as form)" (For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor).

Žižek sees in this process evidence of Hegel's "negation of the negation", the third moment of the dialectic. The first negation is the mutation of the content within and in the name of the old form. The second negation is the obsolescence of the form itself. In this way, something becomes the opposite of itself, paradoxically, by seeming to strengthen itself. In the case of Protestantism, the universalization of religious attitudes ultimately led to its being sidelined as a matter of private contemplation. Which is to say that Protestantism, as a negation of feudalism, was itself negated by capitalism.

The Real

The Real is not only opposed to the imaginary but is also located beyond the symbolic.

Unlike the latter, which is constituted in terms of oppositions such as "presence" and "absence," there is no absence in the real. The symbolic opposition between "presence" and "absence" implies the possibility that something may be missing from the symbolic, the real is "always in its place: it carries it glued to its heel, ignorant of what might exile it from there." If the symbolic is a set of differentiated signifiers, the real is in itself undifferentiated: "it is without fissure." The symbolic introduces "a cut in the real," in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things." Thus the real emerges as that which is outside language: "it is that which resists symbolization absolutely." The real is impossible because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the symbolic order. This character of impossibility and resistance to symbolization lends the real its traumatic quality.

There are also three modalities of the real:

The "symbolic real": the signifier reduced to a meaningless formula

The "real real": a horrific thing, that which conveys the sense of horror in horror films

The "imaginary real": an unfathomable something that permeates things as a trace of the sublime. This form of the real becomes perceptible in the film The Full Monty, for instance, in the fact that in disrobing the unemployed protagonists completely; in other words, through this extra gesture of "voluntary" degradation, something else, of the order of the sublime, becomes visible.

The Symbolic

Although the Symbolic is an essentially linguistic dimension, Lacan does not simply equate the symbolic with language, since the latter is involved also in the imaginary and the real. The symbolic dimension of language is that of the signifier, in which elements have no positive existence but are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences. It is the realm of radical alterity: the Other. The unconscious is the discourse of the Other and thus belongs to the symbolic order. It is also the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. The symbolic is both the "pleasure principle" that regulates the distance from das Ding, and the "death drive" which goes beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition: "the death drive is only the mask of the symbolic order." This register is determinant of subjectivity; for Lacan the symbolic is characterized by the absence of any fixed relations between signifier and signified.

The Imaginary

The basis of the Imaginary order is the formation of the ego in the "mirror stage". Since the ego is formed by identifying with the counterpart or specular image, "identification" is an important aspect of the imaginary. The relationship whereby the ego is constituted by identification is a locus of "alienation", which is another feature of the imaginary, and is fundamentally narcissistic. The imaginary, a realm of surface appearances which are deceptive, is structured by the symbolic order. It also involves a linguistic dimension: whereas the signifier is the foundation of the symbolic, the "signified" and "signification" belong to the imaginary. Thus language has both symbolic and imaginary aspects. Based on the specular image, the imaginary is rooted in the subject's relationship to the body (the image of the body).

Postmodernism

Žižek's understanding of the postmodern can be characterized as an over-proximity of the Real. Žižek identifies various manifestations of this in postmodern culture, such as the technique of "filling in the gaps." (See Žižek's analysis). By way of "filling in the gaps" and "telling it all", what we retreat from is the void as such, which is ultimately none other than the void of subjectivity (the Lacanian "barred subject"). (See The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory.)

For Žižek, present society, or postmodernity, is based upon the demise in the authority of the big Other (see Jacques Lacan). Continuing the theorists of the contemporary risk society, who advocate the personal freedoms of choice or reflexivity, which have replaced this authority, Žižek argues that these theorists ignore the reflexivity at the heart of the subject. For Žižek, lacking the prohibitions of the big Other, in these conditions, the subject's inherent reflexivity manifests itself in attachments to forms of subjection, paranoia and narcissism. In order to ameliorate these pathologies, Žižek proposes the need for a political act or revolution—one that will alter the conditions of possibility of postmodernity (which he identifies as capitalism) and so give birth to a new type of Symbolic Order in which a new breed of subject can exist.

# The Law. Žižek refers to the law throughout his work. The term "the law" signifies the principles upon which society is based, designating a mode of collective conduct based upon a set of prohibitions. However, for Žižek, the rule of the law conceals an inherent unruliness which is precisely the violence by which it established itself as law in the first place. (See For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor.) # The Demise of the big Other. One key aspect of the universalization of reflexivity is the resulting disintegration of the big Other, the communal network of social institutions, customs and laws. For Žižek, the big Other was always dead, in the sense that it never existed in the first place as a material thing. All it ever was (and is) is a purely symbolic order. It means that we all engage in a minimum of idealization, disavowing the brute fact of the Real in favor of another Symbolic world behind it. Žižek expresses this disavowal in terms of an "as if". In order to coexist with our neighbors we act "as if" they do not smell bad or look ridiculous. The big Other is then a kind of collective lie to which we all individually subscribe. (See Jacques Lacan on other/Other and Žižek's For They Know Not What They Do.) # The Return of the big Other. Paradoxically, then, Žižek argues that the typical postmodern subject is one who displays an outright cynicism towards official institutions, yet at the same time believes in the existence of conspiracies and an unseen Other pulling the strings. This apparently contradictory coupling of cynicism and belief is strictly correlative to the demise of the big Other. Its disappearance causes us to construct an Other of the Other in order to escape the unbearable freedom its loss encumbers us with. (See Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture.)

Žižek follows Louis Althusser in jettisoning the Marxist equation: "ideology equals false consciousness." Ideology, to all intents and purposes, is consciousness. Ideology does not "mask" the real—one cannot achieve true consciousness. This being the case, post-ideological postmodern "knowingness"—the cynicism and irony of postmodern cultural production—does not reveal the truth, the real, the hard kernel. Knowing that we are being "lied" to is hardly the stuff of revolution when ideology is not, and never has been, simply a matter of consciousness, of subject positions, but is the very stuff of everyday praxis itself. The cynics and ironists, not to mention the deconstructionists et al., may know that reality is an "ideological construction"—some have even read their Lacan and Derrida—but in their daily practice, caught up in an apparently unalterable world of exchange-values (capital), they do their part to sustain that construction in any case. As Marx would say, it is their very life process that is ideological, what they know, or what they think they know, being neither here nor there. The postmodern cultural artifact—the "critique," the "incredulity"—is itself merely a symptom/commodity fetish. Thus has capital commodified even the cynicism that purports to unmask its "reality," to "emancipate."

Politicization

Today, in the aftermath of the "end of ideology", Žižek is critical of the way political decisions are justified; the way, for example, reductions in social programs are sometimes presented as an apparently 'objective' necessity, though this is no longer a valid basis for political discourse. He sees the current "talk about greater citizen involvement" or "political goals circumscribed within the rubric of the cultural" as having little effectiveness as long as no substantial measures are devised for the long run. But measures such as the "limitation of the freedom of capital" and the "subordination of the manufacturing processes to a mechanism of social control"—these Žižek calls a "radical de-politicization of the economy" (A Plea for Intolerance).

So at present Slavoj Žižek is arguing for a politicization of the economy. For indeed the "tolerant" multicultural impulse, as the dogma of today's liberal society, suppresses the crucial question: How can we reintroduce into the current conditions of globalization the genuine space of the political? He also argues in favor of a "politicization of politics" as a counter balance to post-politics. In the area of political decision making in a democratic context he criticizes the two-party system that is dominant in some countries as a political form of a "post-political era", as a manifestation of a possibility of choice that in reality does not exist.

Politicization is thus for him present whenever "a particular demand begins to function as a representative of the impossible universal". Žižek sees class struggle not as localized objective determinations, as a social position vis-à-vis capital but rather as lying in a "radically subjective" position: the proletariat is the living, "embodied contradiction". Only through particularism in the political struggle can any universalism emerge. Fighting for workers interests often appears discredited today ("indeed in this domain the workers themselves only wish to implement their own interests, they fight only for themselves and not for the whole"). The problem is how to foster a politicizing politics in the age of post-politics. Particular demands, acting as a "metaphorical condensation", would thus aim at something that transcends those particular demands, a genuine reconstruction of the social framework. Žižek, following Jacques Ranciere, sees the real political conflict as being that between an ordered structure of society and those without a place in it, the "part that has no part" in anything but nonetheless causes the structure to falter, because it refers to—i.e. embodies—an "empty principle" of the "universal".

The very fact that a society is not easily divided into classes, that there is no "simple structural trait" for it, that for instance the "middle class" is also intensely fought over by a populism of the right, is a sign of this struggle. Otherwise "class antagonism would be completely symbolized" and no longer both impossible and real at the same time ("impossible/real"). His solution to capitalism is a rapid repoliticization of the economy.

Atheism

Žižek is an atheist. However, he has said he does not consider religion an enemy but rather one of the fields of struggle. He has also referred to himself as a "Christian materialist". Žižek believes the universalist aspect of Christianity should be secularized into militant egalitarianism, against the "pagan notion of destiny". This universalism he derives from the Christian death of God: God truly died on the cross and lives on as the "Holy Spirit", that is, in human community.

In 2006, Žižek wrote an opinion piece published in the New York Times calling atheism a great legacy of Europe, and voiced his support for the propagation of atheism in the continent. He has written many pieces on the reinterpretation of the religious and the theological such as The Puppet and the Dwarf, On Belief and The Fragile Absolute.

Critiques

Slavoj Žižek's fame in academic circles has increased rapidly, especially since he began publishing widely in English. Many hundreds of academics have addressed aspects of Žižek's work in professional papers. Inevitably, in the course of such scholarly discussion, many other thinkers differ with aspects of Žižek conceptual approach or specific arguments. While there is no indication that Žižek has received more criticism than have other continental philosophers of similar repute, a great number of writers have taken stances critical of Slavoj Žižek's work.

Award

He was listed on Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll.

Bibliography

Other works cited

Canning, P. "The Sublime Theorist of Slovenia: Peter Canning Interviews Slavoj Žižek" in Artforum, Issue 31, March 1993, pp. 84–9.

Critical introductions to Žižek

Christopher Hanlon, "Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek." New Literary History 32 (Winter, 2001).

Tony Myers, Slavoj Žižek (London: Routledge, 2003).

Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).

Ian Parker, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

Matthew Sharpe, Slavoj Žižek, a little piece of the Real (London: Ashgate, 2004).

Rex Butler, "Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory" (London: Continuum, 2005).

Jodi Dean, Žižek's Politics (London: Routledge, 2006).

Adam Kotsko, Žižek and Theology (New York: T & T Clark, 2008).

Marcus Pound, Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Interventions) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).

Adrian Johnston, Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008).

Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2009).

Dominik Finkelde, Slavoj Žižek zwischen Lacan und Hegel. Politische Philosophie, Metapsychologie, Ethik (Wien: Turia + Kant, 2009).

Paul A. Taylor, Žižek And The Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).

References

External links

Slavoj Zizek Author Page at Verso Books (Biography, blog, events, and discussion )

Slavoj Zizek Faculty Page at European Graduate School (Biography, bibliography and video lectures)

International Journal of Žižek Studies

Žižek's entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Slavoj Žižek's articles in Lacanian Ink

Collection of Žižek Lectures in Portuguese/English

Žižek Archive at Mideastdilemma.com

PODCAST: Slavoj Žižek – Notes towards a Definition of Communist Culture (10 hours)

PODCAST: Slavoj Žižek 'Apocalyptic Times' Public lecture given at Birkbeck College London in November 2009

Zizek: Far Right and Anti-Immigrant Politicians on the Rise in Europe - video interview by Democracy Now!

Category:Slavoj Žižek Category:1949 births Category:20th-century philosophers Category:21st-century philosophers Category:European Graduate School faculty Category:Academics of Birkbeck, University of London Category:Continental philosophers Category:Cultural critics Category:Film theorists Category:Freudo-Marxism Category:Jacques Lacan Category:Liberal Democracy of Slovenia politicians Category:Living people Category:Marxist theorists Category:Marxist writers Category:Members of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Category:People from Ljubljana Category:Psychoanalytic theory Category:Slovenian atheists Category:Slovenian philosophers Category:Slovenian psychoanalysts Category:Slovenian sociologists Category:University of Ljubljana alumni Category:University of Paris alumni Category:Slovenian socialists Category:Yugoslav communists Category:Slovenian Marxists

Name	Bernie Sanders
Jr/sr	Junior Senator
State	Vermont
Party	Independent
Otherparty	Democratic (affiliated non-member)Progressive (affiliated non-member)Liberty Union
Term start	January 3, 2007
Alongside	Patrick Leahy
Preceded	Jim Jeffords
Date of birth	September 08, 1941
Place of birth	New York City, New York
Dead	alive
Occupation	CarpenterFilmmakerWriterResearcher
Residence	Burlington, Vermont
Spouse	Jane O'Meara
Children	Levi Sanders
Alma mater	University of Chicago (B.A.)
Religion	Judaism
State2	Vermont
District2	At-large
Term start2	January 3, 1991
Term end2	January 3, 2007
Preceded2	Peter P. Smith
Succeeded2	Peter Welch
Office3	Mayor of Burlington
Term start3	1981
Term end3	1989
Predecessor3	Gordon Paquette
Successor3	Peter Clavelle

Bernard "Bernie" Sanders (born September 8, 1941) is the junior United States Senator from Vermont, elected on November 7, 2006. Before becoming Senator, Sanders represented Vermont's at-large district in the United States House of Representatives for 16 years. Sanders also served as mayor of Burlington, Vermont from 1981 through 1989.

Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist, and has praised European social democracy. He is the first person elected to the U.S. Senate to identify as a socialist. Sanders caucuses with the Democratic Party and is counted as a Democrat for the purposes of committee assignments, but because he does not belong to a formal political party, he appears as an independent on the ballot. He was also the only independent member of the House during much of his service there. He is one of two independent Senators in the 111th Congress, along with Joe Lieberman.

Early life, education and career

Sanders, the son of Jewish Polish immigrants to the United States, was born in Brooklyn. He graduated from James Madison High School in Brooklyn and later attended the University of Chicago, graduating with a B.A. in political science in 1964. After graduating from college, Sanders spent time on an Israeli kibbutz, an experience which shaped his political views. In 1964, Sanders moved to Vermont, where he worked as a carpenter, filmmaker, writer and researcher, among other jobs.

Sanders's lifetime legislative score from the AFL-CIO is 100%. As of 2006, he has a grade of "C-" from the National Rifle Association (NRA). Sanders voted against the Brady Bill and in favor of an NRA-supported bill to restrict lawsuits against gun manufacturers in 2005. Sanders voted to abolish the so-called "marriage penalty" for taxes and also voted for a bill that sought to ban human cloning. Sanders has endorsed every Democratic nominee for president of the United States since 1992. Sanders is a co-founder of the House Progressive Caucus and chaired the grouping of mostly liberal Democrats for its first eight years.

Sanders voted against both resolutions authorizing the use of force against Iraq in 1991 and 2002, and opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But he later joined almost all of his colleagues in voting for a non-binding resolution expressing support for U.S. troops at the outset of the invasion, although he gave a floor speech criticizing the partisan nature of the resolution and the Bush administration's actions in the run-up to the war. In relation to the leak investigation involving Valerie Plame, on April 7, 2006, Sanders said, "The revelation that the president authorized the release of classified information in order to discredit an Iraq war critic should tell every member of Congress that the time is now for a serious investigation of how we got into the war in Iraq, and why Congress can no longer act as a rubber stamp for the president." Sanders supports universal health care and opposes what he terms "unfettered" free trade, which he argues deprives American workers of their jobs while exploiting foreign workers in sweatshop factories.

In June 2005, Sanders proposed an amendment to limit provisions that allow the government to obtain individuals' library and book-buying records. The amendment passed the House by a bipartisan majority, but was removed on November 4 that year by House-Senate negotiators, and never became law. Sanders followed this vote on November 5, 2005, by voting against the Online Freedom of Speech Act, which would have exempted the Internet from the restrictions of the McCain-Feingold Bill.

In March 2006, after a series of resolutions calling for him to bring articles of impeachment against the president passed in various towns in Vermont, Sanders stated it would be impractical to impeach George W. Bush, given the "reality that the Republicans control the House and the Senate." Still, Sanders made no secret of his opposition to the Bush Administration, which he regularly attacked for cuts in social programs he supports.

Sanders has also criticized Alan Greenspan. In June 2003, during a question-and-answer discussion with the then-Federal Reserve chairman, Sanders told Greenspan that he was concerned that Greenspan was "way out of touch" and "that you see your major function in your position as the need to represent the wealthy and large corporations." Senator Sanders has maintained and warned (in 1998) that investment banks and commercial banks should remain as two separate entities.

Republicans have attacked Sanders as "an ineffective extremist" for passing only one law and fifteen amendments in his eight terms in the House. Sanders responded by saying that he had passed "the most floor amendments of any member of the House since 1996." Former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean has stated that "Bernie Sanders votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time."

Senate campaign

Sanders had mentioned on several occasions that he would run for the Senate if Jeffords (with whom he has a longstanding friendship) were ever to retire, and entered the race on April 21, 2005, following Jeffords's announcement that he would not seek a fourth term. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, endorsed Sanders; Schumer's backing was critical, as it meant that any Democrat running against Sanders could not expect to receive any significant financial help on a national level.

Sanders was also endorsed by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, and Democratic National Committee chairman and former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Dean said in May 2005 that he considered Sanders an ally who votes with House Democrats. Sen. Barack Obama also campaigned for Sanders in Vermont. Sanders entered into an agreement with the Democratic Party to be listed in their primary but to decline the nomination should he win, which he did easily.

Speculation abounded that the state's popular Republican governor, Jim Douglas, would enter the race as well. Many pundits believed Douglas was the only Republican who could possibly defeat Sanders. However, on April 30, Douglas announced he would seek a third term as governor. In the view of many pundits, this effectively handed the open seat to Sanders.

Sen. Sanders consistently led his Republican challenger, businessman Richard Tarrant, by wide margins in polling. In the most expensive political campaign in Vermont's history, Sanders defeated Tarrant by an approximately 2-to-1 margin in the 2006 midterm election. Many national media outlets (including CNN) projected Sanders the winner before any returns came in.

Sanders is only the third Senator from Vermont to caucus with the Democrats — following Jeffords and Patrick Leahy. He made a deal with the Democratic leadership similar to the one Jeffords made after Jeffords became an independent. In exchange for receiving the committee seats that would be available to him as a Democrat, Sanders votes with the Democrats on all procedural matters unless he asks permission of Majority Whip Richard Durbin. However, such a request is almost never made and is almost never granted. He is free to vote as he pleases on policy matters, but almost always votes with the Democrats.

Senate career

Sanders and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced the Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act of 2007 on January 15, 2007. The measure would have provided funding for research and development on geologic sequestration of carbon dioxide, set emissions standards for new vehicles and a renewable fuels requirement for gasoline beginning in 2016, established energy efficiency and renewable portfolio standards beginning in 2008 and low-carbon electric generation standards beginning in 2016 for electric utilities, and would have required periodic evaluations by the National Academy of Sciences to determine whether emissions targets are adequate.

On September 24, 2008, Senator Sanders posted on his website a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson against the initial bailout proposal, drawing more than 8,000 citizen co-signers in the first 24 hours. On January 26, 2009, Sanders and Democrats Robert Byrd, Russ Feingold and Tom Harkin were the sole majority members to vote against confirmation of Timothy Geithner to be United States Secretary of the Treasury.

On December 10, 2010, Senator Sanders delivered an 8½ hour speech against the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010, the proposed extension of the Bush-era tax rates that eventually became law, saying "Enough is enough! [...] How many homes can you own?" (A long speech such as this is in the tradition of a filibuster, though because it did not block Senate action, it didn't technically qualify as a filibuster under US Senate rules.)

In response to his "filibuster," "activists across the country started talking up the notion of a 'Sanders for President' run in 2012, either as a dissident Democrat in the primaries or as a left-leaning Independent." Hundreds of people signed online petitions urging Sanders to run, and pollsters began measuring his support in key primary states.

Renegotiaton of NAFTA

He is a strong advocate for renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and is a strong opponent of the United States current trade policy towards Latin America and China.

Iraq War

Sanders has opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq from its start and voted against it in the House of Representatives. He has called for a speedy withdrawal and increased veterans benefits.

Media freedom

Sanders has also been a leader in calling for media reform and opposes increased concentration of media outlets. He appeared in Orwell Rolls in His Grave and , two documentaries on the subject.

Global warming and the environment

He warns about the dangers of global warming.

US Federal Reserve audit

Sanders has introduced a Senate companion bill to H.R. 1207 which will conduct an audit of the Federal Reserve.

Civil rights and women's rights

He is a vocal supporter of gay rights, supporting same sex marriage, and of pro-choice legislation.

Personal life

Sanders is married to Jane O'Meara, president of Burlington College, and has one son, Levi Sanders, from a previous marriage. His brother, Larry Sanders, is a Green Party District Councillor for Oxford East in Oxfordshire, England. His nephew, Jacob, is a former Oxford city councillor for the Green Party.

Sanders is one of two sitting U.S. Senators who went to James Madison High School in Brooklyn. Before becoming a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Sanders's roommate was Richard I. Sugarman, a professor at the University of Vermont. Coincidentally, the only other Independent currently serving in the U.S. Senate, Joe Lieberman (I-CT) shared a suite with Professor Sugarman when the two attended Yale University in the 1960s.

Sanders has regular guest appearances on the Thom Hartmann radio program for the Friday segment, "Brunch with Bernie".

Sanders also stars in his own weekly five-minute show, "Senator Sanders Unfiltered", hosted online at www.sandersunfiltered.com.

Electoral history

Most recent election shown below. For a complete list see: Electoral History of Bernie Sanders

References

External links

United States Senator Bernie Sanders official U.S. Senate site

Friends of Bernie Sanders official campaign site

Bernie Sanders Denounces Tax Cut in 8.5 Hour Senate Speech - video report by Democracy Now!

Category:1941 births Category:Living people Category:People from Brooklyn Category:People from Burlington, Vermont Category:Independent politicians in the United States Category:American anti-Iraq War activists Category:Democratic socialists Category:American social democrats Category:Harvard University faculty Category:Jewish members of the United States House of Representatives Category:Jewish United States Senators Category:Jewish American mayors Category:LGBT rights activists from the United States Category:American people of Polish-Jewish descent Category:Mayors of places in Vermont Category:Members of the United States House of Representatives from Vermont Category:University of Chicago alumni Category:United States Senators from Vermont Category:Liberty Union Party politicians

Gala.]]Joe Klein (born September 7, 1946) is a longtime Washington, D.C. and New York journalist and columnist, known for his novel Primary Colors, an anonymously written roman à clef portraying Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. Klein is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. Since 2003 he has been a contributor at the current affairs Time news group. In April 2006, he published Politics Lost, a book on what he calls the "pollster-consultant industrial complex". He has also written articles and book reviews for The New Republic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, LIFE and Rolling Stone.

Early life and career

Klein graduated from the Hackley School and the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in American civilization. In 1969, Klein began reporting for the Essex County Newspapers, and The Peabody Times in Massachusetts In 1972, he reported for Boston's WGBH, and until 1974 he was also the news editor for The Real Paper in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a contributing editor for Rolling Stone from 1975 to 1980, and Washington bureau chief from 1975 to 1977. He became friends with actor-director Tom Laughlin after interviewing him for Rolling Stone and appeared briefly as a reporter in Laughlin's 1977 film Billy Jack Goes to Washington.

Klein published Woody Guthrie: A Life in 1980 and Payback: Five Marines After Vietnam in 1984. He was a political columnist for New York from 1987 to 1992 where he won the Peter Kihss Award for reporting on the 1989 race for Mayor of New York. In May 1992 he joined Newsweek and wrote the column "Public Lives", which won a National Headliner Award in 1994. Newsweek also won a National Magazine Award for their coverage of Bill Clinton's 1992 victory. From 1992 to 1996 he was also a consultant for CBS News, providing commentary. Klein denied authorship again in Newsweek, speculating that another writer wrote it. Washington Post Style editor David von Drehle, in an interview, asked Klein if he was willing to stake his journalistic credibility on his denial, to which Klein agreed. On July 17, 1996, Klein admitted that the speculation had been correct.

Later career

In December 1996, he joined The New Yorker to write the "Letter from Washington" column. In 2000 he published The Running Mate, a sequel of sorts to Primary Colors. In March 2002 Klein published The Natural: Bill Clinton's Misunderstood Presidency, an account of Clinton's two terms in office. Time later published a comment: "In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don't." Greenwald noted that the text of the legislation does not require court review of individual targets, and that Time's response disregards this fact. Klein's response was, "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right."

Later, Greenwald reported that Time "refused the requests of two sitting members of Congress ... to correct Klein's false statements in Time itself". Greenwald has reported that Senator Russ Feingold has been informed by Time that his letter rebutting Klein will be published in a forthcoming issue.

Political views

In The Natural, his book about the Clinton presidency, Klein gave a mixed assessment of Clinton's time in office. In the book, he wrote: "the conventions of journalism prevent me from fitting too neatly into one political niche (although as a columnist for the New Yorker and Newsweek my predilections are obvious)". Klein's depiction of the Clinton presidency also gave a detailed examination of the moderate Democratic positions espoused by the Democratic Leadership Council, as well as third way politics generally, of which Klein was highly complimentary.

He is an admirer of George W. Bush personally, although he has sometimes disagreed with his policies. In an interview with Hugh Hewitt Klein said of Bush, "Let me say that of all the major politicians I've covered in presidential politics in the last two or three times around, he is the most likely to stick with an issue, even if the polls are bad, and to govern from the gut as you said. I don't always agree with the decisions that he makes, but I think he is an honorable man, and when I've criticized him, I've tried to criticize him on the substance, and certainly not on his personality, because I really like the guy."

In 2008, Klein caused controversy with comments on the motivations of neoconservatives, when he said:

American foreign policy scholar Max Boot and the Anti-Defamation League National Director, Abraham Foxman, were among the critics of Klein's views. Klein is also frequently criticized by Bob Somerby, a media commentator.

In May 2009 he invited further controversy when he was quoted in an article in Politico.com, wherein he stated that the reasoning and ideas of prominent conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer were of limited value because of Krauthammer's wheelchair use:

"There's something tragic about him... His work would have a lot more nuance if he were able to see the situations he's writing about."

Klein has been criticized by several conservative publications for accusing Fox News host Glenn Beck, Republican Senator Tom Coburn and former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin of sedition.

In January 2011, during an appearance on CNN's Reliable Sources, Klein criticized the mainstream media for not handling complex issues properly, singling out MSNBC host Ed Schultz:

Personal life

Klein lives with his wife, daughter Sophie and son Teddy, in Pelham, New York, and is also the father of two adult sons.[4]

In March 2008, Klein aroused controversy after making what many saw as an anti-Catholic remark in regards to NBC's Tim Russert, Chris Matthews and the New York Times' Maureen Dowd related to their coverage of Hillary Clinton. He later apologized. Others, such as media critic Bob Somerby, defended Klein's comment as accurate.

External links

Time Magazine columnist profile

References

Category:American biographers Category:American magazine staff writers Category:American novelists Category:American political writers Category:University of Pennsylvania alumni Category:Guggenheim Fellows Category:Jewish American writers Category:1946 births Category:Living people Category:American people of Dutch descent

Name	David Howell Petraeus
Born	November 07, 1952
Placeofbirth	Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York
Placeofburial label	Place of burial
Allegiance	United States of America
Branch	United States Army
Serviceyears	1974–present
Rank	General
Commands	International Security Assistance Force United States Forces-Afghanistan U.S. Central Command Multi-National Force - IraqU.S. Army Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault)1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment A Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment (Mechanized)
Battles	Operation Joint Forge (Bosnia and Herzegovina)Operation Uphold Democracy (Haiti)Operation Desert Spring (Kuwait)Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq)Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan)
Awards	Defense Distinguished Service Medal (2)Army Distinguished Service Medal (2)Defense Superior Service Medal (2)Legion of Merit (4)Bronze Star with Valor VDefense Meritorious Service Medal
Education	United States Military Academy Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs

David Howell Petraeus (; born November 7, 1952) is a United States Army general who serves as the current Commander, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A). His other four-star assignments include serving as the 10th Commander, U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) from September 16, 2008, to June 30, 2010, and as Commanding General, Multi-National Force - Iraq (MNF-I) from January 26, 2007, to September 16, 2008. As commander of MNF-I, Petraeus oversaw all coalition forces in Iraq. He was confirmed by the Senate on June 30, 2010, and took over command from temporary commander Lieutenant-General Sir Nick Parker on July 4, 2010.

Petraeus has a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy from which he graduated in 1974 as a distinguished cadet (top 5% of his class). He was the General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College class of 1983. He subsequently earned an M.P.A. in 1985 and a Ph.D. in International Relations in 1987 from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He later served as Assistant Professor of International Relations at the United States Military Academy and also completed a fellowship at Georgetown University.

Some news reports have speculated that Petraeus may have interest in running for the presidency, especially after he visited a school known for hosting the presidential debates, New Hampshire's Saint Anselm College. Petraeus lives in New Hampshire. Despite these accounts, Petraeus has categorically asserted that he has no political ambitions. On June 23, 2010, President Obama nominated Petraeus to succeed General Stanley McChrystal as commanding general of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, technically a step down from his position as Commander of United States Central Command, which oversees the military efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and parts of Africa.

Personal life

Petraeus was born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, the son of Miriam (née Howell), a librarian, and Sixtus Petraeus, a sea captain. His mother was American and his father had immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands during the initial phase of World War II. Sixtus settled in Cornwall-on-Hudson, where David Petraeus grew up and graduated from Cornwall Central High School in 1970. Residents called him 'Peaches' in reference to his often-mispronounced last name and the nickname stuck with him as a cadet.

Petraeus then went on to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Petraeus was on the intercollegiate soccer and ski teams, was a cadet captain on the brigade staff, and was a "distinguished cadet" academically, graduating in the top 5% of the Class of 1974 (ranked 43rd overall). In the class yearbook, Petraeus was remembered as "always going for it in sports, academics, leadership, and even his social life."

Two months after graduation Petraeus married Holly Knowlton, a graduate of Dickinson College and daughter of Army General William A. Knowlton, who was superintendent of West Point at the time. Holly, who is multi-lingual, was a National Merit Scholar in high school, and graduated summa cum laude from Dickinson College. They have a daughter and son, Anne and Stephen. Petraeus administered the oath of office at his son's 2009 commissioning into the Army after graduating from MIT.

Petraeus's official domicile in the United States is a rustic property in the small community of Springfield, New Hampshire, which his wife inherited from her family.

Army career

Education and academia

Petraeus graduated from West Point in 1974. He earned the General George C. Marshall Award as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Class of 1983 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He subsequently earned an M.P.A. in 1985 and a Ph.D. in international relations in 1987 from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, then served as an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the U.S. Military Academy from 1985 to 1987. His doctoral dissertation was entitled "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era". He also completed a military fellowship at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in 1994–1995, although he was called away early to serve in Haiti as the Chief of Operations for the UN force there in early 1995.

From late 2005 through February 2007, Petraeus served as Commanding General of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (CAC) located there. As commander of CAC, Petraeus was responsible for oversight of the Command and General Staff College and seventeen other schools, centers, and training programs as well as for developing the Army’s doctrinal manuals, training the Army’s officers, and supervising the Army’s center for the collection and dissemination of lessons learned. During his time at CAC, Petraeus and Marine Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis jointly oversaw the publication of Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency, the body of which was written by an extraordinarily diverse group of military officers, academics, human rights advocates, and journalists who had been assembled by Petraeus and Mattis. Additionally, at both Fort Leavenworth and throughout the military's schools and training programs, Petraeus integrated the study of counterinsurgency into lesson plans and training exercises. In recognition of the fact that soldiers in Iraq often performed duties far different than those they trained for, Petraeus also stressed the importance of teaching soldiers how to think as well as how to fight and the need to foster flexibility and adaptability in leaders, he has been called "the world's leading expert in counter-insurgency warfare". Later, having refined his ideas on counterinsurgency based on the implementation of the new COIN doctrine in Iraq, he published both in Iraq as well as in the Sep/Oct 2008 edition of Military Review his "Commander's Counterinsurgency Guidance" to help guide leaders and units in the Multi-National Force-Iraq.

Military operations

1970s

Upon his graduation from West Point in 1974, Petraeus was commissioned an infantry officer. After completing Ranger School (Distinguished Honor Graduate and other honors), Petraeus was assigned to the 509th Airborne Battalion Combat Team, a light infantry unit in Vicenza, Italy. Ever since, light infantry has been at the core of his career, punctuated by assignments to mechanized units, unit commands, staff assignments, and educational institutions. After leaving the 509th as a first lieutenant, Petraeus began a brief association with mechanized units when he became assistant operations officer on the staff of the 2nd Brigade, 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) at Fort Stewart, Georgia. In 1979, he assumed command of a company in the same division: ALPHA Company, 2nd Battalion, 19th Infantry Regiment (Mechanized), and then served as that battalion's operations officer, a major's position that he held as a junior captain. In 1988–1989, he also served as operations officer to the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized)'s 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment (Mechanized) and its 1st Brigade.

1980s

In 1981, Petraeus became aide-de-camp to the Commanding General of the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized). He spent the next few years furthering his military and civilian education, including spending 1982-83 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, attending the Command and General Staff College. At graduation in 1983, he was the General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. From 1983-85 he was at Princeton; and 1985-87 at West Point. After earning his Ph.D. and teaching at West Point, Petraeus continued up the rungs of the command ladder, serving as military assistant to Gen. John Galvin, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. From there, he moved to the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) and then to a post as aide and assistant executive officer to the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Carl Vuono, in Washington, D.C.

1990s

Upon promotion to lieutenant colonel, Petraeus moved from the office of the Chief of Staff to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where he commanded the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault)'s 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment from 1991–1993. As battalion commander of the Iron Rakkasans, he suffered one of the more dramatic incidents in his career; in 1991 he was accidentally shot in the chest with an M-16 assault rifle during a live-fire exercise when a soldier tripped and his rifle discharged. He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, where he was operated on by future U.S. Senator Bill Frist. The hospital released him early after he did fifty push ups without resting, just a few days after the accident.

During 1993–94, Petraeus continued his long association with the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) as the division's Assistant Chief of Staff, G-3 (plans, operations and training) and installation Director of Plans, Training, and Mobilization (DPTM). In 1995, he was assigned to the United Nations Mission in Haiti Military Staff as its Chief Operations Officer during Operation Uphold Democracy. His next command, from 1995–97, was the 1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, centered on the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. At that post, his brigade's training cycle at Fort Polk's Joint Readiness Training Center for low-intensity warfare was chronicled by novelist and military enthusiast Tom Clancy in his book Airborne. From 1997-99 Petraeus served in the Pentagon as Executive Assistant to the Director of the Joint Staff and then to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Henry Shelton, who described Petraeus as "a high-energy individual who likes to lead from the front, in any field he is going into." In 1999, as a brigadier general, Petraeus returned to the 82nd, serving as the assistant division commander for operations and then, briefly, as acting commanding general. During his time with the 82nd, he deployed to Kuwait as part of Operation Desert Spring, the continuous rotation of combat forces through Kuwait during the decade after the Gulf War.

2000s

From the 82nd, he moved on to serve as Chief of Staff of XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg during 2000–2001. In 2000, Petraeus suffered his second major injury, when, during a civilian skydiving jump, his parachute collapsed at low altitude due to a hook turn, resulting in a hard landing that broke his pelvis. He was selected for promotion to Major General in 2001. During 2001–2002, as a brigadier general, Petraeus served a ten-month tour in Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of Operation Joint Forge. In Bosnia, he was the NATO Stabilization Force Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations as well as the Deputy Commander of the U.S. Joint Interagency Counter-Terrorism Task Force, a command created after the September 11 attacks to add counterterrorism capability to the U.S. forces attached to the NATO command in Bosnia. In 2004, he was promoted to Lieutenant General. In 2007, he was promoted to General. On April 23, 2008, Secretary of Defense Gates announced that President Bush was nominating General Petraeus to command U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM), headquartered in Tampa, Florida. The nomination required and received Senate confirmation. He was confirmed by the Senate on June 30, 2010, an anecdote he and other journalists have used to portray Petraeus as an early recognizer of the difficulties that would follow the fall of Baghdad.

In Mosul, a city of nearly two million people, Petraeus and the 101st employed classic counterinsurgency methods to build security and stability, including conducting targeted kinetic operations and using force judiciously, jump-starting the economy, building local security forces, staging elections for the city council within weeks of their arrival, overseeing a program of public works, reinvigorating the political process, and launching 4,500 reconstruction projects. This approach can be attributed to Petraeus, who had been steeped in nation-building during his previous tours in nations such as Bosnia and Haiti and thus approached nation-building as a central military mission and who was "prepared to act while the civilian authority in Baghdad was still getting organized," according to Michael Gordon of The New York Times. Some Iraqis gave Petraeus the nickname 'King David,' which was later adopted by some of his colleagues. Newsweek has stated that "It's widely accepted that no force worked harder to win Iraqi hearts and minds than the 101st Air Assault Division led by Petraeus."

One of the General's major public works was the restoration and re-opening of the University of Mosul. Petraeus strongly supported the use of commanders' discretionary funds for public works, telling Coalition Provisional Authority director L. Paul Bremer "Money is ammunition" during the director's first visit to Mosul. Petraeus' often repeated catchphrase was later incorporated into official military briefings and was also eventually incorporated into the U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual drafted with Petraeus's oversight.

In February 2004, the 101st was replaced in Mosul by I Corps headquarters, but operational forces consisted solely of a unit roughly one quarter its size—a Stryker brigade. The following summer, the Governor of Nineveh Province was assassinated and most of the Sunni Arab Provincial Council members walked out in the ensuing selection of the new governor, leaving Kurdish members in charge of a predominantly Sunni Arab province. Later that year, the local police commander defected to the Kurdish Minister of Interior in Irbil after repeated assassination attempts against him, attacks on his house, and the kidnapping of his sister. The largely Sunni Arab police collapsed under insurgent attacks launched at the same time Coalition Forces attacked Fallujah in November 2004.

There are differing explanations for the apparent collapse of the police force in Mosul. The Guardian quoted an anonymous US diplomat saying "Mosul basically collapsed after he [Petraeus] left". Former diplomat Peter Galbraith criticized Petraeus' command of the 101st, saying his achievements have been exaggerated and his reputation is inflated. He wrote for The New York Review of Books that "Petraeus ignored warnings from America's Kurdish allies that he was appointing the wrong people to key positions in Mosul's local government and police." On the other hand, in the book Fiasco, Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks wrote that "Mosul was quiet while he (Petraeus) was there, and likely would have remained so had his successor had as many troops as he had—and as much understanding of counterinsurgency techniques." Ricks went on to note that "the population-oriented approach Petraeus took in Mosul in 2003 would be the one the entire U.S. Army in Iraq was trying to adopt in 2006." Time columnist Joe Klein largely agreed with Ricks, writing that the Stryker brigade that replaced the 101st "didn't do any of the local governance that Petraeus had done." Moving away from counterinsurgency principles, "they were occupiers, not builders." New York Times reporter Michael Gordon and retired General Bernard Trainor echoed Ricks and Klein, including in their book Cobra II a quote that Petraeus "did it right and won over Mosul."

Multi-National Security Transition Command – Iraq

In June 2004, less than six months after the 101st returned to the U.S., Petraeus was promoted to lieutenant general and became the first commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq. This newly created command had responsibility for training, equipping, and mentoring Iraq's growing Army, Police, and other security forces as well as developing Iraq's security institutions and building associated infrastructure, such as training bases, police stations, and border forts. During Petraeus's fifteen months at the helm of MNSTC-I, he stood up a three-star command virtually from scratch and in the midst of serious fighting in places like Fallujah, Mosul, and Najaf. By the end of his command, some 100,000 Iraqi Security Forces had been trained; Iraqi Army and Police were being employed in combat; countless reconstruction projects had been executed; and hundreds of thousands of weapons, body armor, and other equipment had been distributed in what was described as the "largest military procurement and distribution effort since World War II," at a cost of over $11 billion.

In September 2004, Petraeus wrote an article for The Washington Post in which he described the tangible progress being made in building Iraq's security forces from the ground up while also noting the many challenges associated with doing so. "Although there have been reverses -- not to mention horrific terrorist attacks," Petraeus wrote, "there has been progress in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load for their own security, something they are keen to do." Some of the challenges involved in building security forces had to do with accomplishing this task in the midst of a tough insurgency—or, as Petraeus wrote, "making the mission akin to repairing an aircraft while in flight -- and while being shot at." Other challenges included allegations of corruption as well as efforts to improve Iraq's supply accountability procedures. For example, according to former Interim Iraq Governing Council member Ali A. Allawi in The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace, "under the very noses of the security transition command, officials both inside and outside the ministry of defense were planning to embezzle most, if not all, of the procurement budget of the army." The Washington Post stated in August 2007 that the Pentagon had lost track of approximately 30% of weapons supplied to the Iraqi security forces. The General Accounting Office said that the weapons distribution was haphazard, rushed, and did not follow established procedures—particularly from 2004 to 2005, when security training was led by Petraeus and Iraq's security forces began to see combat in places like Najaf and Samarra. Over a hundred thousand AK-47 assault rifles and pistols were delivered to Iraqi forces without full documentation, and some of the missing weapons may have been abducted by Iraqi insurgents. Thousands of body armour pieces have also been lost. The Independent'' has stated that the military believed "the situation on the ground was so urgent, and the agency responsible for recording the transfers of arms so short staffed, that field commanders had little choice in the matter." The Pentagon conducted its own investigation, and accountability was subsequently regained for many of the weapons.

Following his second tour in Iraq, Petraeus authored a widely read article in Military Review, listing fourteen observations he had made during two tours in Iraq, including: do not do too much with your own hands, money is ammunition, increasing the number of stakeholders is critical to success, success in a counterinsurgency requires more than just military operations, ultimate success depends on local leaders, there is no substitute for flexible and adaptable leaders, and, finally, a leader's most important task is to set the right tone.

Multi-National Force – Iraq (spring 2007)

In January 2007, as part of his overhauled Iraq strategy, President George W. Bush announced that Petraeus would succeed Gen. George Casey as commanding general of MNF-I to lead all U.S. troops in Iraq. On January 23, the Senate Armed Services Committee held Petraeus' nomination hearing, during which he testified on his ideas for Iraq, particularly the strategy underpinning the "surge" of forces. During his opening statement, Petraeus stated that "security of the population, especially in Baghdad, and in partnership with the Iraqi Security Forces, will be the focus of the military effort." He went on to state that security will require establishing a persistent presence, especially in Iraq's most threatened neighborhoods. He also noted the critical importance of helping Iraq increase its governmental capacity, develop employment programs, and improve daily life for its citizens.

Throughout Petraeus' tenure in Iraq, Multi-National Force-Iraq endeavored to work with the Government of Iraq to carry out this strategy that focuses on securing the population. Doing so required establishing—and maintaining—persistent presence by living among the population, separating reconcilable Iraqis from irreconcilable enemies, relentlessly pursuing the enemy, taking back sanctuaries and then holding areas that have been cleared, and continuing to develop Iraq's security forces and to support local security forces, often called Sons of Iraq, and to integrate them into the Iraqi Army and Police and other employment programs.

The strategy underpinning the "surge" of forces, as well as the ideas Petraeus included in FM 3-24, have been referred to by some journalists and politicians as the "Petraeus Doctrine," although the surge itself was proposed a few months before Petraeus took command. Despite the misgivings of most Democratic and a few Republican senators over the proposed implementation of the "Petraeus Doctrine" in Iraq, specifically regarding the troop surge, Petraeus was unanimously confirmed as a four-star general and MNF-I commander on January 27.

Before leaving for Iraq, Petraeus recruited a number of highly educated military officers, nicknamed "Petraeus guys" or "designated thinkers," to advise him as commander, including Col. Mike Meese, head of the Social Sciences Department at West Point and Col. H.R. McMaster, famous for his leadership at the Battle of 73 Easting in the Gulf War and in the pacification of Tal Afar more recently, as well as for his doctoral dissertation on Vietnam-era civil-military relations entitled Dereliction of Duty. While most of Petraeus's closest advisers are American military officers, he also hired Lt. Col. David Kilcullen of the Australian Army, who was working for the US State Department. Kilcullen upon his return from Iraq published The Accidental Guerrilla, and has discussed the central front of the war and lessons learned in Iraq in The Washington Post.

After taking command of MNF-I on February 10, 2007, Petraeus inspected U.S. and Iraqi units all over Iraq, visiting outposts in greater Baghdad, Tikrit, Baquba, Ramadi, Mosul, Kirkuk, Bayji, Samarra, Basrah and as far west as al-Hit and Al Qaim. In April 2007, Petraeus made his first visit to Washington as MNF-I Commander, reporting to President Bush and Congress on the progress of the "surge" and the overall situation in Iraq. During this visit he met privately with members of Congress and reportedly argued against setting a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq.

By late May 2007, Congress did not impose any timetables in war funding legislation for troop withdrawal. The enacted legislation did mandate that Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, deliver a report to Congress by September 15, 2007, detailing their assessment of the military, economic and political situation of Iraq.

In June 2007, Petraeus stated in an interview that there were “astonishing signs of normalcy” in Baghdad, and this comment drew criticism from Senate majority leader Harry Reid. In the same interview, however, Petraeus stated that "many problems remain" and he noted the need to help the Iraqis "stitch back together the fabric of society that was torn during the height of sectarian violence" in late 2006. Petraeus also warned that he expected that the situation in Iraq would require the continued deployment of the elevated troop level of more than 150,000 beyond September 2007; he also stated that U.S. involvement in Iraq could last years afterward. These statements are representative of the fact that throughout their time in Iraq, Petraeus and Crocker remained circumspect and refused to classify themselves as optimists or pessimists, noting, instead, that they were realists and that the reality in Iraq was very hard. They also repeatedly emphasized the importance of forthright reports and an unvarnished approach. "Indeed, Petraeus' realistic approach and assessments were lauded during the McLaughlin Group's 2008 Year-End Awards, when Monica Crowley nominated Petraeus for the most honest person of the year, stating, "...[H]e spoke about the great successes of the surge in Iraq, but he always tempered it, never sugar-coated it."

Multi-National Force – Iraq (summer and fall 2007)

In July 2007, the White House submitted to Congress the interim report on Iraq, which stated that coalition forces had made satisfactory progress on 6 of 18 benchmarks set by Congress. On September 7, 2007, in a letter addressed to the troops he was commanding, Petraeus wrote that much military progress had been made, but that the national level political progress that was hoped for had not been achieved. Petraeus' Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq was delivered to Congress on September 10, 2007.

On August 15, 2007, The Los Angeles Times stated that, according to unnamed administration officials, the report "would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government." However, Petraeus declared in his testimony to Congress that "I wrote this testimony myself." He further elaborated that his testimony to Congress "has not been cleared by, nor shared with, anyone in the Pentagon, the White House, or Congress."

In his September Congressional testimony, Petraeus stated that "As a bottom line up front, the military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met." He cited numerous factors for this progress, to include the fact that Coalition and Iraqi Forces had dealt significant blows to Al-Qaeda Iraq and had disrupted Shia militias, that ethno-sectarian violence had been reduced, and that the tribal rejection of Al-Qaeda had spread from Anbar Province to numerous other locations across Iraq. Based on this progress and additional progress expected to be achieved, Petraeus recommended drawing down the surge forces from Iraq and gradually transitioning increased responsibilities to Iraqi Forces, as their capabilities and conditions on the ground permitted.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada argued Petraeus' "plan is just more of the same" and "is neither a drawdown or a change in mission that we need." Democratic Representative Robert Wexler of Florida accused Petraeus of "cherry-picking statistics" and "massaging information". Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Tom Lantos of California called the General and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker "Two of our nation's most capable public servants" and said Democrats feel "esteem for their professionalism." He also said that "We can no longer take their assertions on Iraq at face value"; concluding, "We need to get out of Iraq, for that country's sake as well as our own."

Republican Presidential candidate Duncan Hunter called the report "a candid, independent assessment given with integrity". Republican Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona stated that "I commend General Petraeus for his honest and forthright assessment of the situation in Iraq." Anti-war Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska criticized the report while praising Petraeus, saying "It's not your fault, general... It's not Ambassador Crocker's fault. It's this administration's fault." A USA Today/Gallup poll taken after Petraeus' report to Congress showed virtually no change in public opinion toward the war. A Pew Research Center survey found that most Americans who have heard about the report approve of Petraeus' recommendations.

On September 20, the Senate passed an amendment by Republican John Cornyn III of Texas designed to "strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus". Cornyn drafted the amendment in response to a controversial full-page ad by the liberal group Moveon.org in the September 10, 2007, edition of The New York Times. All forty-nine Republican Senators and twenty-two Democratic Senators voted in support. The House passed a similar resolution by a 341-79 vote on September 26.

In December 2007, The Washington Post's "Fact Checker" stated that "While some of Petraeus's statistics are open to challenge, his claims about a general reduction in violence have been borne out over subsequent months. It now looks as if Petraeus was broadly right on this issue at least".

Based on the conditions on the ground, in October 2007, Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker revised their campaign plan for Iraq. In recognition of the progress made against Al Qaeda Iraq, one of the major points would be "shifting the U.S. military effort to focus more on countering Shiite militias".

Multi-National Force – Iraq (spring 2008)

On February 18, 2008, USA Today stated that "the U.S. effort has shown more success" and that, after the number of troops reached its peak in fall 2007, "U.S. deaths were at their lowest levels since the 2003 invasion, civilian casualties were down, and street life was resuming in Baghdad." In light of the significant reduction in violence and as the surge brigades began to redeploy without replacement, Petraeus characterized the progress as tenuous, fragile, and reversible and repeatedly reminded all involved that much work remains to be done. During an early February trip to Iraq, Defense Secretary Robert Gates endorsed the idea of a period of consolidation and evaluation upon completion of the withdrawal of surge brigades from Iraq.

Petraeus and Crocker continued these themes at their two full days of testimony before Congress on April 8 and 9th. During his opening statement, Petraeus stated that "there has been significant but uneven security progress in Iraq," while also noting that "the situation in certain areas is still unsatisfactory and that innumerable challenges remain" and that "the progress made since last spring is fragile and reversible." He also recommended a continuation of the drawdown of surge forces as well as a 45-day period of consolidation and evaluation after the final surge brigade has redeployed in late July. Analysts for USA Today and The New York Times stated that the hearings "lacked the suspense of last September's debate," but they did include sharp questioning as well as both skepticism and praise from various Congressional leaders.

In late May 2008, the Senate Armed Services Committee held nomination hearings for Petraeus and Lieutenant General Ray Odierno to lead United States Central Command and Multi-National Force-Iraq, respectively. During the hearings, Committee Chairman Carl Levin praised these two men, stating that "we owe Gen. Petraeus and Gen. Odierno a debt of gratitude for the commitment, determination and strength that they brought to their areas of responsibility. And regardless of how long the administration may choose to remain engaged in the strife in that country, our troops are better off with the leadership these two distinguished soldiers provide." During his opening statement, Petraeus discussed four principles that would guide his efforts if confirmed as CENTCOM Commander: seeking to strengthen international partnerships; taking a "whole of government" approach; pursuing comprehensive efforts and solutions; and, finally, both supporting efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and ensuring readiness for possible contingency operations in the future. Petraeus also noted that during the week before his testimony, the number of security incidents in Iraq was the lowest in over four years. After Petraeus's returned to Baghdad, and despite the continued drawdown of surge forces as well as recent Iraqi-led operations in places like Basrah, Mosul, and Baghdad, the number of security incidents in Iraq remained at their lowest level in over four years.

Multi-National Force – Iraq (summer and fall 2008)

In September 2008, Petraeus gave an interview to BBC News stating that he did not think using the term "victory" in describing the Iraq war was appropriate, saying "This is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade... it's not war with a simple slogan."

Petraeus had discussed the term 'victory' before in March 2008, saying to NPR News that "an Iraq that is at peace with itself, at peace with its neighbors, that has a government that is representative of—and responsive to—its citizenry and is a contributing member of the global community" could arguably be called 'victory'. On the eve of his change of command, in September 2008, Petraeus stated that "I don't use terms like victory or defeat... I'm a realist, not an optimist or a pessimist. And the reality is that there has been significant progress but there are still serious challenges."

Change of command

presents a gift to Petraeus during a farewell ceremony in Baghdad on September 15, 2008.]]

On September 16, 2008, Petraeus formally gave over his command in Iraq to General Raymond T. Odierno in a government ceremony presided by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. This is also illustrated by the Iraq Trends charts that the MNF-I produces weekly. The January 3, 2009, "Iraq Trends Chart" clearly depicts over time, the increases in incidents followed by the sharp decline as described by Dexter Filkens and others.

General Petraeus's critical role in Iraq is widely acknowledged. In a recent introduction of Petraeus at an ROTC commissioning ceremony, June 1, 2010, Princeton President Shirley Tilghman noted that, "Although he has distinguished himself in many roles since receiving his commission as a young West Point cadet in 1974, his 48 months of service in Iraq, including 19 as commanding general, were of historic proportions as he brought comparative stability to a country so riddled with violence that it threatened to disintegrate." Tilghman Princeton OCS Remarks 2010

U.S. Central Command (fall 2008 to summer 2010)

at Saint Anselm College]] On October 31, 2008, Petraeus assumed command of the United States Central Command (USCENTCOM) headquartered in Tampa, Florida. Petraeus was responsible for U.S. operations in 20 countries spreading from Egypt to Pakistan—including Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. During his time at CENTCOM, Petraeus advocated that countering the terrorist threats in the CENTCOM region requires more than just counter-terrorism forces, demanding instead whole-of-governments, comprehensive approaches akin to those of counterinsurgency. Petraeus reiterated this view in a 2009 interview published in Parade magazine. In a recent interview for Newsweek magazine’s "Interview Issue: The View From People Who Make a Difference", Petraeus expressed his support for President Obama’s announced Afghanistan strategy and discussed his view that reconciliation efforts in Afghanistan should for the time being occur "at the lower and midlevels".

In mid-August, 2009, Petraeus established the Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence within the USCENTCOM Directorate of Intelligence to provide leadership to coordinate, integrate and focus analysis efforts in support of operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On March 16, 2010, testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Petraeus described the continuing Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a challenge to U.S. interests in the region. According to the testimony, the conflict was "fomenting anti-American sentiment" due to "a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel." This was widely commented on in the media. When questioned by journalist Philip Klein, Petraeus said the original reporter "picked apart" and "spun" his speech. He believes there are many important factors standing in the way of peace, including “a whole bunch of extremist organizations, some of which by the way deny Israel’s right to exist. There’s a country that has a nuclear program who denies that the Holocaust took place. So again we have all these factors in there. This [Israel] is just one."

In March 2010, Petraeus visited the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College to speak about Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus spoke a few days after the seventh anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, noting the successful changes in Iraq since the U.S. troop surge. The visit to Saint Anselm created rumors that Petraeus was contemplating a run for the Presidency; however, he denied the speculation saying that he was not aware that the college has been the site of numerous presidential debates.

Toward the close of his tenure as CENTCOM Commander, including in his interview published in Vanity Fair, Petraeus discussed the effort to determine and send to Afghanistan the right “inputs” for success there; these inputs include several structures and organizations that proved important in Iraq, including “an engagement cell to support reconciliation…a finance cell to go after financing of the enemy…[a] really robust detainee-operations task force, a rule-of-law task force, an energy-fusion cell—all these other sort of nonstandard missions that are very important.”

On May 7, 2010, Petraeus announced that Times Square bombing suspect, Faisal Shahzad, is a "lone wolf" terrorist who did not work with others. On May 10, 2010, Attorney General Eric Holder said that the evidence shows the Pakistani Taliban directed this plot.

Commander of US and ISAF forces in Afghanistan

speaks with Petraeus aboard a helicopter over Afghanistan in January 2011.]] On June 23, 2010, President Obama announced that he would nominate Petraeus to succeed General Stanley A. McChrystal as the Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan. The change of command was prompted by McChrystal's comments about the Obama administration and its policies in Afghanistan during an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. During the assumption of command remarks, Petraeus provided his vision and goals to NATO, the members of his command, and his Afghan partners. As he was known to do while the Commander in Iraq, Petraeus delivered his first Letter to the Troops on the same day he assumed command.

On August 1, 2010, shortly after the disclosure of the Afghan war logs on Wikileaks, Petraeus issued his updated Tactical Directive for the prevention of civilian casualties, providing guidance and intent for the use of force by the U.S. military units operating in Afghanistan (replacing the July 1, 2009 version). This directive reinforced the concept of "disciplined use of force in partnership with Afghan Security Forces" in the fight against insurgent forces. In the October 2010 issue of Army Magazine, Petraeus discusses changes that have taken place over the last 18 months including: Setting the Conditions for Progress, Capitalizing on the Conditions for Progress, Improving Security, Supporting Governance Expansion, Promoting Economic Development, and discussing how the Troops are Carrying Out a Difficult Mission.

Health problems

General Petraeus was diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer in February 2009 and underwent two months of successful radiation treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The diagnosis and treatment was not publicly disclosed until October 2009 because Petraeus and his family regarded his illness as a personal matter that did not interfere with the performance of his duties.

On June 15, 2010, Petraeus momentarily fainted while being questioned by the Senate Armed Services Committee. He quickly recovered and was able to walk and exit the room without assistance. He attributed the episode to possible dehydration.

Decorations and badges

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Additional recognition of note

Petraeus has garnered numerous accolades in recent years. In 2010, he was named number 12 of 50 people who mattered in 2010 by the New Statesmen magazine, was named a Top Global Thinker of 2010 by Foreign Policy magazine, received the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, the Citadel Business School’s Leader of Principle Award, the AUSA Massachusetts Bay Area Chapter’s Person of the Year Award, HELP USA’s Award for Veterans, Princeton University’s James Madison Medal, the Lotos Club’s Award of Distinction and Medal of Merit, the Pilgrims of the United States’ Medallion for Service to the Nation, the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum's 2010 Intrepid Freedom Award, the Veterans of Foreign Wars Dwight D. Eisenhower Award, and the American Political Science Association's Hubert H. Humphrey Award, November 2010 issue of Foreign Policy, he was named number eight of the "The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers," and the USO Distinguished Service Award. Most recently, he was awarded the George Kennan Award by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. December 9, 2010, Barbara Walters' picked Petraeus for the Most Fascinating Person of 2010. Walters called the top commander in Afghanistan "an American hero." Petraeus was chosen as "one of Time magazine's 50 "People Who Mattered" in December 2010. Early January 2011, Pete Hegseth and Wade Zirkle from Vets for Freedom, wrote an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal making a claim that Petraeus should be promoted to Five-Star which would make him General of the Army In addition, a Facebook page has been dedicated to this effort .

In 2009, he received the Sam M. Gibbons Lifetime Achievement Award, American Legion's Distinguished Service Medal, the Atlantic Council's Military Leadership Award, the Union League Club of Philadelphia's Abraham Lincoln Award, the National Father's Day Committee's Father of the Year Award. Also in 2009, Petraeus received the National Committee on American Foreign Policy's George F. Kennan Award, the National Defense Industrial Association's Eisenhower Award, the Office of Strategic Service Society's William J. Donovan Award, the No Greater Sacrifice Freedom Award, and the Congressional Medal of Honor Society's Distinguished Citizen Award. He was also named as one of the "75 Best People in the World" in the October 2009 issue of Esquire, as well as a Distinguished Member of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment and Honorary President of the 7th Armored Division Association.

In 2008, a poll conducted by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines selected Petraeus as one of the world's top 100 public intellectuals. Also, the Business Executives for National Security awarded Petraeus their 2008 Eisenhower Award. Also in 2008, the Static Line Association named Petraeus as its 2008 Man of the Year, and Der Spiegel named him "America's most respected soldier." As 2008 came to a close, GQ (December 2008) named Petraeus as the "Leader of the Year: Right Man, Right Time", Newsweek named him the 16th most powerful person in the world in its December 20, 2008, edition, and Prospect magazine named him the "Public Intellectual of the Year".

In 2007, Time named Petraeus one of the 100 most influential leaders and revolutionaries of the year as well as one of its four runners up for Time Person of the Year. He was also named the second most influential American conservative by The Daily Telegraph as well as The Daily Telegraph's 2007 Man of the Year. In 2005, Petraeus was selected as one of America's top leaders by US News and World Report.

Speeches and public remarks

"Institutionalizing Change: Transformation in the US Army, 2005-2007,” May 2010.

National Committee on American Foreign Policy George F. Kennan Award Acceptance Remarks. American Foreign Policy Interests, July/August 2009, 31(4).

"The Foreign Policy Interview with Gen. David H. Petraeus," January/February 2009.

Published works

Petraeus, David H. (1983). "What is Wrong with a Nuclear Freeze," Military Review v.63:49-64, November, 1983.

Petraeus, David H. (1984). "Light Infantry in Europe: Strategic Flexibility and Conventional Deterrence," Military Review v.64:33-55, December, 1984.

Petraeus, David H. (1986), "Lessons of history and lessons of Vietnam", Parameters (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College) 16(3): 43-53, Autumn 1986.

.

Clark, Asa A., Kaufman, Daniel J., and Petraeus, David H. (1987). “Why an Army?” Army Magazine v38(2)26-34, February 1987.

Petraeus, David H. (1987). “El Salvador and the Vietnam Analogy,” Armed Force Journal International, February 1987.

.

Golden, James R.; Kaufman, Daniel J.; Clark, Asa A.; Petraeus, David H. (Eds)(1989),"NATO at Forty: Change Continuity, & Prospects". Westview Pr.

. . (2006) "Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq," Military Review (2007) The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Forward)"FM-3-24" (2007) "Beyond the Cloister," The American Interest Magazine .

Petraeus, David H. (2010) "Shoulder to shoulder in Afghanistan," Policy Options, April 2010.

See also

Initial Benchmark Assessment Report

Iraq War troop surge of 2007

MoveOn.org ad controversy

Multinational Force Iraq

Operation Iraqi Freedom

Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq

Notes and references

Further reading

Robinson, Linda (2008). Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq. PublicAffairs. ISBN 978-1586487669.

External links

Graduate Alumni profile at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs

Collected news and commentary at The New York Times

Conversations with David Petraeus on Charlie Rose

Appearances on C-SPAN

;News articles (date sequence)

101st Airborne Scores Success in Reconstruction of Northern Iraq, Michael R. Gordon, The New York Times, September 4, 2003.

In Company of Soldiers, Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn, March 15, 2004.

The Story of O, Christopher Dickey, The New York Times, April 4, 2004.

An Open Mind For A New Army, Julian E. Barnes, U.S. News & World Report, October 31, 2005.

Bush To Name A New General To Oversee Iraq, Michael R. Gordon, The New York Times, January 5, 2006.

Our Man in Iraq, Wesley Morgan, 'The Daily Princetonian'', October 26, 2006.

FM 3-24 New Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Manual, December, 2006, Forward written by LTG David Petraeus.

Leader of the Fabled 101st to Command in Iraq, Tom Bowman, NPR, January 5, 2007.

Iraq Will be Petraeus' Knot to Untie, Rick Atkinson, The Washington Post, January 6, 2007.

Petraeus Takes Reins in Iraq, Wesley Morgan, The Daily Princetonian, January 10, 2007.

Petraeus Faces Tough Road in Iraq, Wesley Morgan, The Daily Princetonian, January 12, 2007.

Petraeus on Vietnam's Legacy, Rachel Dry, The Washington Post, January 14, 2007, excerpts from Petraeus' doctoral dissertation, "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam".

Senate confirms new top general for Iraq, Associated Press, CNN, January 26, 2007.

David and Goliath, and Petraeus, Steven Alvarez, The Orlando Sentinel, January 28, 2007.

US Iraq chief warns of long war, BBC News, July 9, 2007.

Scions of the Surge, Newsweek, March 24, 2008.

Leader of the Year: Right Man, Right Time, Lisa DePaulo, GQ, November, 2008.

The Story of Power, Jon Meacham, Newsweek, December 20, 2008.

An Intellectual Surge, James Crabtree, Prospect Magazine, January 17, 2009.

The Generals' Insurgency: The Story Behind the U.S. Troop Surge in Iraq. Washington Post.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in the Middle East, comes to BYU, Sara Israelsen-Hartley, Deseret News, March 25, 2010.

The Professor of War, Mark Bowden, Vanity Fair, May 2010.

Odznaczenie generała Davida Petraeusa (gallery), President of the Republic of Poland, April 7, 2010. Gen. David Petraeus z wizytą w Polsce (gallery), Ministry of National Defence of the Republic of Poland, April 8, 2010.

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