The American War in Afghanistan: A History
book about American War in Afghanistan
The American War in Afghanistan: A History is a nonfiction historical account of the United States war in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2020. It was written by Carter Malkasian and published in 2021 by Oxford University Press. In 2022 the author received the Lionel Gelber Prize for this book.
Themes
This book is a comprehensive history of the war, arguing that one of the primary reasons for the Taliban's success was their deep connection to the religious and social identity of Afghanistan, and that the inability of the American-supported Afghan government to attract popular support and retain control of the country was due to Afghans’ viewing the American military as a foreign occupying power, writing, "The very presence of Americans in Afghanistan trod on what it meant to be Afghan… Any Afghan government, however good, however democratic, was going to be imperiled as long as it was aligned with the United States."
See also
Robert Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Yale University Press, 2000.
Summers, Harry G, Jr. On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Presidio Press, 1982
Republican insurgency in Afghanistan
Afghanistan conflict (1978–present)
References
External links
Official website
Oxford Scholarship Online
Book review. Publishers Weekly.
ISBN 9780197550779
A Conversation with Carter Malkasian regarding this book. Video.
The public source identifies “The American War in Afghanistan: A History” as book about American War in Afghanistan. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around American, Afghanistan and History.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “The American War in Afghanistan: A History”, the useful work is to connect “book about American War in Afghanistan” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q112968173. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001, 2020, 2021 and 2022.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
- Identifying works and editions
- Tracing reception history
- Finding collection records
The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “The American War in Afghanistan: A History”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow The American War in Afghanistan: A History primary sources, The American War in Afghanistan: A History archive and American research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “The American War in Afghanistan: A History”?
- Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
- How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “The American War in Afghanistan: A History” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.