Includes bibliographical references.

Introduction / Nick Turse -- Armageddon at the top of the world ...not!: a century of frenzy over the North-West Frontier / Juan Cole -- The familiar road to failure / Rodric Braithwaite -- Afghanistan, Gorky, and an open letter to Leonid Brezhnev, 1980 / Andrei Sakharov -- We were waging war against a people / Oleg Vasilevich Kustov -- Abolish the CIA! / Chalmers Johnson -- Mirage of the good war / Tariq Ali -- Chaos central / Chris Sands -- Meet the Afghan Army: is it a figment of Washington's imagination? / Ann Jones -- Paying off the warlords: anatomy of a culture of corruption / Pratap Chatterjee -- How the US funds the Taliban / Aram Roston -- Remember the women? / Ann Jones -- The US government has never supported democratic organizations / Elsa Rassbach interviews Zoya of the Foreign Committee of RAWA -- Going for broke: six ways the Af-Pak war is expanding / Tom Engelhardt -- The shadow war: making sense of the new CIA battlefield / Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse -- The 700 military bases of Afghanistan: black sites in the empire of bases / Nick Turse -- How hearts and minds were lost: a personal experience working with the international military / Zabih Farhad (pseudonym) -- All foreign troops must withdraw / Dominique Bari interviews Latif Pedram -- No nation can liberate another / Malalai Joya -- What Obama could learn from Gorbachev / Robert Crews -- Obama's policies make the situation worse / Graham Fuller -- The war we can't win: the limits of American power / Andrew J. Bacevich -- How to get out / Robert Dreyfuss.