Oral history of war in Afghanistan, writer resigns

Finally, after more than two years of challenge over a dispute in publishing the book “An Intimate War” in Britain, a captain in the British Territorial Army and the book’s writer resigned of his post in order to publish his critical oral history book about the presence of the US and British forces in Afghanistan’s war free from the pressures of the British defense ministry. Dr Mike Martin had been locked in a battle with the Ministry of Defence to publish his study after it commissioned him to write a PhD thesis on the recent history of Helmand.

Completed in February 2013, the author assumed it had been publicly available at King’s College Library ever since, but a librarian confirmed it has never received the work and the thesis is currently unavailable to the public. The book presents a bleak picture of British and American involvement, claiming that troops failed to grasp that it was primarily a tribal civil war. "This meant that we often made the conflict worse, rather than better," Martin wrote. Dr Mike Martin said it took three years from their deployment to Helmand in May 2006 for British forces to finally move away from attacks and airstrikes that left areas “devastated” with high civilian casualties. He also criticized the Army for being completely unaware of the historical animosity felt by the local population towards their former colonial masters.

 
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