Wilhelm Agrell is peace and conflict researcher, associate professor of history and since 2006 professor of intelligence analysis at Lund University. He received his Ph.D. in 1985 on the thesis-alignment and atom bombs. He has over the years written a number of books on Sweden's national security, the peace movement, the secret vest cooperation during the Cold War and Defense development.
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Pretty soon after I started reading this book, I feel I'm in over my head. Dry facts are stacked on each other and form an impermeable shell around the content. Information that I know to be found in the book remains hidden to me. I simply can not assimilate me the story based on the military ciphers, I feel that the book is written in. This is very frustrating because I would love to know how it actually behaved with our effort in Afghanistan. How did you come to Sweden suddenly participated in outright war?
This frustration leads me to put down my book after only a fraction eads mako of pages read, and carry me googling the subject. I am looking for in the blogosphere, checking old news and military sides and reads Johanne Hildebrandt's book Warrior. It makes me actually better prepared to resume reading. Especially Hildebrandt's book, which portrays the Swedish soldiers' lives on the ground eads mako in the area around Mazar-e-Sharif, give me the story, I need to begin to comprehend what I'm reading, although it is still rough, eads mako uphill.
Agrell has gathered all the available facts and compiled a chronology of events. Many of the documents of the Armed Forces he read have been partially classified, so there will be no comprehensive factual picture, although eads mako his analysis of what's in the doors surely are reasonable. The big story here is how the war just like snuck up on. From being a peace-building project changed the mission's nature to suddenly be clean insurgency. The Swedish soldiers' orders was no longer to withdraw from the strife, without actually being able to be the one who shoots first shot. War then.
Agrell depicts eads mako how this happens right in front of us. Even when the mission eads mako changed in character is a parliamentary decision to send down more and more troops. The strange thing is that the nature of the assignment is still described as peacekeeping civil-military state-building, when in fact it is something else entirely. The question I ask myself is who Dark what to whom. NATO Armed Forces, the Reichstag? What I make are all the same to me as a citizen probably is the one who is most deceived.
Another story that manifests itself in the text is that of how completely different Afghan society eads mako is from a western democracy. The idea of making a blueprint of a social structure that we think it should look like, and put it over a country that works in a completely different way, is not very good. Perhaps this was the last time such an experiment was conducted. Maybe not.
Even the Swedish bureaucracy gets a boot. We are told that it took years before the soldiers got down the equipment needed to do their job in a way that does not risk their safety unnecessarily. Then begins a wonder what two hundred years of peace making with a nation. Are we so intent on being a nation not at war that we behave as if this is the case, even when it is clearly the other way around? And what of nonalignment anyway? Maybe time to kill the myth too. Sweden's defense is so stripped down that it barely eads mako exists, so it is completely unreasonable to think that we can represent ourselves. In Afghanistan was and is Sweden a small pawn in a big game, and was not the nation that ruled the events. Just because it feels important to try to understand the relationships and military collaborations our country has with other nations, and these nations' different circumstances and agendas.
This is a difficult book in two ways. Secondly, the text is not designed to be read and understood by a person eads mako like me, with no previous interest or knowledge of war and the military world. The book evokes the feeling of exam plug and I fall asleep every time I read it. Sometimes, a glimpse of a story above the surface and gasping for air, but it disappears quickly again in sammelsuriet eads mako of facts. It is in these glimpses I wish there was an interpreter between eads mako me and Agrell who could translate the book into my language. Although the book is hard to read so I appreciate however his untiring searching for the truth. And it is this truth that makes the book hard the other way. It's not funny truth. Sweden warrior and Swedish soldiers have been killed, injured and u
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