Author Douglas Wissing discusses book, Funding the Enemy: How US Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban, Monday, July 2, 7 PM

Join author Douglas Wissing as he discusses his new book, Funding the Enemy: How US Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban, on Monday, July 2, 7 PM, in the Library's Meeting Room.

During Wissing's research and fieldwork in Afghanistan's war zones, a drumbeat of off-the-record and offhand remarks pointed him to one conclusion: "We blew it." The sentiment was even blazoned across the US military's fortifications, as Wissing saw at Forward Operating Base Mehtar Lam in insurgency-wracked Laghman Province: "I glanced over at a concrete blast barrier while waiting for a helicopter," Wissing says. "Someone had spray-painted in jagged letters: 'The GAME. You Lost It.'"

This is the first book to detail the toxic embrace between American policymakers and careerists, Afghan kleptocrats and opportunistic Taliban.

"Douglas Wissing's book Funding the Enemy is a sobering account of the attempts by several US administrations to both wage war in and provide aid to Afghanistan, often with confusing and contradictory results. Backed by extensive interviews as well as on-the-ground embedded-reporter experience, the book illustrates the nearly impossible task of nation-building in a country with a long history of factional friction and transactional corruption." --Lee H. Hamilton, former Indiana congressman and co-chair of the Iraq Study Group

Photo: A Khost Province tribal elder listens to the Americans soldiers’ development proposal as a younger tribal leader sits in the shadow. (Photo by Douglas Wissing)