latest books
Nov. 11th, 2012 01:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerLittle America by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (32)
An excellent but rather depressing work on the war in Afghanistan. Chandrasekaran begins the book by talking about the projects funded by the US in the late 1940s and 1950s that sought to develop agriculture and infrastructure in Afghanistan, including a model town where Afghan and US contractors working on the projects lived a Mad Men-style life, a town that Afghans called "Little America". While this part of the story is fascinating, it's just foreshadowing; most of the book is about the current war, as seen through the eyes of Marines, soldiers, US State Department and US AID workers, US civilian and military leaders, and countless Afghans, from senior government officials to day laborers who Chandrasekaran interviewed in his years spent covering the war. It's depressing, not because the US didn't put out enough effort (which sometimes we didn't, but mostly we did) or because we had bad ideas or foolish people in charge of policy or implementation (which were occasionally true but not normally the rule). It's depressing because people who were usually very smart, very dedicated, and often had all the resources they needed either didn't agree, or didn't have a clear enough view of the war at ground level, or had to react to too many competing priorities to be able to develop and thoroughly implement a coherent and effective policy.
Chandrasekaran's central contention is that we did not devote the right resources in the right way at the right time to achieve the effects we wanted, but that all of those were possible at different times.Conflict over CT vs. COIN, over Afghanistan vs. Iraq, over some of the larger than life personalities involved in policy formulation in Washington, and the Obama administration's insistence on setting timelines for disengagement have ultimately doomed US attempts to implement the COIN and stabilize the country. None of these are helped by the seeming difficulty of finding stable, credible, Afghan leaders at the national, provincial, and subprovincial level. After 30+ years of war, the Afghan leaders who can actually implement and sustain civil society are not most of them people whom the US is comfortable dealing with, and those whom the US is comfortable dealing with usually do not have the strength and connections to implement policy.
On top of these US-Afghan problems were Blue on Blue conflicts that would have been enough to derail most efforts on their own. The US Marine's insistence on operating almost as an entirely separate national army in ISAF created immense problems for overall strategy, despite the fact that once the Marines moved into an area they were among the most effective forces in establishing and maintaining stability, through hard work and constant steadfastness even in the face of severe losses. The conflict between Richard Holbrooke and (essentially) the entire rest of the US foreign policy community made it nearly impossible for this brilliant man, who understood Afghanistan better than perhaps anyone else at his level in government, to thoroughly implement the plans he made. Holbrooke, as portrayed here, was his own worst enemy--abrasive, iconoclastic, combative. Likewise the intransigence of USAID, which decided early on to oppose one of the few agricultural programs that could have replaced poppy cultivation on a widespread scale, purely on the basis of partisan political theory and in the face of countless experienced AID, State, and private Afghan hands, crushed one hope for creating a viable agricultural economy not based on heroin (and, incidentally, fixing the broken system of farming and irrigation that America had tried to create in the 1950s, only to leave half-finished and nonfunctional when US workers left at the beginning of the civil war). And, to round out the program of US incompetence, the vast number of civil service staffers sent out to Afghanistan who were either incompetent, disengaged, or entirely misused seems to have been staggering. One story, of a smart and capable American who knew Central Asia well, who fought hard to get an appointment as an AID officer, went through over a year of vetting and pointless, pro-forma training, only to be stuck in a cubicle in the embassy in Kabul, her field experience largely ignored, is enough to make you cry.
We got involved in Afghanistan a long time ago (I remember my dad telling me stories about how, when he was in the US Air Force after World War Two, he spent some time in Kabul, where the US was building an airfield). We didn't do a good job then, and then we left when Zahir Shah was overthrown. Then we used Afghanistan as a pawn in the Cold War, and again left it broken and bleeding, a prey to bandits and thugs, once we had wounded the Soviet Union sufficiently. Now we've spent over ten years occupying it and trying to create stability out of the chaos we helped create over the previous half century. And it looks as if we're going to throw up our hands and leave it yet again, weak, unstable, and at the mercy of factions we've created and armed and can't control.
One of the bitterest memories of growing up is watching the news about the war in Vietnam and seeing us depart, in the end, leaving behind so many people who had been either our allies or at least our dependents, people whose lives we had promised to make better, who in the end we had only harmed. One of the reasons I studied international relations in college and tried to achieve a diplomatic career afterwards was to play a role in seeing we didn't make that sort of mistake again. I was never able to build that career, and instead have spent most of my working life watching foreign affairs from the sidelines while I did other jobs. I'm sorry I never had that career, but I can't say I'm sorry to have had no role in Afghanistan. I can only imagine how bitter and depressing it must be for those who worked, who fought, who sacrificed, who lost friends and comrades and family, to see it all begin to wind down as it is now, seeing all the potentialities we've missed, how much blood and toil and gold we've poured in, often so badly and so blindly, to so little effect. I wish the Afghans well, but I wonder if we've done anything, anything at all, but make their lives harder.
Dolly and the Bird of Paradise by Dorothy Dunnett (33): Another Johnson Johnson mystery. Another unsuspecting (but capable) young woman encounters JJ, the yachting, portrait-painting intelligence officer and becomes involved in one of his cases. High life, sailing misadventures, murders, and an unexpected (almost unprecedented) glimpse into Johnson's personal life ensure. Of all JJ's appearances, it is here, I think, that he reminds me the most of Francis Crawford. Like all these novels, it comes with a recommendation; just remember that while her detective novels are not as ornately complex and footnoted as Dunnett's historical novels, they're not brain candy--there's plot within plot, and few things are straightforward or, indeed, ever clearly spelled out. Read this when you're awake and clear-headed to get the most out of it.
In progress:
Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War Against the Taliban by Stephen Tanner
The Interpreter by Robert Moss
Boer Commando by Denneys Reitz
In the Skies of Nomonhan by Dimitar Nedialkov
The Fort by Bernard Cornwell
Through a Howling Wilderness: Benedict Arnold's March to Quebec, 1775 by Thomas Desjardins
The Western Front: Ordinary Soldiers and the Defining Battles of World War I by Richard Holmes
Knights of the Cross; or, Krzyzacy by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Tales of Terror and Mystery by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
An excellent but rather depressing work on the war in Afghanistan. Chandrasekaran begins the book by talking about the projects funded by the US in the late 1940s and 1950s that sought to develop agriculture and infrastructure in Afghanistan, including a model town where Afghan and US contractors working on the projects lived a Mad Men-style life, a town that Afghans called "Little America". While this part of the story is fascinating, it's just foreshadowing; most of the book is about the current war, as seen through the eyes of Marines, soldiers, US State Department and US AID workers, US civilian and military leaders, and countless Afghans, from senior government officials to day laborers who Chandrasekaran interviewed in his years spent covering the war. It's depressing, not because the US didn't put out enough effort (which sometimes we didn't, but mostly we did) or because we had bad ideas or foolish people in charge of policy or implementation (which were occasionally true but not normally the rule). It's depressing because people who were usually very smart, very dedicated, and often had all the resources they needed either didn't agree, or didn't have a clear enough view of the war at ground level, or had to react to too many competing priorities to be able to develop and thoroughly implement a coherent and effective policy.
Chandrasekaran's central contention is that we did not devote the right resources in the right way at the right time to achieve the effects we wanted, but that all of those were possible at different times.Conflict over CT vs. COIN, over Afghanistan vs. Iraq, over some of the larger than life personalities involved in policy formulation in Washington, and the Obama administration's insistence on setting timelines for disengagement have ultimately doomed US attempts to implement the COIN and stabilize the country. None of these are helped by the seeming difficulty of finding stable, credible, Afghan leaders at the national, provincial, and subprovincial level. After 30+ years of war, the Afghan leaders who can actually implement and sustain civil society are not most of them people whom the US is comfortable dealing with, and those whom the US is comfortable dealing with usually do not have the strength and connections to implement policy.
On top of these US-Afghan problems were Blue on Blue conflicts that would have been enough to derail most efforts on their own. The US Marine's insistence on operating almost as an entirely separate national army in ISAF created immense problems for overall strategy, despite the fact that once the Marines moved into an area they were among the most effective forces in establishing and maintaining stability, through hard work and constant steadfastness even in the face of severe losses. The conflict between Richard Holbrooke and (essentially) the entire rest of the US foreign policy community made it nearly impossible for this brilliant man, who understood Afghanistan better than perhaps anyone else at his level in government, to thoroughly implement the plans he made. Holbrooke, as portrayed here, was his own worst enemy--abrasive, iconoclastic, combative. Likewise the intransigence of USAID, which decided early on to oppose one of the few agricultural programs that could have replaced poppy cultivation on a widespread scale, purely on the basis of partisan political theory and in the face of countless experienced AID, State, and private Afghan hands, crushed one hope for creating a viable agricultural economy not based on heroin (and, incidentally, fixing the broken system of farming and irrigation that America had tried to create in the 1950s, only to leave half-finished and nonfunctional when US workers left at the beginning of the civil war). And, to round out the program of US incompetence, the vast number of civil service staffers sent out to Afghanistan who were either incompetent, disengaged, or entirely misused seems to have been staggering. One story, of a smart and capable American who knew Central Asia well, who fought hard to get an appointment as an AID officer, went through over a year of vetting and pointless, pro-forma training, only to be stuck in a cubicle in the embassy in Kabul, her field experience largely ignored, is enough to make you cry.
We got involved in Afghanistan a long time ago (I remember my dad telling me stories about how, when he was in the US Air Force after World War Two, he spent some time in Kabul, where the US was building an airfield). We didn't do a good job then, and then we left when Zahir Shah was overthrown. Then we used Afghanistan as a pawn in the Cold War, and again left it broken and bleeding, a prey to bandits and thugs, once we had wounded the Soviet Union sufficiently. Now we've spent over ten years occupying it and trying to create stability out of the chaos we helped create over the previous half century. And it looks as if we're going to throw up our hands and leave it yet again, weak, unstable, and at the mercy of factions we've created and armed and can't control.
One of the bitterest memories of growing up is watching the news about the war in Vietnam and seeing us depart, in the end, leaving behind so many people who had been either our allies or at least our dependents, people whose lives we had promised to make better, who in the end we had only harmed. One of the reasons I studied international relations in college and tried to achieve a diplomatic career afterwards was to play a role in seeing we didn't make that sort of mistake again. I was never able to build that career, and instead have spent most of my working life watching foreign affairs from the sidelines while I did other jobs. I'm sorry I never had that career, but I can't say I'm sorry to have had no role in Afghanistan. I can only imagine how bitter and depressing it must be for those who worked, who fought, who sacrificed, who lost friends and comrades and family, to see it all begin to wind down as it is now, seeing all the potentialities we've missed, how much blood and toil and gold we've poured in, often so badly and so blindly, to so little effect. I wish the Afghans well, but I wonder if we've done anything, anything at all, but make their lives harder.
Dolly and the Bird of Paradise by Dorothy Dunnett (33): Another Johnson Johnson mystery. Another unsuspecting (but capable) young woman encounters JJ, the yachting, portrait-painting intelligence officer and becomes involved in one of his cases. High life, sailing misadventures, murders, and an unexpected (almost unprecedented) glimpse into Johnson's personal life ensure. Of all JJ's appearances, it is here, I think, that he reminds me the most of Francis Crawford. Like all these novels, it comes with a recommendation; just remember that while her detective novels are not as ornately complex and footnoted as Dunnett's historical novels, they're not brain candy--there's plot within plot, and few things are straightforward or, indeed, ever clearly spelled out. Read this when you're awake and clear-headed to get the most out of it.
In progress:
Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War Against the Taliban by Stephen Tanner
The Interpreter by Robert Moss
Boer Commando by Denneys Reitz
In the Skies of Nomonhan by Dimitar Nedialkov
The Fort by Bernard Cornwell
Through a Howling Wilderness: Benedict Arnold's March to Quebec, 1775 by Thomas Desjardins
The Western Front: Ordinary Soldiers and the Defining Battles of World War I by Richard Holmes
Knights of the Cross; or, Krzyzacy by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Tales of Terror and Mystery by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
