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Summary
Summary
In its earliest days, the American-led war in Afghanistan appeared to be a triumph--a "good war"--in comparison to the debacle in Iraq. It has since turned into one of the longest and most costly wars in U.S. history. The story of how
this good war went so bad may well turn out to be a defining tragedy of the 21st century--yet as acclaimed war correspondent Jack Fairweather explains, it should also give us reason to hope for an outcome grounded in Afghan reality, rather than our own.
In The Good War, Fairweather provides the first full narrative history of the war in Afghanistan, from its inception after 9/11 to the drawdown in 2014. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, previously unpublished archives, and months of reporting in Afghanistan, Fairweather explores the righteous intentions and astounding hubris that caused the American strategy in Afghanistan to flounder, refuting the long-held notion that the war could have been won with more troops and cash. Fairweather argues that only by accepting the limitations in Afghanistan--from the presence of the Taliban to the ubiquity of the opium trade to the country's unsuitability for rapid, Western-style development--can America help to restore peace in this shattered land.
A timely lesson in the perils of nation-building and a sobering reminder of the limits of American power, The Good War leads readers from the White House situation room to American military outposts, from warlords' palaces to insurgents' dens, to explain how the U.S. and its allies might have salvaged the Afghan campaign--and how we must rethink other "good" wars in the future.
Author Notes
A former foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and the Washington Post, Jack Fairweather won the British Press Award for his reporting on the Iraq invasion and is the author of A War of Choice. Fairweather is currently a Middle East editor and correspondent for Bloomberg News, and he lives in Istanbul with his wife and two daughters.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Unrealistic expectations, inadequate local knowledge, and poor planning doomed the post-2001 allied effort in Afghanistan, argues Fairweather (A War of Choice), a Middle East editor and correspondent for Bloomberg News, who spent time embedded with British forces. Prior to deploying to the area around Kandahar, Fairweather says, "British understanding of the situation didn't extend much further than... vague misgivings and self-assurances," and Americans were hardly better off. Fairweather's richly-narrated history of the conflict is a soft-spoken but scathing indictment of military tactics and lack of preparation. His story takes frequent tragicomic turns, as when a much-heralded Taliban interlocutor presented to Hamid Karzai as a negotiating partner turned out to be a shopkeeper with no connection to terrorists. When the British military's request for funds for additional helicopters was rejected, they purchased them anyway, "using an accounting sleight of hand" that was immediately detected by then-chancellor Gordon Brown. Now, with the war winding down, Afghanistan is left with a badly fractured political system and a government unable to secure large areas of the country. Fairweather's central point is that hubris and arrogance led the U.S. military into dangerous territory abroad as well as domestically: "By pushing [America's] civilian leadership into escalating the war, the military had strayed into unprecedented-and unconstitutional-political waters." Maps & b&w photos. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A reconsideration of "how the world's most powerful leaders plotted to build a new kind of nation in Afghanistan that was pure fantasy." Bloomberg News Middle East editor and correspondent Fairweather (War of Choice: The British in Iraq 2003-9, 2011) finds American navet and confusion of purpose at the crux of what went wrong in the war in Afghanistan. The original defeat of the Taliban in 2001 was almost too swift to be true, and early on, President George W. Bush insisted that the United States was "not into nation-building; we are focused on justice." Then, the U.S. shifted the focus to Iraq, allowing the Afghan warlords to duke it out, especially the opportunistic, CIA-backed Hamid Karzai. As the Taliban began to creep back in and the provinces fell into anarchy and opium-growing (once quelled under the austere Taliban), the American administration underwent a philosophical shift. With Iraq then in tatters, a humanitarian aim of rebuilding the country took over. Yet corruption skimmed the aid money, and U.S. engineering firms had little knowledge of the local environment, and there was virtually no oversight. The creation of a series of Provincial Reconstruction Teams was an attempt to tie local tribal connections to a central authority, and some of Karzai's appointed governors were removedHelmand's Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, who was overseeing a vast, lucrative opium-growing network. The clamor for more money and more troops became the recurrent cri de coeur, drowning out sounder arguments, including that of British ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles, who called for more tribal engagement and negotiations with the Taliban. While the efforts to commit Afghan children to education were successful, the miserable litany of IEDs, troop surge, counterinsurgency, fraudulent elections, runaway generals, drone strikes and immense waste underscores what Fairweather calls the "futility of force." A thorough, elegant reassessment of America's "irresistible illusion." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice Review
In this well-written book, Fairweather (Bloomberg News) explores the good intentions of those who initiated and then prosecuted the US-Afghanistan war, yet he continually finds himself having to explain why so little good was done in spite of them. He does discuss the shortcomings of leaders at many levels, structural disharmonies such as the ambiguous role of Pakistan, and military-civilian conflicts, but he implies that the root of failure lies in hubris--a modernizing, democratic Afghanistan was never in the power of the US and its allies to produce. Yet even casual readers can find other reasons this far-from-good war inflicted disaster on so many, ranging from intra-NATO conflicts and the lack of fit between strategies that appeared to have worked elsewhere (such as "the surge") to ineffective leadership and personal and institutional careerism. Corruption is addressed but not its systemic pervasiveness from Washington on down. The author's reluctance to grasp the nettles of political, structural, and moral failure opens space for readers to come to their own conclusions about the events he describes, making this book useful for policy makers, as well as in the classroom. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers; upper-division undergraduates and above. --Mary Ann Tetreault, Trinity University
Library Journal Review
The "Good War" was launched in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, initially an effort to eradicate the al-Qa'eda terrorist networks, and soon a commitment to nation building. Experienced foreign correspondent Fairweather (A War of Choice) provides a detailed narrative of the expanding military, diplomatic, and development campaigns, characterized by shifting priorities, ignorance of the people the United States was trying to help, and arrogance that prolonged the war over more than 12 years at a huge cost in wasted resources and human lives. Fairweather summarizes contemporary accounts and extensive interviews with American and NATO officers and diplomats as well as Afghani leaders, including former president Hamid Karzai, to convey a tragic contrast between idealistic aims and the reality that overwhelming U.S. force cannot stabilize a distant society. He recounts repeated military campaigns and diplomatic initiatives that were unsuccessful because of the American failure to form clear strategic goals or coordinate political, military, and development activities. VERDICT Recommended for all Americans who want to understand more than a dozen years of an American war in Afghanistan, poorly conceived or understood by the public or its leaders. Fairweather offers a knowledgeable argument for a more careful and thoughtful response to a complex and dangerous world in which terrorists threaten the stability of many weak societies.-Elizabeth Hayford, formerly with Associated Coll. of the Midwest, Evanston, IL (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Note on Text | p. xiii |
Prologue The Mask of Anarchy | p. xv |
Part I The Missing Peace 2001-2003 | p. 1 |
Chapter 1 The Wrong Kind of War | p. 3 |
Chapter 2 Bloody Hell | p. 10 |
Chapter 3 Good Taliban | p. 20 |
Chapter 4 The Man Who Would Be King | p. 29 |
Chapter 5 At the Gates | p. 47 |
Chapter 6 Warlords | p. 54 |
Chapter 7 National Solidarity | p. 61 |
Chapter 8 A Convenient Drug | p. 75 |
Chapter 9 Homecoming | p. 82 |
Part II Dangerous Alliance 2004-2007 | p. 91 |
Chapter 10 Imperial Vision | p. 93 |
Chapter 11 PRTs | p. 102 |
Chapter 12 A Special Relationship | p. 115 |
Chapter 13 Eradication | p. 125 |
Chapter 14 Friendly Advice | p. 133 |
Chapter 15 Fly-Fishing in the Hindu Kush | p. 146 |
Chapter 16 A New War | p. 155 |
Chapter 17 Medusa | p. 164 |
Chapter 18 Bad Guests | p. 175 |
Chapter 19 All the Way | p. 186 |
Chapter 20 Salam | p. 198 |
Part III The Blood Price 2009-2014 | p. 207 |
Chapter 21 An Education | p. 209 |
Chapter 22 The Switch | p. 222 |
Chapter 23 Ghosts | p. 236 |
Chapter 24 A Cruel Summer | p. 248 |
Chapter 25 Elections | p. 263 |
Chapter 26 Political Expediency | p. 280 |
Chapter 27 A Reckoning | p. 291 |
Chapter 28 The Futility of Force | p. 298 |
Chapter 29 Endgame | p. 311 |
Containment | p. 326 |
Acknowledgments | p. 335 |
Notes | p. 337 |
Bibliography | p. 375 |
Index | p. 381 |