The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan

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.)