Book Review: The Good War

The Good War:Why We Couldn't Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistanby Jack FairweatherBasic Books, 2014The publicity chatter for former Washington Post correspondent Jack Fairweather's new book The Good War: Why We Couldn't Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan calls it "a timely lesson in the perils of nation-building and a sobering reminder of the limits of American power," and like almost all publicity chatter, this is almost inexpressibly boring and probably generated well outside any room where Fairweather himself did his writing. It's also inherently overreaching: the history of US military involvement in Afghanistan can't yet be circumscribed as history because it hasn't yet finished being news. The subject is murky and in flux, and although what clarity already attaches to it is the work of correspondents like Fairweather, it's unlikely that any of those reporters will turn out to be the conflict's Thucydides, that rare example of an eyewitness participant whose work is still studied long after all the participants are dead.Fairweather confines himself to a familiar and narratively coherent period, bracketed on the one end by the US and Coalition invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and subsequent expulsion of the Taliban and on the other end the drawing-down of Western forces in 2014, and he concentrates a good deal of his narrative on the vivid personalities involved. He works up a wide variety of dramatic Bob Woodward-style scenes from interviews and memoirs, like the moment on September 13, 2001, when U.S. President George W. Bush receives a grim presentation by CIA Director George Tenet and the CIA's counterterrorism coordinator Cofer Black about the challenges that would be faced in northern Afghanistan by American troops and the Northern Alliance. Bush, Fairweather writes,

looked suitably daunted as he listened to Tenet's presentation that September morning. Black took that as his cue for a little bombast. He leaped from his chair as he started to talk about the coming battle, throwing down markers on the floor to represent the two sides."Mr. President," he said, "we can do this. No doubt in my mind ... But you've got to understand, people are going to die. And the worst part about it, Mr. President, Americans are going to die - my colleagues and my friends.""That's war," Bush said.Black concluded his presentation with a ghoulish claim: "You give us the mission - we can get 'em. When we're through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs," he said.

The greed, violence, and chaos of the country at the height of hostilities broils to the surface of Fairweather's account over and over again. Warlords, bandits, and petty opportunists work to their own ends in a patchwork of antagonism and fretful cooperation with the generals, diplomats, and contractors who descend on the country in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Fairweather makes it clear that nobody in Afghanistan during the period he examines really knew who to trust, and he illustrates this in dozens of moments tense enough to be transplanted directly to some B-level Hollywood movie, as in a fraught moment in May 2007, when Lieutenant Colonel Steve Baker, commander of the 508th Brigade Special Forces Battalion, after five hours of "rambling and sometimes tense negotiations" at a Pakistani border outpost. "Baker's Land Cruiser had just pulled out of the school gates when shots rang out behind him," Fairweather writes,

For a split second, Baker thought it was some local confrontation. Only when he heard the distinctive staccato burst of American M160 rifles in return did he know the situation had gone horribly wrong. "Stop the vehicle," he bellowed at the Pakistani colonel in the front seat. The man ignored him. Baker's Land Cruiser and a second one behind his drove straight past the turn to the helicopter landing zone and down a short slope. Baker took out his pistol. "Stop the fucking vehicle now," he yelled.He was certain they had just avoided a kidnapping.

In addition to presenting a peppery and extremely lucid account of one of the longest and most expensive wars in US history, Fairweather conducts a wry and surprisingly entertaining parallel commentary in his book's End Notes (this is a proper and historical function of textual Notes, though comparatively little used in our bare-bones intellectual culture). When he writes, for instance, about Afghanistan then-President Hamid Karzai's ally Sher Mohammed Akundzada, he digresses in the main text about the man's infamous father:

Sher Mohammed's father, Mullah Nasim, hasd risen to prominence in the 1980s by butchering his clan rivals in the midst of the anti-Soviet resistance and blaming many of their murders on the Russians. At the same time, he had roped his followers into growing poppies, the opium produced from which was used as a palliative for local consumption. Under Mullah Nasim's coercion, poppy-growing shifted from northern Afghanistan's narrow gorges to the rich banks of the Helmand River valley. In 1981, Mullah Nasim even issued a religious decree ordering his men to plant poppies. His efforts were successful for a time, but he was ultimately gunned down by a rival, and his family - including Sher Mohammed - fled to Quetta, Pakistan, once the Taliban showed up.

And he follows this up with a smart End Note:

In 1989, Akhundzada approached the US embassy in Islamabad offering to ban poppy cultivation in exchange for $2 million in development aid. It might have been a smart move: Akhundzada could squeeze Hekmatyar's heroin labs while being paid by the Americans to do it, in the process raising his profile with the superpower at his rival's expense. In the end, though, he made a fatal miscalculation: He still had to drive through Hekmatyar's territory to get to Islamabad.

Fairweather's energy move The Good War compellingly forward despite the dark, looming fact that the book's title is brutally ironic; this is a long and violent story that almost entirely lacks any happy endings or even satisfying outcomes. The book is a fine staging of a rotten play.