by Jack Fairweather ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 2014
A thorough, elegant reassessment of America’s “irresistible illusion.”
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 naïveté 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 removed—Helmand’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.”Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0465044955
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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by Stephen E. Ambrose ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 15, 1996
In a splendid retelling of a great story, Ambrose chronicles Lewis and Clark's epic 1803-06 journey across the continent and back. Thomas Jefferson, more than anyone else, helped to effect the dream of a transcontinental US. As noted historian Ambrose (Univ. of New Orleans; D-Day, 1994, etc.) recounts, Jefferson's first great accomplishment in this regard was the Louisiana Purchase. His second was the dispatching of a US Army "Corps of Discovery" under his neighbor and friend, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to travel by land to the Pacific Ocean in search of a waterway to the West. Lewis, partner William Clark, and their 30-man expeditionary force recorded hundreds of species of birds, plants, and animals not previously known to Western science; mapped the interiors of the country; established ties with Indian tribes of the Northern Plains and the Northwest; and set the stage for the exploitation of the western country, particularly in the fur trade. Also, by Ambrose's account, Lewis and Clark's well-meaning ignorance and diplomatic maladroitness set the tone for early American relationships with Native Americans. Despite their close relationships with some Indians, Lewis and Clark persisted in absurd beliefs about them, some of which were subscribed to by Jefferson, as well (e.g., that Indians were descendants of a long-lost tribe of Welshmen). Although the expedition was a great success and fame and fortune followed, Lewis, now drinking heavily and suffering setbacks in love and politics, fell into a deep depression and committed suicide in 1809. The author speculates that he might have considered his great expedition a failure because the land remained unexploited by Americans. A fascinating glimpse of a pristine, vanished America and the beginning of the great and tragic conquest of the West.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81107-3
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | WORLD | MILITARY | HISTORY
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SEEN & HEARD
by John Lewis Gaddis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2002
Provocative, polymathic, pleasurable. (Illustrations throughout)
Entertaining, masterful disquisition on the aims, limitations, design, and methods of historiography.
Gaddis (Military and Naval History/Yale; We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, 1997) adapts the lectures he gave at Oxford while its George Eastman Visiting Professor (2000–01). Employing a wide range of metaphors (from Cleopatra’s nose to Napoleon’s underwear), displaying an extensive knowledge of current thinking in mathematics, physics, and evolutionary biology, alluding frequently to figures as disparate as Lee Harvey Oswald, Gwyneth Paltrow, John Lennon, and John Malkovich, Gaddis guides us on a genial trip into the historical method and the imagination that informs it. He begins by showing the relationship between a cartographer and a historian, asserting that the latter must “interpret the past for the purposes of the present with a view to managing the future.” He also takes us through a set of principles he believes historians must employ and reminds us that the imagination of the historian must always be tethered to reliable sources. He takes on social scientists (especially economists), observing that as they attempt to become more “scientific” (establishing laws, making accurate predictions), they move in the opposite direction of today’s “hard” scientists: “When social scientists are right, they too often confirm the obvious.” Gaddis moves to a discussion of variables (declaring irrelevant the distinction between “independent” and “dependent”: “interdependent,” he says, is the more accurate term), examines chaos theory and explores theories of causation. He ends with an intriguing discussion of the role of the biographer, insisting that historians retain a moral view of events, and with a reminder that they must necessarily distort even as they clarify. Historians, like teachers, he says, both oppress and liberate.
Provocative, polymathic, pleasurable. (Illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-19-506652-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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