Wrong Turn
America's Deadly Embrace of Counter-Insurgency
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A searing indictment of US strategy in Afghanistan from a distinguished military leader and West Point military historian—“A remarkable book” (National Review).
In 2008, Col. Gian Gentile exposed a growing rift among military intellectuals with an article titled “Misreading the Surge Threatens U.S. Army’s Conventional Capabilities,” that appeared in World Politics Review. While the years of US strategy in Afghanistan had been dominated by the doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN), Gentile and a small group of dissident officers and defense analysts began to question the necessity and efficacy of COIN—essentially armed nation-building—in achieving the United States’ limited core policy objective in Afghanistan: the destruction of Al Qaeda.
Drawing both on the author’s experiences as a combat battalion commander in the Iraq War and his research into the application of counterinsurgency in a variety of historical contexts, Wrong Turn is a brilliant summation of Gentile’s views of the failures of COIN, as well as a trenchant reevaluation of US operations in Afghanistan.
“Gentile is convinced that Obama’s ‘surge’ in Afghanistan can’t work. . . . And, if Afghanistan doesn’t turn around soon, the Democrats . . . who have come to embrace the Petraeus-Nagl view of modern warfare . . . may find themselves wondering whether it’s time to go back to the drawing board.” —The New Republic
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 2006, after five years as a warzone, Iraq was descending into chaos. But then General David Petraeus arrived, adopted counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics, and ended the war. That's the official story, but according to Gentile (a former Iraq War commander and current director of West Point's military history program), it didn't really happen that way. In this vivid and astute polemic, Gentile argues that the U.S. military's appropriation of COIN, a strategy with a long and fraught history, as the author explains, was a dangerously misguided attempt "to refight the Vietnam War but this time in Iraq." COIN, in Gentile's estimation, is little more than "a recipe for perpetual war." In fact, he argues that the conflict in Iraq was settled not by Petraeus's use of COIN; rather, the violence subsided when Sunni insurgents turned against al-Qaeda, and Shia factions quit fighting one another. Yet that hasn't stopped the powers that be from implementing COIN in the Afghan theater. Gentile ultimately offers a sobering warning if we refuse to learn from the failures of COIN and end our foolish belief in savior generals, we are "doomed to repeat the same mistakes for a long, long time." This should be required reading for military scholars and active soldiers.
