



The Good War
Why We Couldn't Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
In the earliest years of the war in Afghanistan, after the Taliban fell to an American-led coalition, the fight there appeared to be a triumph—a “good war” in comparison to the debacle in Iraq. Now, thirteen years after it began, it has turned into the longest war in U.S. history, as well as the most profligate; at an estimated $4 to $6 trillion, the final price tag for America’s part in the war in Afghanistan will be higher than that of World War II. And with thousands of coalition servicemen and Afghan civilians having paid for the war with their lives or limbs, the true cost of this futile expedition may never be properly calculated.
As we wind down our combat operations in Afghanistan and slouch toward withdrawal, the time is right for a full accounting of what went wrong. In The Good War, acclaimed author and war correspondent Jack Fairweather goes beyond the battlefield to explore the righteous intentions and stunning hubris that brought the United States and its allies to the verge of defeat in this far-flung theater. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, troves of previously untapped material from Afghan government archives, and months of experience living and reporting in Afghanistan, Fairweather traces the course of the conflict from its inception following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to its steady drawdown during President Obama’s second term, in the process offering a bold reassessment of the war. He describes how the Bush administration came within a hair’s breadth of making peace with the Taliban in 2002. He shows how Afghan opium could have rebuilt the country rather than destroying it. And he provides the most intimate portrait yet of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, arguing that Karzai’s gravest mistake was giving in not to warlords but rather to the international community, which has consistently prevented him from taking the necessary steps to help Afghans seize their own future.
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 Afghan military outposts, from warlords’ palaces to insurgents’ dens, to explain how the US and our allies might have salvaged the Afghan campaign—and how we might rethink other “good” wars in the future.
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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 civilian leadership into escalating the war, the military had strayed into unprecedented and unconstitutional political waters." Maps & b&w photos.