Page 1 of 2 Writers refuse to face horrors of Afghan war
By Nick Turse
Quick - name the five most important, influential, and best-known books on the
Afghan war. Okay, name three. Okay, I'll settle for two. How about one?
While the American war in Vietnam raged, publishers churned out books whose
titles still resonate. In 1967 alone, classics like Mary McCarthy's Vietnam,
Howard Zinn's Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, Thich Nhat Hanh's Vietnam:
Lotus in a Sea of Fire, not to mention Norman Mailer's Why Are We in
Vietnam: A Novel all hit the shelves.
In fact, between 1962 and 1970, as American involvement in the conflict
accelerated and peaked, some 9,430 books were written about the Vietnam War.
From 2002 to 2010, less than half as
many - 4,221 texts of all types - have been written about the Afghan war.
It didn't help that, from 2003-2008, the Iraq War sucked up all the attention
and left Afghanistan largely "forgotten", analytically and otherwise, nor did
it help that the Afghan war never had a significant antiwar movement.
The vibrant, large-scale movement of the Vietnam years, filled with people
eager to learn more about just what they were protesting, proved an engine that
drove publishers. Significant numbers of books produced by and for members of
that movement investigated aspects of the civilian suffering the American war
brought to Indochina. Not surprisingly, the Afghan war has produced many fewer
works on the conflict's human fallout, and books like Zinn's, calling for
withdrawal, have been few and far between.
Four decades ago, a stream of books was being produced for popular audiences
that exposed the nature of war making and focused readers' attention on the
misery caused by US military actions abroad. Today, a startling percentage of
the authors who bother to focus on the current conflict are producing works
dedicated to waging the seemingly endless American war in Afghanistan better.
Pentagon reading lists
Just recently, the Pentagon put a book focused on the Afghan war, Operation Dark
Heart by Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer, on the bestseller list. No
mean feat in itself. The initial version of Shaffer's book, vetted and cleared
for release by his Army Reserve chain of command, was already in print and
about to head for local bookstores when the Pentagon got cold feet about
letting the man who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency's operations out of
Afghanistan's Bagram air field in 2003-2004 have his say.
At a cost of almost US$50,000 taxpayer dollars, the Defense Department promptly
reached an agreement with Shaffer and his publisher to buy up and then destroy
most of that print run - about 9,500 copies. The resulting publicity from the
military's official book-burning vaulted a newly redacted version to number one
on Amazon.com's bestseller list and, according to Army Times, "a week after
going on sale, it was on its third reprint with 50,000 copies sold or on sale."
Operation Dark Heart's path to prominence may have been atypical, but
when it comes to books on the Afghan war, the Pentagon has driven sales and
shaped the market in other powerful ways. For one thing, the war has produced a
plethora of professional military reading lists populated by books designed to
help officers and enlisted personnel become educated in the hottest subject in
military affairs: counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine - the same disastrous form
of warfare that, in the Vietnam years, indirectly produced so many books for
antiwar reading lists.
Take the "Commander's Counter-Insurgency Reading List" from the US Army's
Combined Arms Center. It contains seven key texts, most of them classic works,
including The Evolution of a Revolt by T E Lawrence (of Arabia), but its
"additional readings" contain newer faves like retired army colonel and COIN
uber-cheerleader John Nagl's 2002 text, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife:
Counter-Insurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. Similarly, a
pre-deployment reading list for Army personnel shipping out to Afghanistan
breaks down selections by rank, assigning privates a series of texts, including Taliban:
Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid,
while their colonels are told to read Nagl's book, among other works.
"Today's military thinker must appreciate the many dimensions - political,
environmental, economic, informational, and others - that comprise
international security," said Air Force chief of staff General Norton Schwartz
in July, marking the latest of his office's quarterly recommendations of books
to read. Among the selections was former Australian infantry officer and
counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen's 2009 offering, The Accidental
Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One, which also
appeared on this year's US Army War College's suggested military reading list.
But don't think this is strictly a military phenomenon. Nagl's and Kilcullen's
works and others like them, focused on enhancing war-fighting capabilities, not
stirring debate on the wisdom or morality of the war in question or war-making
in general, are increasingly being sold to civilian audiences, too. In recent
years, newspapers and magazines have done their part in publicizing selections
from such military reading lists and from military or former military figures.
The process, involving articles, positive book reviews, op-ed opportunities, as
well as raves from pundits and commentators, can now transform even a once
little-noticed Pentagon-approved tract into a must-read for the book-buying
public.
Confessions of a COINdinista
With the career implosion of General Stanley McChrystal this past summer,
Kilcullen became America's second foremost "COINdinista" - as advocates of
counter-insurgency warfare are now called.
Numero uno, of course, is General David Petraeus, who first dusted off
Vietnam's counter-insurgency doctrine, long discarded by the US military, and
made it gleam in a 2006 manual produced for the Army and Marines. It even got
its own trade edition complete with a foreword co-authored by none other than,
you guessed it, Petraeus himself. He then employed Kilcullen, who was (like
Nagl) one of the field manual's many co-authors, as his senior
counter-insurgency advisor while he commanded the Multinational Force in Iraq
in 2007. Today, Kilcullen serves as the president and chief executive officer
of Caerus, a private consulting firm that sells advice to those operating in
areas in crisis, like war and disaster zones.
This year, Kilcullen has a new book out. Its one-word title could hardly be
more sweeping: Counter-Insurgency. No ifs, ands, or buts about it, even
though, as the author immediately informs readers, the book is simply "a
snapshot of wartime thinking", a collection of new and previously published
selections "written mainly in the field during the conflicts in Iraq and
Afghanistan". In reality, the COIN guru's latest offering is yet another
manual, complete with rounded corners and an easy-to-grip, beveled "tough
cover," designed to be tossed into a rucksack and taken to war - or simply
meant to thrill a certain class of armchair COINdinistas.
No one reading this book or his previous one can doubt Kilcullen is smart, even
if quite a few of his observations come across as anything but. Cases in point
are some of his "28 Articles" (a reference to T E Lawrence's famed "27
Articles" on waging an insurgency, a title choice which manages to imply that
Kilcullen is the new Lawrence of ... well, the Greater Middle East). These
fundamentals for company-level counter-insurgency, distributed on-line ad
infinitum by the COIN community, have already become very influential within
the US military.
Here's a little sample: "Be prepared for setbacks." No shit. "Have a game
plan." Ditto. "Rank is nothing: talent is everything." All right already. You
get the idea.
While America does send mere boys into combat, one hopes the slightly older
boys leading them would have already discovered many of these truths. Likely as
not, military fans have embraced Kilcullen's 27-plus-1, because it is a short
read in the always-popular checklist format.
More interesting than anything in Kilcullen's new book is what it says about
the topics on the table for the military crowd and what publishers like Oxford
University Press, which sent the text into the world, think is important about
the Afghan war. Counter-insurgency is in. War-fighting handbooks are in.
Gimmick covers designed for the war zone are in. Analysis about whether to
fight such wars, investigation of the true costs of war to those most affected,
plans to end bloody costly wars: all definitely out.
The Pentagon printing press
Kilcullen, now freelancing "in the boardroom, the battle space, and anywhere in
between" (according to his company's website), represents one militarized
segment of this overwhelmingly pro-war, or at least anti-antiwar, publishing
trend. Another party responsible for beefing up the numbers when it comes to
books on the Afghan war is the military itself.
Over the last year, the Pentagon's own publishing arms have been printing up a
storm. Take Afghanistan, Counter-Insurgency, and the Indirect Approach,
released earlier this year by the Joint Special Operations University - a
Pentagon professional school designed to meet the "specific educational needs
of special operators and non-SOF [special operations forces] national-security
decision makers." It is just one of the many monographs pouring off Pentagon
presses that investigate various aspects of COIN and related concepts with an
eye toward improving US fortunes in Afghanistan.
In the book, Thomas Henrikson, former Army officer and now senior fellow at the
Hoover Institution, conducts a historical analysis of the "indirect approach"
to COIN. (In other words, when Americans partner with, or rely on, local forces
to carry out US wars abroad.) And guess what? He thinks it's exactly the way to
go, so long as it's done with "thoughtfulness," and so he advocates for more of
the same in the years ahead.
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