The Foreign Service Journal, April 2018

90 APRIL 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Karzai’s ill-tempered accusations that Washington was deliberately bleed- ing Afghanistan to keep the country beholden to Pakistan. Confronted with the complexities of South Asia and traumatized by the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. homeland, the United States failed to develop a coherent strat- egy. Confusion over war aims surfaced from the outset, as policymakers tried to decide whether to limit their objective to defeating al-Qaida or embrace a more ambitious goal of remaking Afghanistan as a reliable, democratic American ally. Coll reveals that General Tommy Franks, who headed the U.S. Central Command, was distracted during the battle for Tora Bora by a phone call from then-Defense Secretary Donald Rums- feld demanding a war plan for Iraq. He laments that “military history is rife with examples of generals and presidents who squander strategic advantage by failing to press a battlefield triumph to its conclu- sion, undermining their victory. Here was the same story again, involving not only complacency but also inexplicable strate- gic judgment, fractured decision-making and confusion.” Coll blames both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations for subsequent missteps. The White House, he writes, “tolerated and even promoted stovepiped, semi-independent cam- paigns waged simultaneously by different agencies of the American government.” Lethal operations against suspected ter- rorist targets underscored the costs of this approach. In Pakistan, the Obama administra- tion doubled down on drone strikes and covert operations while in Afghanistan the number of “strike packages”—of men, helicopters and vehicles to conduct night raids on Taliban leaders—multiplied. While these tactics undoubtedly removed individuals hostile to the United States from the battlefield, Coll argues that they were undertaken without assessing how the backlash in both countries would undermine strategic objectives. One Afghan summed up the disconnect between U.S. actions and local realities: “We are like rocks here. You kick us, the Taliban kicks us. No one listens.” Coll acknowledges the intrinsic chal- lenges of dealing with Afghanistan, a war-scarred nation ranked near the bot- tom of every table of development indi- cators, yet he may be overly optimistic about the prospects for success even if Washington had managed to produce a policy that simultaneously stabilized Afghanistan and Pakistan and balanced the exigencies of counterterrorism with the longer-term needs of counterinsur- gency. In more than 750 pages, I couldn’t find the word “quagmire.” But it’s difficult to read Coll’s narrative without feeling that each new policy review, strategy or move on the ground only pulls the United States deeper into Afghanistan with no easy exit, let alone victory. For State Department readers, this book offers a vivid account of how diplomacy has been marginalized over the past two decades and the conse- quent costs to global stability and our own national security. n FSO Eric Green joined the Foreign Service in 1990 and has also served in the Philip- pines, Russia, Ukraine, Northern Ireland, Turkey and Iceland. He is currently in language training for an upcoming posting to Warsaw. He is a member of the Foreign Service Journal Editorial Board. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of State or the U.S. government.