The Foreign Service Journal, October 2012

64 OCTOBER 2012 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL BOOKS Dispatches from Marineistan Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, $27.95, hardcover, 333 pages. Reviewed by Christine Dal Bello Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s latest book, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan , focuses on President Barack Obama’s 2009 decision to send additional U.S. troops to “Marineistan,” the Marine Corps area of operations in Helmand province. The acclaimed Washington Post reporter conducted 70 interviews for this highly readable book, which he notes would not have been possible without Kael Weston, a State Department employee who “introduced me to Larry Nicholson and convinced him to grant me insider access to the Second Marine Expedition- ary Brigade during its year in Helmand province.” Throughout, Chan- drasekaran makes clear his respect for many of the mil- itary and civilian officials he encounters. He points out that Carter Malkasian, the State Department representative in Helmand’s Garmser district at the time, was the only foreign official whom he ever heard “widely referred to as a sahib, an Urdu salutation once used to address British colonial officials that Afghans employed as a term of honor and respect.” I particularly appreciated his assess- ment of the late Richard Holbrooke, which he illustrates with stories that capture his genius, as well as his propensity for rubbing others the wrong way. As Chan- drasekaran says, the antipathy between Ambassador Holbrooke and the White House was “visceral and vicious … and sabotaged America’s best chance [to mid- wife a negotiated settlement among the Taliban] for a peace deal to end the war.” The author concludes that Embassy Kabul was not realistic in its aspirations, wasting time and resources on “useless district governments.” Making matters worse, neither the State Department nor the U.S. Agency for International Development could fulfill the key civilian component in the military’s counterin- surgency strategy. As for the U.S. military, Little America is replete with examples of tribalism within the Pentagon; rigidity on the part of many generals serving in Afghani- stan; and egregious acts committed by a handful of troops, including murdering civilians, disrespecting the Koran and mistreating Taliban corpses. While the surge proved successful in the short term, the spillover effect that the military commanders had expected when asking for additional troops never materialized. Instead, progress in the south was offset by losses in the eastern and northern parts of the country. And even where the military did stabilize areas, the Americans weren’t confident that the Afghans were capable of taking over the effort. Then again, that should not have been surprising given the fact that 95 percent of the army and police forces are report- edly functionally illiterate. One Afghan National Army battalion Chandrasekaran observed lacked the ability to plan or execute even the simplest missions. And while they knew how to fire their guns, their “spray and pray” technique was hardly effective. But the biggest problem was their lack of motivation. While ideology has fueled the most successful Afghan fighters, Chandrasekaran reports that most ANA recruits had joined out of necessity, for the income to support their families. My own Foreign Service tour in Afghanistan, from 2005 to 2006, was brief and predates the period covered in Little America . But even then, it was abun- dantly clear to me that our measures of success were far too short-sighted. The type of change we were trying to effect takes decades, not months or years. I still recall a conversation with a civilian contractor colleague who was involved in police training. She men- tioned that many of the recruits had never even looked in a mirror. Yet in both the police and army sectors, we were try- ing to mold them into images of Ameri- can forces, comprised of young men and women who have the good fortune to grow up in more privileged and educated circumstances. Overall, the flaws Chandrasekaran highlights in the handling of the Marine- istan deployment and the overall U.S. mis- sion in Afghanistan will be all too familiar to most readers. While I took exception to some of his characterizations, which were simplistic and one-sided, the personal accounts he weaves throughout his narra- tive, and his compelling storytelling style, animate an otherwise thoroughly depress- ing story. Christine Dal Bello, a Foreign Service officer serving in Pretoria, recently completed a Pearson Fellowship. Her previous assign- ments include Mumbai, Vienna, Jakarta and Kabul, where she served for six months from 2005 to 2006. Even where U.S. troops did stabilize parts of the country, it wasn’t clear that Afghans could take over the effort.