The Foreign Service Journal, October 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2021 77 Presidents Hafizullah Amin, Babrak Karmal and Mohammad Najibulah. Ultimately, Whitlock does not presume to offer any definitive, or new analysis for America’s failure in Afghani- stan. He does, however, suggest pos- sible analytical avenues for historians: Should the United States have sought to engage the Taliban much earlier, possibly when it had maximum leverage in 2002? Should the United States have recognized warnings by experts (including President Hamid Karzai) that U.S. military tactics and reliance on partnerships with hated warlords were alienating the Afghan people? Should the U.S. have devised a strategy to end crucial support for the Taliban from Pakistan? Future analysts will need to delve more deeply into Afghanistan’s recent history to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of this tragic misadven- ture. What was the impact of U.S. support for the most radical Mujahideen parties in the struggle against the Soviet occupa- tion? What was the cost of the U.S. policy decision to ignore developments in Afghanistan following the Soviet with- drawal? Should the March 2020 agree- ment with the Taliban have included a peace accord with the Ghani government as a sine qua non for a U.S. troop with- drawal? The Afghanistan Papers is an essential resource for anyone seeking to under- stand the past two decades of the failed U.S. effort to bring peace and democracy to this critical part of the world. Edmund McWilliams is a retired senior Foreign Service officer who served as deputy chief of mission at U.S. Embassy Kabul (1986- 1988) and as special envoy to Afghanistan, based in Pakistan (1988-1989). He also re- ported on developments in Afghanistan from U.S. Embassy Dushanbe (1992-1994). The Consequences of a Digital Age Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence Kate Crawford, Yale University Press, 2021, $28/hardcover, e-book available, 336 pages. Reviewed by Vivian S. Walker Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI is a powerful manifesto against the abuse of political and economic influence in the emerging technology sector. From lithiummines to Amazon warehouses, from biased audi- ence profiling to opaque government- sponsored data collection, Crawford provides a sobering overview of the social costs of machine learning applications. At times in this provocative and intel- ligent volume, it seems that Crawford is inspired by the muse of Karl Marx, exposing the exploitative, elitist power structures that shape the digital age. As a recent report from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence indicates, the so-called AI revolution has significant consequences for national security, economic stability and social welfare. Much remains to be done to manage AI’s power and potential, as well as its destabilizing limitations, at home and abroad. The Atlas of AI offers a distinctive and timely perspec- tive on these limitations, revealing the corruption inherent in the political and economic forces that govern the technol- ogy industry. Part of the difficulty in addressing the AI challenge lies in defining it. Setting aside its algorithmic aspects, Crawford frames AI as a shifting, multilayered land- scape of physical, economic, political and social relationships. Though the “atlas”