The Foreign Service Journal, November 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2014 33 102 Days of War: How Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda & the Taliban Survived 2001 Yaniv Barzilai, Potomac Books, 2014, $24.95/hardcover, $13.99/Kindle, 194 pages. Almost 10 years before Osama bin Laden was killed, the United States had a rare opportunity to decapitate the organization that had just carried out the deadliest foreign attack on American soil in his- tory. During battles that raged across Afghanistan in the 102 days after 9/11, CIA officers and special operations forces allied with local Afghan resistance forces to topple the Taliban and go after al-Qaida. Yet bin Laden escaped, and al-Qaida and the Taliban endured the initial onslaught. In 102 Days of War , Yaniv Barzilai takes the reader from meetings in the White House to the most sensitive operations in Afghanistan to explain how America’s enemies survived 2001. Using a broad array of sources, including interviews with U.S. officials at every level of the war, Barzilai concludes that the out- come stemmed both from tactical errors and, more importantly, failures in policy and leadership. Yaniv Barzilai is a first-tour Foreign Service officer serving in Baku. Prior to joining the Service, Barzilai was awarded the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship from the U.S. Department of State in 2009. He worked in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the Office of Afghanistan Affairs, as well as the Office of the Special Representative for Somalia at Embassy Nairobi. For Barzilai’s take on publishing in the Foreign Service, see the June FSJ . A Body of Language: Revealing the Common Mind of Mankind Matt A. Ellsworth, Amazon Digital Services, Inc., 2013, $5, Kindle. A Body of Language: Revealing the Common Mind of Mankind offers a great boost for those learning Arabic and a good read for anyone who loves anthropology, linguistics, the common origins of human- kind—or a good mystery. Matt Ellsworth proposes the solution to an ancient linguis- tic mystery, which the Arabs refer to as the phenomenon of al-ishtiqaq al-akbar (when several words share the same letters, those words are often akin in meaning). The theory behind the phenomenon is that each phonetic character of the Semitic mother tongue had a particular semantic value—or meaning— in the remote past. Ellsworth shows that the sounds of the Arabic alphabet derive their meaning from reference to the shape and function of parts of the human body. Readers are guided through the author’s journey in this daunting project, with descriptions of how he found the meanings of particular sounds, demonstrations of how the sounds and their meanings work together “as semantic molecules” to form words, a review of writings on the al-ishtiqaq al-akbar phenomenon and the author’s thoughts and ideas, which he calls “digressions,” along the way. Matt A. Ellsworth, currently a general services officer in Kinshasa, has served in Asia, Africa, North and South America and the Middle East. He speaks French, Spanish, Arabic and Russian, and is a trained conference interpreter. Originally from Arizona, his interest in linguistics started during his missionary experience in Chile in the 1970s and continued through studies at Brigham Young University, the Monterey Institute of Interna- tional Studies, the Defense Language Institute and the Foreign Service Institute. Outsmarting Apartheid: An Oral History of South Africa’s Cultural and Educational Exchange with the United States, 1960-1999 Daniel Whitman, ed., with assistance from Kari Jaksa, SUNY Press, 2014, $105/hardcover; $29.95/ebook, 470 pages. “ Outsmarting Apartheid is a major contribution to the study of ‘soft diplomacy,’” says John Campbell, retired FSO and author of Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink . “It is a wonderful picture of the way the public diplomacy section of an embassy works, and the positive impact it can have on advancing U.S. interests.” For several decades prior to South Africa’s first democratic elections in December 1994, some 3,000 South Africans partici- pated in cultural and educational exchange programs with the United States through the Department of State. Many of those individuals were involved in helping to bring about the peaceful end of apartheid and build a post-apartheid democratic system. They now occupy important positions in academia, the media, parliament and the judiciary of South Africa. With an introduction and final note by Daniel Whitman, a former program development officer at Embassy Pretoria, the book consists of interviews with more than 30 South Africans and Americans who administered, advanced and participated in the government-funded exchange. The result is a detailed