It‘s the victory, misleading, lies, and withdrawal chaos of one of America‘s longest war in history ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
It‘s the victory, misleading, lies, and withdrawal chaos of one of America‘s longest war in history ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This book really lays out what went wrong in Afghanistan and how many people in government lied about it to the public.
Mixed on this. Well written, interesting. But if you regularly followed the coverage of this war over the last 20 yrs, not really any bombshell revelations here. In preface author self-servingly builds it up as the Pentagon Papers-style expose that the public was clamoring for. Not really.
So many miscalculations. Such shortsightedness. At times an oversimplification of the people of Afghanistan. An over simplification of Islam. At times this war was just ignored as focus was placed on Iraq. Over confidence on projected outcomes. And more often than not just flat out lies about the truth on the ground to placate the American public. We once said “No more Vietnam‘s” but how quickly we forgot our lessons.
I‘ve been wanting to understand the war in Afghanistan better. I tried to read a friend‘s books from a Dept. of Defense masters course but they were over my head. This book does a terrific job of painting a picture of Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Afghan civilians. It covers each of the presidencies throughout the war and where things went wrong. It was a great listen that helped put things into perspective and well researched journalism.
And seriously folks, we all need to read this.
This #audiobook is a comprehensive look at the failure of the Afghanistan War. Particularly timely now. The most sensible thing I read was someone that said we should‘ve paid for a generation of students to go to school in India, then let them run their own country. I think that would‘ve been a lot more effective than the nation building the US did try to do.
#booked2021 #RelatedTo911
A lot of information to digest but ultimately the book‘s message is that troops should have left Afghanistan shortly after the war started. According to the records used to support the book, defeat was inevitable once the goal was changed to nation building. 5 stars.