You yourself fought in Afghanistan. I was wondering why he suggested understanding the war there as the title. Is there much about this that people don’t understand?
I’ve had a varied life over the past decade. I really started my professional life after the 9/11 attacks, as a young platoon leader in Afghanistan. i returned to afghanistan in 2004 as a ranger platoon leader and then left and studied the arabic speaking world for several years. i got my masters and doctorate focused on lebanon. but i started working in afghanistan again in 2009 when i served as adviser to general mcchrystal and then returned briefly in 2010 to do an assessment for general petraeus. If I look at my life over the last decade, even though I’ve probably spent more time in the Arabic-speaking world, Afghanistan is a place I’ve always returned to, just like the soldiers who are in the US military.
You are reading: Best books on the war in afghanistan
so you definitely know what you’re talking about.
I’m not too sure. I would start from a position of intellectual humility. when i left the army i moved to lebanon and spent several years studying the people, politics and cultures of the arabic speaking world. I believe that the experience in regional studies has made me much less likely to make general statements about the people, cultures and languages of Afghanistan. When I first entered Afghanistan in the winter of 2001 and fought in Operation Anaconda in March 2002, I thought I knew just about everything I needed to know as a young platoon leader. I knew how to maneuver my squad, I knew how to fire my weapon accurately, I knew how to lead my platoon and engage the enemy. I thought that was enough. But one of the books I cited was Clausewitz’s on war. The first and most important act of judgment that the statesman-commander has to make is to establish the type of war in which he embarks. For me, that means studying the human terrain of the environment in which you are operating. Like many young military officers, I don’t think he was humble enough about the environment in which he operated as a young officer. I’d like to think that over the years I’ve become more aware of everything I don’t understand about the environment. When I looked back at Afghanistan from the perspective of a think tank scholar and civilian advisor to the commander there, I like to say that I knew more than I didn’t.
And knowledge of the environment is essential for success?
yes. i remember when i first went to afghanistan, i read the taliban by ahmed rashid, which is a great book. But soldiers working in Afghanistan today, especially those who spend more than a year in the country, need to have a much more granular understanding of Afghan culture. They’re never going to be anthropologists with machine guns, but they should be able to understand the local dynamics better than I did when I first went there. one of the problems you have with military officers, and I speak as someone who used to be a military officer, is that they want to know the book they need to read. the only thing they need to do. Oftentimes, when working in an environment like Afghanistan or the Arabic-speaking world, being comfortable with everything you won’t be able to understand is more important than having the right set of data. I especially like David Edwards’ book, Heroes of the Age, for this. highlights many of the ambiguities and contradictions within Afghan society, culture, and history that are unrealistic for a US military officer to attempt to understand on a nine-month tour.
In terms of people not understanding this decade-long war, what frustrates you the most?
As a war veteran, what frustrates me the most is that, for the most part, American society has waged war on a country it hasn’t bothered to learn much about, and waged war. with young men and women you don’t really know. Only 0.5% of the US population serves in the military, so the percentage of soldiers, marines, and airmen serving in Afghanistan is less than that. so there’s this disconnect between american society and the armed forces that serve in afghanistan, and there’s this disconnect between this great national project in afghanistan, this conflict that we’re waging, and a variety of development activities associated with that conflict, and the american people . they really have no connection to that. As someone who has, on occasion, advised military commanders and I often find myself in conversations with younger military officers, guys who are doing the kind of work I used to do when I was a young officer, I’m just trying to further a degree learning about the environment before people enter it.
what gets us into the books.
The one volume introduction to Afghanistan that I always recommend to people is Thomas Barfield’s Afghanistan. the other two that i really enjoy are from david edwards, who is a social anthropologist at williams college [massachusetts]. he is simply a charming writer and an accomplished and fantastic anthropologist working in afghanistan. so those three books by those two anthropologists I always recommend to people. If you only have time to read one book on Afghanistan, make sure it’s Tom Barfield’s; If you have time to read some more, make sure it’s the two David Edwards books.
let’s look at thomas barfield’s book first. he is an Afghan veteran, he has lived in Afghan villages, he is an academic, but is he also a readable book?
yes. the first three books I have recommended are all eminently readable. both barfield and edwards are obviously afghan hands, they know a lot about afghanistan, but they present the material in a very accessible way. they are truly a delight to read. when you think of anthropological texts on afghanistan, you think of a rather dry reading; It’s not these books at all. they are really charming, although very sobering.
tell me a bit more about the barfield book specifically.
Barfield’s book, which is a cultural and political history, was published in the spring of 2010. Oh, if only this book had been published a decade earlier! when the us military and its diplomats and allies entered afghanistan in the fall of 2001, we really didn’t know much about the country. When I returned in the summer of 2009, I was surprised to find that most people working in Afghanistan did not know much more about the country in 2009 than they did in 2001. Tom Barfield is a scholar whom many other scholars, military officers, and Diplomats have plenty of time for it, and this is a very accessible volume history of Afghanistan. It serves as an excellent overview for anyone who works there, whether they are a military officer, diplomat, aid and development worker, or private investor. the things that I would highlight about this book are, first of all, that it is accessible. second, that it’s pretty funny: he’s a witty writer. thirdly, that he has become, for better or worse (mainly for the better, I would say), a point of reference for anyone working in afghanistan. I’ve seen this book on the shelves of everyone from serious academics to squad leaders to General David Petraeus.
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let’s talk about the next book, by david edwards. as you mentioned, he is also an anthropologist.
david edwards wrote two books. The first book, Heroes of the Age, looks at the competition within Afghanistan between tribe, state, and Islam. i remember finishing this book by flying from herat to mazar-e-sharif in the summer of 2009. the conclusion is unsettling. Edwards writes, “I argued that Afghanistan’s central problem was Afghanistan itself, specifically certain deep moral contradictions that have prevented the country from forging a coherent civil society. These contradictions are deeply embedded in Afghan culture, but have come to the fore in the last 100 years since the advent of the nation-state, the establishment of permanent borders, and the attempt to establish an extensive state bureaucracy and invert that bureaucracy in new ways. of authority and control. It was a very sobering thing to read, especially as we were trying to design a comprehensive counter-insurgency campaign to increase the legitimacy of the government of Afghanistan. centralized authority and a strong state is something afghanistan has never really had.
And Edwards tells that story by looking at three individuals: a tribal khan, a Muslim saint, and a prince who became king of the newly created state.
yes, it traces a person’s story and shows how that person says something about afghanistan. For example, it traces the story of Amir Abdur Rahman, who was able to forge a strong state. but then, when he died, his body had to be smuggled out of the capital to be buried, because people were so angry about his heavy hand. It was one of the most sobering books I’ve read about Afghanistan and the tension that exists between the different centers of authority.
heroes of the age is set in the 19th century. The second book he has chosen from Edwards, before the Taliban, is more contemporary.
starts with what happened in 1978 and the decline in violence in afghanistan, and brings us up to date on events in afghanistan up to [the] 9/11 [attacks]. because if you look at the history of afghanistan in the 20th century, it’s a pretty peaceful country. As William Maley has written, Afghanistan is really the exception to Asia in the 20th century. when much of the asian continent was at war, afghanistan was essentially at peace until 1978. it is not true that afghanistan has always been a country at war with itself. It has always been a country where authority has been questioned, but above all, until August 1978, it has been the story of a country at peace with itself and its neighbors. edwards traces afghanistan’s descent in 1978 to the conflict afghanistan we tend to think of when we see it today.
Your next choice is Stathis Kalyvas’ Logic of Violence in Civil War. This is not about Afghanistan, but about a book that made a great contribution to the theoretical framework for understanding violence in civil war.
yes, when choosing five books about the war in afghanistan, I chose three books about afghanistan and two about the conflict itself. The reason I chose this book is that it had a revolutionary effect on the way social scientists think about civil wars in general. Prior to the publication of this book, the social science literature considered political loyalty and loyalty in civil wars to be primarily exogenous. you have a loyalty, you stay with that loyalty, that’s who you are, that’s what defines you during conflict. this book challenges that notion.
In terms of the conflict itself, what concerns both an insurgent and a counterinsurgent, or the parties to a civil war, is really behavior. how do you behave during the conflict? And if you look at the way populations behave during civil wars, whether they collaborate or not, and who they collaborate with, it’s largely determined by who controls that population.
This book had a revolutionary effect. Some would say that Kalyvas goes too far in arguing that loyalty is endogenous, overlooking things like religious identity and tribal identity. but, in general, if he is trying to predict how a population is going to behave, he will be more successful if he looks at which party or combatant controls a given area or part of the population than was pre-war policy . preferences are. It has direct political implications. if you’re trying to create collaboration within a certain area, you know you have to exercise control over the population, you can’t take a person’s political allegiance for granted. Similarly, you cannot simply discard a population. one of the things we saw in iraq is that in the areas where the us military was able to increase, the collaboration rates began to increase. you started to see concerned local citizens, you started to see people joining the police forces. Part of the design logic for the US campaign in Afghanistan was based on these observations about the behavior of populations in civil wars.
and also in afghanistan, based on your observations on the ground, was there validation of the kalyvas theory?
yes. Kalyvas writes that the higher the level of control exercised by a political actor in an area, the higher the level of civil collaboration with this political actor. populations in civil wars are basically trying to survive. they’ll do it in several different ways: they’ll survive by evading cover, they’ll survive by going back and forth between different factions, they’ll survive by autarchy (“a pox in both houses, I’m just living for myself!”) their goal is just to survive both the insurgents like the counterinsurgents or the different sides of the civil war they really need the population to do something different they need them to take sides they need them to at least start supporting the institutions of the state that are necessary to defeat the insurgency like joining to the police forces, for example. we’ve seen it in afghanistan. the more the counterinsurgent forces can exert control over an area, the more collaboration with the counterinsurgent forces will increase. so, have we seen how the logic of violence plays out in the civil war in afghanistan? yes, i think we have. the two questions are, is this drop in violence sustainable and v is it worth it?
is it?
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maybe not. it is only sustainable if those counterinsurgency forces, which are predominantly us and allies, can be replaced by Afghan security forces. In a place like Helmand province, for example, the United States has invested billions of dollars. the general question of whether or not that expense was worth it is ultimately a political question.
Your latest book is about war, by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz.
If you’re trying to understand any conflict, you still have to start with the dead Prussian. If we are assigning a reading list to understand the war in Afghanistan, we first have to understand the war as a phenomenon. it has a certain logic. There is still no other book that is as significant in terms of understanding war as about war. First, as Clausewitz said, you have to establish the type of war you are embarking on. One of the criticisms of counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan is that there has been a disconnect between counterinsurgency operations and the political objectives of decision-makers at home. there has been no strategic bridge. I think that’s probably a good review. operations in afghanistan have taken on a life of their own, disconnected from politics. there is a divide between the civilian politicians and the military on the ground, and I think both sides are responsible for that.
are you saying that when clauswitz argues that the first thing you have to decide is what kind of war you are embarking on, in the case of afghanistan which was not done correctly?
that’s one area where we’ve failed in afghanistan. we have misdiagnosed the conflict at several key junctures. I’m not sure we understand war right now. I always think that the united states and its allies have taken too slow a step in understanding the conflict in afghanistan. for many years, we continue to fight what we call an anti-terrorist campaign. So we decided to fight a counterinsurgency campaign, but we decided to fight without the resources that we knew would be necessary. so even after increasing resources, we were dealing with a partner in afghanistan…
tell me more.
Traditionally, the problem a government faces when dealing with an insurgency is a lack of capacity. When we think of counterinsurgency, we think that the problem is the capacity of the Afghan government. but one of the observations we made in 2009 was that the problem in afghanistan was not necessarily the lack of capacity of the afghan government, but also its behavior. we have never created a political campaign to accompany our military campaign. We have undertaken operations to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and degrade the Taliban, but we have never devised a coherent political strategy to address the behavior of the Afghan government at all levels.
Are you talking about corruption?
the problem is not corruption per se. a state can be corrupt and still exist. America deals with corruption. the problem in afghanistan – and one of the things that discourages even people like me who have put a lot of time and sweat into the war in afghanistan – is things like the kabul bank fiasco. you have officials who not only want to eat the golden egg, but also kill and cook the egg goose that laid it. the problem we have in afghanistan is this mentality, largely fueled by the psychology of a population that has been living in conflict for 30 years, that it’s about maximizing profits in the shortest possible time, without thinking about institution building long-term . in the case of the kabul bank, people just tried to get as rich as possible without really caring if the bank was going to collapse or not. We have never developed a coherent strategy to use our influence over Hamid Karzai and others to affect the behavior of key Afghan decision makers.
many people who read about the war will not be soldiers. As a former soldier, was there a part of the book where you really thought, “wow, he was writing at the time of the Napoleonic wars, but this is so true today!”
I personally think that books one, two and eight [on the war] are as relevant today as they were when they were written. in book eight there is a section on how war is just one branch of political activity. war is in no sense autonomous, it is simply a continuation of political exchange with the addition of other means. And yet, he has seen the conflict in Afghanistan being carried out almost entirely by the US and allied militaries without really thinking about the political nature of the war. if we had thought about the war in afghanistan as a political problem, that the ultimate goal was not necessarily the destruction of the enemy’s fighting forces, but rather political reconciliation, if we had thought about the political behavior of the afghan government, then I think we would we would look at a campaign that looks very different from the one we’ve been running.
Are you in favor of the withdrawal planned for the end of 2014?
I am a co-author of an article that talks about how the United States can reduce. i believe the united states should have a lasting commitment to the region, but it is entirely reasonable for the united states and allied taxpayers to demand that the war in afghanistan be fought with fewer resources and in a way that does not tie up the vast majority of our military capabilities and intelligence in a landlocked country in central asia. we have to be honest here – the us has very little interest in afghanistan. It makes no sense for the United States to overcommit itself to Afghanistan in the long term. Personally, I wish the Obama administration had done things a little differently. I wish we had made a long-term commitment to Afghanistan with fewer resources. instead, we made a commitment with many resources but in a very short period of time. The way we engaged with Afghanistan has encouraged behavior among Afghans, and among Pakistanis as well, to simply try to get the most out of the United States and its allies in the shortest amount of time.
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