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A review by lajacquerie
No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes by Anand Gopal
4.0
The more I read about U.S. involvement in the Middle East over the past ~40 years (and especially since 9/11), the more I realize how profoundly we squandered chances to do good. This book makes clear the deep impact that our actions in this invasion had as leadership minimized our mistakes and aggrandized our successes, willfully turning a blind eye to the necessary efforts we would have to investigate and build for long-term stability so we could chalk up quick and ultimately empty "wins." Personal friends will understand this (I doubt random readers will), but one of the things that I found most heartbreaking is how starkly misplaced the hope of many Afghans was... in the U.S.
Hindsight's 20/20, and with the benefit of a few years' reflection there is very little reason to be surprised with how things are going. Maybe we can do better than putting warlords on payroll in the future.
Disclaimer: This is a supremely elided review of this book, finished on a day when I'm not particularly hopeful that our government is getting any better at making decisions--which is certainly coloring things here. "No Good Men" did a wonderful job of demonstrating how much more complex Afghanistan is than (most) U.S. actors seemed to understand. It also sketches out why some of the bad decisions that were made, were made. Its stories are primarily told through a Talib commander, U.S.-backed warlord, and housewife, each of whom's life changes considerably (and often more than once) through the course of the decades covered. Survival is a major theme, and something that I rarely have cause to consider so viscerally. This book also made me long for my Peace Studies classes, to have an in-depth conversation on how this situation would have made for a very interesting reconciliation and reintegration test case (though obviously no country should have to be an experiment in what it takes to provide long-lasting social stability).
Hindsight's 20/20, and with the benefit of a few years' reflection there is very little reason to be surprised with how things are going. Maybe we can do better than putting warlords on payroll in the future.
Disclaimer: This is a supremely elided review of this book, finished on a day when I'm not particularly hopeful that our government is getting any better at making decisions--which is certainly coloring things here. "No Good Men" did a wonderful job of demonstrating how much more complex Afghanistan is than (most) U.S. actors seemed to understand. It also sketches out why some of the bad decisions that were made, were made. Its stories are primarily told through a Talib commander, U.S.-backed warlord, and housewife, each of whom's life changes considerably (and often more than once) through the course of the decades covered. Survival is a major theme, and something that I rarely have cause to consider so viscerally. This book also made me long for my Peace Studies classes, to have an in-depth conversation on how this situation would have made for a very interesting reconciliation and reintegration test case (though obviously no country should have to be an experiment in what it takes to provide long-lasting social stability).