Afghanistan
By Doug Stanton
(Scribner; 393 pages; $28)
The Obama administration hopes that Operation Khanjar, or Dagger Strike, will reclaim southern Afghanistan from the Taliban. The surge in fighting in Helmand province, followed by development, is intended to regain momentum in the faltering war effort and to reverse Afghanistan's downward spiral. It comes on the eve of Afghan presidential elections already delayed once because of insecurity.

Across the border, the Pakistani army has launched its own offensive. Punctuated by dramatic U.S. drone strikes, these operations have produced uncertain results against militants in the tribal areas but have unleashed an appalling humanitarian crisis within Pakistan by creating 2.5 million refugees.

While most Americans are focused on the recession, America's two war theaters - one in Iraq, the other stretching across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border - have quietly been transformed by harrowing demographic upheaval. Long the world's largest refugee population, 3 million Afghans remain abroad. Recent fighting has displaced a quarter-million people internally. More than 1.5 million Iraqis have fled their country, and 2.7 million more remain internally displaced. Far from the view of the United States, 10 million men, women and children languish in tent cities and other insecure surroundings with only the dimmest of prospects for returning to stable homes.

Few in Washington could have imagined in 2001 that American efforts to secure the country against terrorism would have shaped a landscape haunted by ghostly flows of millions of homeless and uprooted - migrations of biblical scale, whose consequences may be with us for generations. The question of political imagination is critical.

So what were the architects of the war in Afghanistan thinking? In "The Graveyard of Empires," Seth G. Jones, a political scientist who conducted hundreds of interviews in the United States and Afghanistan, offers a valuable window onto how officials have understood the military campaign. Initially scornful of "nation building," the Bush administration tried to stabilize the country on the cheap. It then shifted resources to Iraq.

In "Horse Soldiers," journalist Doug Stanton paints a colorful, if oversize, portrait of the resourceful warriors who implemented these policies under dicey conditions in northern Afghanistan in 2001. Having hurriedly improvised their supplies by shopping at REI and ordering from Shotgun News, they hit the ground with guns, vodka for the local strongman and feed for the horses that they would ride (the first time in the saddle for most) into battle.

Neither author intended to write an expose, and both are generally fawning toward military authorities in particular. Stanton casts his story as a heroic Western. Jones spares most of the important policymakers from criticism, except then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Instead, he points the finger for the "squandering" of the American victory implausibly at a tight-fisted bureaucratic agency, the Office of Management and Budget. He also faults corrupt Afghan officials and the Europeans, echoing U.S. soldiers who have given ISAF, NATO's International Security Assistance Force, their own translation: "I Saw Americans Fight" or "I Suck at Fighting."

But each account, in its own way, reveals that American civilian and military elites, abetted by social scientists in think tanks and universities, have a wildly distorted view of their capacity to remake far-flung parts of the world. Stanton quotes a Special Forces operative who likened his team's fight with the Taliban to a battle between "The Jetsons" and "the Flintstones." Another "had the job of getting inside" the head of Abdul Rashid Dostum, the strongman with whom Special Forces collaborated, and "predicting what he would do even before Dostum himself knew" (even if he did not speak any of Dostum's many languages).

Despite disagreements between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rumsfeld, Jones tells us, there was broad agreement, as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage put it, that "Panama was a good model for stabilizing Afghanistan." In one of the most insightful parts of Jones' book, we learn that there was also a consensus, based on a misreading of the Soviet experience, that a "light footprint" would avoid the quagmire that the Soviets faced. (In fact, Jones shows, the Soviets were undermanned. Confined to cities, they left the countryside to the guerrillas, much as the coalition forces have today.)

In short, the United States mistook the Taliban for a movement from the Stone Age that could be easily vanquished by modern technology and technocratic governance. Drawing mechanically on dubious historical examples, policymakers believed that the Latin American interventions that toppled Manuel Noriega in Panama and others could be replicated in Central Asia. In reality, the United States is not sure whom it is fighting in Afghanistan.

Many readers will find "Horse Soldiers" entertaining as a kind of adventure story, and even skeptics will admire the courage of its heroes. Those searching for a more sober account will appreciate "In the Graveyard of Empires" and the author's case for government reform as the most fundamental solution to Afghanistan's problems. Yet both books unwittingly offer other lessons: They expose a staggering myopia on the part of U.S. political elites who imagine that they can reshape the world by force of arms - a misjudgment whose results growing masses of refugees and civilian casualties must bear, far from America's shores.


Robert D. Crews, an assistant professor of history at Stanford, co-edited "The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan" (Harvard University Press, 2008). E-mail him at books@sfchronicle.com.



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