Little America; The War Within the War for Afghanistan

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Good/Very good. Patrick Baz (Jacket photograph). Format is approximately 6 inches by 9 inches. xi, [1], 368, [2] pages. Slighly cocked. Includes Map of Southern Afghanistan, 8 pages of photographs, as well as a Prologue. Part 1 covers Grand Dreams; Part Two covers Shattered Plans; Part Three covers Triage, as well as Acknowledgments, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an Indian-American journalist. He is the National Editor of The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1994. At The Post he has served as bureau chief in Baghdad, Cairo, and Southeast Asia, and as a correspondent covering the war in Afghanistan. During 2003, the Post put his stories on the front page 138 times., In 2004, he was journalist-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Chandrasekaran's 2006 book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone won the 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize and was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Awards for non-fiction. In this extraordinarily insightful, illuminating book, Rajiv Chandrasekaran focuses on southern Afghanistan in the year of Obama's surge. Little America is a story of this long arc of American involvement, and of the campaign to salvage a victory in southern Afghanistan on Obama's watch., and reveals the epic tug of war that occurred between the president and a military that, once on the ground, increasingly went its own way. From the award-winning author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a riveting, intimate account of America's troubled war in Afghanistan. Chandrasekaran has written a fascinating book, required reading for anyone who wants to know about that crucial first year of America's rule in post-Saddam Iraq. When President Barack Obama ordered the surge of troops and aid to Afghanistan, Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran followed. He found the effort sabotaged not only by Afghan and Pakistani malfeasance but by infighting and incompetence within the American government: a war cabinet arrested by vicious bickering among top national security aides; diplomats and aid workers who failed to deliver on their grand promises; generals who dispatched troops to the wrong places; and headstrong military leaders who sought a far more expansive campaign than the White House wanted. Through their bungling and quarreling, they wound up squandering the first year of the surge. Chandrasekaran explains how the United States has never understood Afghanistan, and probably never will. During the Cold War, American engineers undertook a massive development project across southern Afghanistan in an attempt to woo the country from Soviet influence. They built dams and irrigation canals, and they established a comfortable residential community known as Little America, with a Western-style school, a coed community pool, and a plush clubhouse, all of which embodied American and Afghan hopes for a bright future and a close relationship. But in the late 1970s, after growing Afghan resistance and a Communist coup, the Americans abandoned the region to warlords and poppy farmers. In one revelatory scene after another, Chandrasekaran follows American efforts to reclaim the very same territory from the Taliban. Along the way, we meet an Army general whose experience as the top military officer in charge of Iraq's Green Zone couldn't prepare him for the bureaucratic knots of Afghanistan, a Marine commander whose desire to charge into remote hamlets conflicted with civilian priorities, and a war-seasoned diplomat frustrated in his push for a scaled-down but long-term American commitment. Their struggles show how Obama's hope of a good war, and the Pentagon's desire for a resounding victory, shriveled on the arid plains of southern Afghanistan. Meticulously reported, hugely revealing, Little America is an unprecedented examination of a failing war, and an eye-opening look at the complex relationship between America and Afghanistan.