Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

The Washington Post journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran shows how too much American bureaucracy stymied efforts to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and politically stabilise the country.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s first book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, chronicled the US war in Iraq. It was a devastating critique, highlighting the arrogance, ignorance and complacency of American intellectual and political elites. Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan could be considered its follow-up. Whereas the former book concentrated on the Bush administration’s approach to war, Little America examines President Barack Obama’s record. The war in Afghanistan was a war Obama inherited (although as a Senator he had supported it). After over a decade in Afghanistan, with billions of dollars spent and many lives sacrificed, there was still not much to show in the way of progress.

In 2009 President Obama announced a troop surge to try and deal with the Taliban insurgency. This counter insurgency strategy was called COIN. The whole idea was not so much to knock out the Taliban, as to make the towns and villages safe. Once security had been increased, the thinking was that the people would naturally support law and order. Young men would be less likely to be radicalised and join the Taliban. The problem was that, for the Americans at least, not everyone was on the same page. The President’s office, the State Department and the Military all seemed to have differing ideas on what would work. There was all this push and pull between key figures, arguing amongst themselves as to what was the best way forward. As Chandrasekaran writes, “The American bureaucracy had become America’s worst enemy.” Too many experts, not enough discussion, not enough first hand experience and common sense. Even the military, working on the ground in Afghanistan, never got out much to meet the locals and learn their customs and language. One State Department representative working in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasian, bucked this trend. He learnt to speak fluent Pashto and was respectful and mindful of the local culture. As a result he was surprisingly effective. If the US had deployed thousands of Carter Malkasians, then so much more would undoubtedly have been achieved, with far less loss of life.

Instead, negligible results were achieved. A 2010 CIA report concluded that Afghanistan was “trending to stalemate”. While there had been gains in some areas, other regions had gone backwards. Overall there had been no net progress.

Making things worse was the fact that Obama had put in a timeline for withdrawal. All thinking revolved around the idea of a deadline for success, rather than a long term investment. Many of the civilian employees working in Afghanistan didn’t like the place, performed the minimum required and couldn’t wait to leave and take up a cushy job somewhere else. Western style ideas of efficiency, technocratic expertise and problem solving were applied to an ancient, poor and illiterate civilisation.

Little America makes for very sorrowful reading. It highlights the folly of thinking that foreign wars can be easily managed, their outcomes assured by simply implementing the required policies. Rajiv Chandrasekaran brings to his subject an on-the-ground journalist’s account. He’s followed soldiers into battle, interviewed key bureaucrats and politicians, and wandered out into the streets of Afghanistan to talk to the locals. He mixes analysis with first hand experience to give a clear picture of what has gone wrong. His two books together, Imperial Life in the Emerald City and Little America, make essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the complexity and folly of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Published by Bloomsbury. ISBN: 9781408831809 RRP: $29.99

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Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

In this compelling piece of on the ground journalism, Washington Post journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran describes the chaotic and ill managed period of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s time in Iraq.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City details the actions of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq between the immediate post-invasion period and the handover of power to the Iraqis, with so-called insurgency attacks on the rise during that period. The CPA, headed by Paul Bremer, was run like a modern business enterprise. The whole 2003 – 2004 episode, as described by Washington Post journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran, reads like an interesting example of what happens when technocratic thinking is applied to problems that require common sense and a firm grasp of reality. From the get-go, the CPA had big plans (dreams, really) of creating a fully functioning Western democracy in a matter of months. The Iraqi people were merely putty for the realisation of this grand scheme.

In fact, the Iraqi people were to all intents and purposes invisible to their occupiers. The list is long of CPA hot shots who took zero interest in Iraq’s history, culture, language and deeply damaged psyche. In many examples, it seemed as though the Americans thought of the Iraqis as standing in the way of their elevated vision for a Middle Eastern democracy. The recruitment process for getting on the CPA payroll required an enthusiastic belief in the ideals and political aims of George W. Bush. People with few qualifications could find themselves fast tracked into plum jobs in Iraq if they were connected in some way to key Republican Party figures. Those with appropriate skill sets were often sent back for not being simpatico enough with the overall Bush program. It was a case of not what you know, but who you know.

Chandrasekaran writes in a pithy and fast paced manner. He works a large amount of material into a cracking tale of good intentions turned into a terrible farce. He reports from on the ground in Iraq and the Green Zone, giving his writing a feeling of great immediacy. Imperial Life in the Emerald City almost reads like a novel, with absurdist scenes involving government officials and contractors creating mayhem but patting themselves on the back for a job well done. This is a tale of bureaucracy gone mad. George W. Bush convinced a hoard of fellow believers in a form of magic thinking. He thought he could invade Iraq, raze half of it to the ground, and build it up again in a couple of months as a glittering democratic jewel in the Middle East.

Imperial Life in the Imperial City is a both a cautionary tale, the anatomy of a train wreck and an example of what happens when political dreams backed up by awesome military power crash against reality.

Imperial Life in the Imperial City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Published by Bloomsbury. ISBN: 9780747592891 RRP: $24.95