Book of the week: The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan by Bing West

(Random House, $28)

“Counterinsurgency has become the American military’s new creed, the antidote not just in Iraq but Afghanistan too,” said Dexter Filkins in The New York Times. “Protect the Afghan people, build schools, and hold elections,” the logic goes, “and the insurgents will wither away.” In his new book, military analyst Bing West delivers “a crushing and seemingly irrefutable critique” of the idea that this doctrine, which soldiers are dying for, can work in Afghanistan. And West didn’t come to that conclusion while sitting at a desk. The 70-year-old Vietnam veteran and former assistant defense secretary under Ronald Reagan embedded with various U.S. units and “waded through the canals, ran through firefights, and humped up mountains.” His complaint isn’t with our Marines and soldiers; it’s with political and military leaders who haven’t recognized that Afghanistan isn’t Iraq.

West’s thesis is “simple and straightforward,” said Mackubin Thomas Owens in National Review. He argues that counterinsurgency can’t work this time because the Afghan tribes whose hearts and minds we’re trying to win over have no local authority in which to place their trust. President Karzai’s government in Kabul is corrupt and largely absent from everyday life in most of the country. West notes that while much of the populace may be rooting against a Taliban restoration, they’re remaining on the sidelines while Americans do most of the fighting. It would be foolish to do otherwise because they’d then be gambling on a long-term U.S. presence. Not that West is advocating a U.S. pullout. “We must commit to stay in Afghanistan as long as it takes,” he writes.

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But “the fact that West spends only the final three pages” sketching an alternate strategy indicates that there might not be a better approach, said Andrew Exum in The Wall Street Journal. Taking a page from his own experience in Vietnam, he wants to see a small cadre of U.S. advisers guiding Afghan troops, who’d in turn be supported by U.S. airstrikes and various small U.S. special operations units. That’s not really so different, though, from what the Joint Chiefs are looking to do in the long term, after they begin drawing down troops this summer. But you can argue the particulars with West and still admire his achievement here. He’s created “some of the most compelling descriptions of combat” ever put to page, and has given us “one of the best books yet written about Afghanistan.”