Washington Post Book Reviews
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Wednesday October 13, 2010
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OBAMA'S WARS Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 978-1439172490
441 pages
$30
Reviewed by Neil Sheehan
In another of his superbly reported insider accounts, "Obama's Wars," Bob Woodward recounts how a new president may have embroiled himself in a war that could poison his presidency -- just as his predecessor, George W. Bush, destroyed his with a foolhardy war in Iraq and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were ruined by the war in Vietnam.
The grim mountains and deserts of Afghanistan are a boneyard of invading armies. The British rulers of colonial India sent an Anglo-Indian army there in 1839 to establish Afghanistan as a buffer state against the advances of imperial Russia in Central Asia. The enterprise faltered against Afghan resistance, and the main garrison at Kabul -- about 4,500 troops and 12,000 family members and camp followers -- decided to retreat back to India in January 1842. Afghan tribesmen fell upon them in the snows of the mountain passes and slaughtered them without pity. Only one man, a doctor named William Brydon, reached safety. A few others were spared as prisoners and subsequently rescued.
One hundred and thirty-seven years later came the mighty Soviet Union's turn. In December 1979 Leonid Brezhnev dispatched the lead elements of a 110,000-man Soviet expeditionary force to rescue Afghanistan's collapsing communist regime. The Red Army was a proud army. It had smashed Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht, once thought invincible. But after 10 years of fruitless Afghan warfare, the last elements of a broken and dispirited Soviet force climbed into their armored vehicles and headed back north to Russia.
The American war in Afghanistan began, of course, in 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the refusal of the Taliban leadership to hand over Osama bin Laden and the other al-Qaeda leaders who instigated and planned them. President Bush, however, neglected Afghanistan in favor of his war in Iraq.
According to Woodward's narrative, Obama seems to have first stepped into the Afghan war in a somewhat absent-minded way, granting the military 21,000 more troops for the conflict, without much examination, during the opening months of his administration.
By the fall, the commanders are back for more. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, an aggressive and highly regarded officer (until he blew himself up with disparaging comments about his colleagues and superiors in a Rolling Stone interview), had been appointed the new commander for Afghanistan on May 11, 2009. He had toured the country to reassess the situation and had handed in his report at the end of August.
Soon the bad news arrives at the White House. McChrystal wants an additional 40,000 troops, enough reinforcements to virtually equal the size of the Soviet commitment, 108,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan when added to the 68,000 already authorized for deployment there. The request is backed by Robert Gates, the secretary of defense; Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. David Petraeus, the most prestigious officer in the Army, thanks to his application of counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq, and the chief of U.S. Central Command, which covers American forces in the Middle East and South Asia from its headquarters in Tampa. (Petraeus took over as commanding general in Afghanistan after McChrystal was sacked for his indiscretion in June 2010.)
As there is minimal mention of Iraq in the book, Woodward takes his title from the arguments over the troop request that drag on through the fall of 2009 in the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing.
The military wants the 40,000 troops with no strings attached, no promise that this will be the last request and no fixing of a date when Obama can begin withdrawing them. The president sees the pit opening before him. "This is not what I'm looking for," he says. "I'm not doing 10 years, I'm not doing a long-term nation-building effort. I'm not spending a trillion dollars." He wants another, more flexible option with fewer troops and a built-in date to start withdrawals. But the military won't give it to him. Gates, Mullen and Petraeus hold fast to the original request and put additional pressure on Obama through their supporters in Congress and the media. (The 29,000 NATO forces in Afghanistan do not figure in the argument because many are noncombat support troops and because it is uncertain how much longer allied countries will maintain their contributions.)
Finally, at the end of November, the president surrenders and gives the military most of what it demands. In a strategy memorandum dated Nov. 29, 2009, which Obama dictated himself and Woodward prints verbatim at the end of the book, the president approves a 33,000-troop surge for Afghanistan, bringing the U.S. force level there to 101,000. Obama estimates the cost at $113 billion per year. He specifies July 2011 as the time when reductions are supposed to begin but then undercuts himself by giving the military an escape hatch: The reductions are to be "based on progress on the ground."
Vice President Biden, who stood by the president's side and fought hardest against the military during the months of arguments in the Situation Room, warns Obama, as the president is about to hand out his strategy memorandum, that they could get "locked into Vietnam." The comment is striking, because Obama's strategy for Afghanistan bears a remarkable resemblance to Nixon's "Vietnamization" strategy.
Under Vietnamization, Nixon bought time with the public at home by gradually withdrawing U.S. troops (he still spent the lives of more than 20,000 in the process) while shifting the burden of combat to the Saigon government's forces and simultaneously strengthening them so they would presumably be able to stand up to their communist opponent once the last American combat troops departed. Tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery and infantry weapons of all sorts were lavished on Saigon's army and jet fighter-bombers and helicopters on its air force.
But unless they are mainly mercenary, armies usually reflect the nature of the society from which they are drawn, and Saigon's society was ruled by a clique of generals and their wives and hangers-on whose incompetence and venality were monumental. When the North Vietnamese army launched another offensive in 1975, the Saigon forces possessed all they needed to fight, except the will. They collapsed and fled faster than their enemy could catch up with them.
In his strategy memo, Obama similarly posits strengthening the Afghan armed forces and police so that he will be able to gradually reduce U.S. troops. The rub is that Obama's ally, Afghan president Hamid Karzai, and his half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, preside over a massively corrupt government and show no evidence of willingness to reform it. Woodward also tells us that Hamid Karzai has become mentally unstable, given to severe mood swings and "increasingly delusional and paranoid." It would be a miracle if an Afghan national army and police force able to take on the Taliban could be created in this void of morality and competence.
"Got Hope?" was one of the rallying cries of Obama's supporters during the 2008 election campaign. He will need hope in Afghanistan. The Taliban obviously cannot defeat the U.S. Army in set-piece battles, but it does not have to do that to win the war. It can bleed us men and treasure, year after year, until the American people have had enough.
Neil Sheehan is the author of "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam," which won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His latest book, "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon," will appear in paperback this month.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER
Tom Franklin
Morrow
ISBN 978-0060594664
274 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post Book World. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
The incantatory title of Tom Franklin's terrific new novel comes from the way children in the South are taught to spell Mississippi: "M-I crooked letter crooked letter I crooked letter crooked letter I humpback humpback I." But letters aren't the only thing twisted in the rural town of Chabot, Miss., where this story of long-delayed repercussions and revelations takes place. Franklin, an Edgar-winning writer of atmospheric tales, deserves an audience to match the praise he's attracted for "Poachers," "Hell at the Breech" and "Smonk." If you're looking for a smart, thoughtful novel that sinks deep into a Southern hamlet of the American psyche, "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter" is your next book.
The opening chapter introduces us to Larry Ott, a gentle weirdo -- "Scary Larry" to the locals -- who lives his simple, strictly ritualized life in withering isolation. The fact that his house is full of books -- mostly horror novels -- does little to discourage the rumors about him. Every morning, he puts on a clean uniform and goes to his auto repair shop, hoping someone will stop in. But no one ever has, which renders "his shop more a tradition than a business." Not that such economic stagnation is uncommon in this town marked by touches of Gothic decay. The local clothing store, for instance, "had gone so long without customers it'd briefly become a vintage clothing store without changing stock."
Meanwhile, the citizens of Chabot are terrified by what might have happened to the daughter of their richest resident. Missing now for eight days, she seems a cruel echo of another young woman who vanished 25 years ago during the only date Larry Ott ever had. He knows he's a "person of interest" in regard to this new crime -- vandals and policemen have made that clear -- but, still, he doesn't expect to be shot in the chest when he arrives home.
"Crooked Letter" makes a haunting demonstration of Faulkner's claim that "the past is never dead. It's not even past." With a bullet lodged near the protagonist's heart, the story slips back to Larry's adolescence when he was a book-loving, asthmatic kid who knew too much about snakes and not nearly enough about sports. He's ostracized from his peers and taunted even by his own father: "You got it easy," the man sneers at him. "Momma's boy reading the livelong day. Watch your cartoons, play with your dolls, read your funny books. But you can't unscrew a god dang bolt to save your life, can't charge a dad blame battery."
Poor Larry has only one nightly prayer: that God might send him a friend, which, of course, is the sort of pungent desire that kids can smell a stone's throw away. But Larry has no preconceptions about who that friend might be. None of the class or race lines drawn in his newly desegregated school matter to him at all.
These childhood scenes are so painfully accurate that one suspects Franklin was not the coolest kid in eighth grade. He also gives an evocative description of the racial tension that came to such small Mississippi schools when the federal rulings finally prevailed, which sets up a fascinating contrast with the state of race relations in present-day Chabot. Now that the old economic hierarchy has collapsed, no more blacks work as nannies or cooks in white homes, and the scariest place in town is "White Trash Ave."
Even as we slowly learn of the slights, assaults and crimes that took place 25 years ago, another strand of the story pursues the investigation into Larry's shooting. The constable who takes up his case is an introspective African-American named Silas Jones. Though Silas is well-liked and gainfully employed, he bears a shameful connection to Larry; both men live in the shadow of decisions they made long ago in moments of panic, and Silas, in particular, is feeling the cost of his silence, his pride, his cowardice. As he searches for the missing girl and tries to solve Larry's shooting, he's dogged by the sense that something essential is missing from him.
Franklin is a master of subtle withholding, revealing lines of culpability and sympathy in this small town one crooked letter at a time. Some sins are too late to atone for, but others aren't. I was reminded of another fine novel about the poisoned friendship between a white boy and a black boy called "Prince Edward," by Dennis McFarland, but Franklin's tale has those Southern Gothic shadows that make it darker and more unnerving. And yet, if you've grown weary of abducted-women thrillers, "Crooked Letter" offers a welcome relief. The author manages to make the women's disappearances the crux of the plot, but not the center of his story. He's a lot more interested in the collateral damage of those crimes.
Franklin first attracted attention as a short story writer, and you can see that skill in this well-crafted tale, which despite all the historical and psychological ground it covers, finishes up in a tight 272 pages. The terror of a quiet oddball is a thread-worn plot, of course, but this is a novel that spells out something else entirely.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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