Washington Post Book Reviews
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Tuesday March 15, 2011 |
REVOLUTION: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
Deb Olin Unferth
Henry Holt
ISBN 978-0805093230
208 pages
$24
Reviewed by Stephen Lowman
Deb Olin Unferth met George at an anti-CIA protest. She quickly fell in love. When George, a passionately devout Christian and communist sympathizer, asked if she wanted to go to Nicaragua and join the Sandinistas, she said "OK." So in 1987, at the age of 18, Unferth dropped out of college and traveled with George by bus to Central America. They were "a couple of idiot gringos" traipsing through bullet-scarred capitals, searching for revolution jobs, and spouting the lingo of liberation theology.
They were also young and stupidly in love, and the reader will have a pretty good idea as to how it's all going to end.
Even if we've never joined a revolution, at some point we've been in their shoes. And speaking of footwear, Unferth devotes one short chapter to the subject. She laments not having packed Birkenstocks because it "turns out the revolution was going to involve a lot of walking." Instead, she brought an uncomfortable, strappy number that soon fell apart. "But I'd wanted to look nice, you know, cute for the revolution." Unferth later learned that the Sandinistas jokingly referred to the foreigners who were inspired by their revolution and flocked to their country as "Sandalistas."
Part travel journal, part coming-of-age memoir, "Revolution" is at its most charming, and funny, in these tales of naivete and cultural difference. At one point Unferth fights for her right to go braless at a church-run orphanage in El Salvador, where she and George work in exchange for lodging. George, always loyal, follows her out the door when the head nun kicks her to the street.
Unferth spends the book's last chapters wondering what became of George and trying to understand their relationship. Part of the attraction can surely be summed up by a motto she found on the bedroom wall of a hostel: "Life is too short to eat vanilla ice cream and dance with boring men."
Stephen Lowman can be reached at lowmans(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE WRONG WAR: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan
Bing West
Random House
ISBN 978-1400068739
307 pages
$28
Reviewed by Chris Bray
In a new book about the war in Afghanistan, distinguished military affairs writer Bing West argues that hazy objectives, bad political assumptions and a long strategic muddle have burned away whatever structure of success American grunts have built on the battlefield. In this telling, tactical excellence and the considerable courage of frontline troops are forever being rendered nugatory by failed leadership.
West spreads the blame widely, but finds a failure of political culture at the heart of the problem. Endlessly engaged in euphemism and rhetorical triangulation, American generals and politicians insist on a story in which war isn't war, and doesn't center on killing. Official doctrine instead declares that professional warriors are engaged in a nation-building strategy "to serve and secure the population," a focus that West argues has "transformed the military into a giant Peace Corps."
Few leaders are spared. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pronounces that "we can't kill our way to victory" in a counterinsurgency. West's judgment: "That was political drivel."
He writes that "the senior ranks were determined to sell counterinsurgency as benevolent nation building," a politically motivated story that promised to minimize domestic opposition.
While he speaks poorly of most military leaders, West argues that the "political drivel" started at the top. Former President George W. Bush "proclaimed his messianic belief that all peoples desired freedom, regardless of the cultural context," wading into war without a clear idea of what it would entail. As a result of this unrealistic organizing vision, the Bush administration "did not have a coherent strategy and was riven by internal dissension." The effective prosecution of a war requires that it be organized with achievable objectives that grow from realistic expectations. Here was the first in a long string of failures.
Not that a change of leadership helped, West adds, as President Barack Obama carefully hedged his bets with a shifting and foggy series of objectives. "By declaring an ambiguous mission," West writes, "the president had positioned himself brilliantly as a politician. His Delphic pronouncements left open his options. That same uncertainty harmed the military mission."
While American leaders have dithered and fantasized, West charges, Afghan leaders have used the war as a business, enriching themselves through patronage and graft. But the counterinsurgency doctrine that has guided much of the American effort in Afghanistan promotes stabilization for the purpose of establishing legitimate government. "The American goal was to persuade Afghan tribes to support a centrally controlled, deeply corrupt democracy," West writes. This clash between doctrine and reality builds a trap that recurrently captures its makers.
The soldiers caught in the trap can see it clearly. West quotes a perceptive Army officer, Capt. Matt Golsteyn: "We're the insurgents here ... and we're selling a poor product called the Kabul government."
This smart analysis of political fantasy and failure is not the heart of the book, however. As always, West's greatest strengths are his exceptional personal courage and his experienced perception of combat. He anchors a narrative of failed policy in a set of battlefield stories that explains events with unusual clarity. Particularly harrowing is West's account of a disastrous fight in the Konar Province village of Ganjigal, in an operation called Dancing Goat 2 that left five Americans and nine soldiers of the Afghan National Army dead.
The battlefield sequences and West's examination of the politics of the war fit together well, showing the human price of the conflict while raising questions about what those costs have bought. Political failure in war threatens to waste human lives, and this book connects the failure and the damaged lives with careful effort.
Finally, West ends a descriptive and analytical narrative with prescription, in a chapter titled "The Way Out." Some of the solutions he offers here raise more questions than they answer, such as his observation that the availability of sanctuary in Pakistan makes it impossible to defeat an enemy that can leave Afghanistan to survive and regroup. This is true and widely acknowledged, but West joins the rest of us in having no particular answer to the dilemma.
Most important, though, West argues for Afghans to assume the lead in securing Afghanistan. The time has surely come to take that suggestion -- and the book in which it appears -- seriously.
Chris Bray is a former soldier.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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