Many readers will recall a writer named Paula Broadwell. Broadwell was responsible for a shocking act of propaganda about the razing of the village of Tarok Kolache, in which she wrote on Tom Ricks’s blog of a U.S. Army unit bombing a village to the ground then mocked upset villagers for insufficiently appreciating the Army’s offer to rebuild it afterward. She quickly walked back her writing on the incident, and the Army battalion commander responsible got in his own jabs as well.

Needless to say, the incident was horrible for a number of reasons, including how many of Broadwell’s arguments about the village later proved to be absolutely false or misleading. Broadwell wrote this propaganda while researching her book-length hagiography of General David Petraeus, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that she mentions this incident in an effort to paint him in the most favorable light possible.

Paula mentions Tarok Kolache in a long narrative about efforts to “clear” the South of Afghanistan. Aside from the very unsettling fact that her book’s narrative of the campaign differs sharply from her posts about it at Tom Ricks’ blog (in the book I couldn’t find any references to “Mohammad,” the Afghan villager Broadwell accused of displaying “a fit of theatrics” when he was angry that his village was destroyed), Broadwell mischaracterizes my own objections to and analysis of this incident—and even more bizarrely, despite being in occasional email contact with me in the months since (we’re on the same listserv and have corresponded), Paula presented followup comments from LTC Michael Flynn but never sought my comment on the matter.

To wit, on page 162 Broadwell mentions my criticism of the razing:

The Afghan report claiming $100 million in property damage also set off a brief eruption in the blogosphere. Joshua Foust, a fellow at the American Security Project and a PBS columnist who previously worked in the intelligence community, revisited Flynn’s decision in October to level Tarok Kolache in a post called “The Unforgivable Horror of Village Razing.” He cited the inaccurate Daily Mail story quoting Flynn telling villagers in Khosrow Sofla that if they didn’t tell him where IEDs had been buried, he would wipe the village off the face of the earth. He argued that bombing villages in in Kandahar Province as a means of ridding them of IEDs and homemade explosives violated Article 33 of the Geneva Convention. Foust also questioned whether Flynn was circumventing oversight by the Afghan Ministry of the Interior by independently choosing members of the Afghan Local Police detachment in Charqolba Olya. He wondered whether Flynn and other U.S. commanders should have involved Afghan colonel Abdul Raziq in the clearing of Khosrow Sofla and other villages in early October.

There’s a bit more there but I’m limiting this to her portrayal of what I said. For starters, I never once argued that Flynn violated Article 33 of the Geneva Convention — I wondered at what point a policy of razing villages would violate Article 33. It is an important semantic distinction, as Broadwell’s version claims that I accused Flynn of committing a war crime. I never did such a thing.

Moving on, Broadwell declines, for reasons I don’t understand, to note that I originally wrote that first post not because of a Daily Mail article but because of what Broadwell herself had written. It was Broadwell’s boosterism of the razing policies, and not the Daily Mail’s reporting, which had first sparked my interest and then my ire. Considering the conflagration that followed, in which she participated, both on Ricks’ blog and on her own Facebook page, Broadwell cannot reasonably claim to be ignorant of what, exactly, I was responding to (especially when we consider that most of what she recounts in that paragraph is not actually in the Daily Mail story).

Further, the debate over Tarok Kolache became a series of competing posts both here and at Tom Ricks’ blog, and when actual reporters covered the story they were neither as complimentary as Broadwell nor as dismissive of local Afghans’ concerns.

Broadwell cannot claim to be ignorant of followup posts I wrote about Tarok Kolache, since in the original post there is no mention, not even in the comments, of the Afghan Local Police. That came in a succeeding post, where—once again—my concerns about the policy to build up the ALP come not from that single Daily Mail story, as Broadwell contends, but from Broadwell’s own writing. She is, once again, misconstruing the nature of the disagreement, and neglecting to mention her own role in pushing a version of events her book implicitly admits was just not accurate (at least judging by how much her version of events has evolved in the last year).

Broadwell is also leaving out huge pieces of analysis of how bad an idea this village razing was (you can see those summarized here), but I want to end this with one very important point: no matter what Broadwell writes about the necessity of dropping twenty-five tons of explosives on a collection of mud huts, no matter how often she quotes LTC Flynn denying he ever threatened villagers with the destruction of their homes if they didn’t try to remove IEDs, there are multiple examples from multiple media outlets of similar circumstances that dispute Broadwell’s account.

For example, Carlotta Gall reported on Khosrow Sofla:

Some of the damage has been extensive, such as in the village of Taroko Kalacha, in Arghandab district, which was so heavily mined by the Taliban that American forces resorted to aerial bombardment and leveled the whole village of 36 homes. The guidelines reissued by the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, General David H. Petraeus, permitted such a step, one NATO official said.

The neighboring village of Khosrow fared better. About 10 compounds and orchards were damaged, but after villagers saw the destruction of Taroko Kalacha, they hired a former mujahedeen fighter to defuse the Taliban mines and so saved their houses from destruction, said one of the village elders, Hajji Abdul Qayum.

So there’s a village seeing the devastation of a nearby town, choosing to hire someone to clear it without bombing it smithereens. In nearby Helmand, too, the British Marines showed that such devastation was just not necessary:

Ambitious plans were rapidly drawn up to clear the village of IEDs and then secure it until local residents had returned to their homes. An exhaustive process of consultation determined that dozens of families, scattered across central Helmand, were prepared to return home to Char Coucha if the bombs were cleared.

Despite high demand for counter-IED specialists across Helmand, a clearance force of 80 was deployed to Char Coucha to undertake the risky first stage of the operation – a painstaking fingertip search of an entire village and all its complex terrain, including partially-destroyed compounds with overgrown vegetation up to 6ft high.

There is ample evidence, in other words, both that Flynn did in fact issue some sort of ultimatum to the villagers of the Arghandab, and that in other areas similarly booby-trapped villages were cleared without dropping 25 tons of explosives on them. This is important as one thinks about why Broadwell would twist the reality of Tarok Kolache into such an unrecognizable mess. Knowing, for example, that multiple Afghans told reporters that Flynn had threatened their villages with destruction is difficult to square with Broadwell’s insistences that Flynn did no such thing, unless we assume the motive that she is deliberately whitewashing the reality of the war to make the subject of her book, David Petraeus (and by extension his subordinates who carried out his orders), look better than he deserves. That an ISAF Major General went so far as to tell the AfPak Channel that this was part of a deliberate policy to “allows the district governor to connect with the population by leading the process of compensating the property owner for the rebuilding costs” highlights further just how dishonestly Broadwell is portraying events.

So here’s a bigger question: when the one tiny bit of Broadwell’s story that I’m aware of is riddled with such half-truths, spin, and outright deception about what really happened, how can I possibly trust her and her co-author to tell the rest of David Petraeus’ career (and his vaunted leadership skills) honestly? She has demonstrated a decided lack of honesty in portraying what can only be called a minor sidenote in the war; on what basis can any of us trust that the bigger arguments she makes are even mostly honest?

When I contacted Broadwell, her response was cheery and non-committal. “I thought we portrayed all sides but will certainly go back and look! I don’t think anything was portrayed dishonestly at all and I am very sorry if it came across that way to you. I strive very hard to present all sides. What was written is from the blogs and can be verified.”

Indeed it can.

And no, I did not buy her book to research this. I looked through it at a Barnes & Noble, taking pictures of the relevant pages on my cellphone. I find her marketing scheme of donating some of her proceeds to the Wounded Warrior Project completely classless. Since I didn’t want to punish the WWP by not buying her book, I instead donated $100 to the project as an apology. And that’s way more than they would have gotten with a single extra book sale anyway.

IMAGE: Paula recently appeared on the Daily Show With John Stewart to promote her book. She challenged him to a pushup contest to donate money to Wounded Warriors.

Chen, Jay, ed. A Small Key Opens Big Doors. 50 Years of Amazing Peace Corps Stories, Volume Three: The Heart of Eurasia. Travelers Tales: Palo Alto, 2011.336 pages, includes Foreword, Preface, Introduction, Acknowledgments.

Disclosure: Jay Chen is a friend and fellow Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV). We served in the same group in Kazakhstan starting in the summer of 2005. I even submitted a story to this collection, and while I’m not surprised it didn’t make the cut, I was surprised to see my name in the Acknowledgments in the back. The tone of this book is quite different from most reviewed for Registan’s readers, but it undoubtedly shares many valuable American impressions of Central Eurasia. In full disclosure, there are chapters by a few RPCV friends from Kazakhstan.

This is a book  is travel literature of a unique variety. Unlike most of the books printed by its publisher, there is very little actual travel. This is not a surprise to those familiar with the US Peace Corps, which typically involves only two big trips: from and to your home in the United States. For my own part I recall having a strong desire to distinguish myself from other Americans and foreign travelers while abroad – I was not a tourist, or a missionary, or a Foreign Service employee. I was attempting to come to some better understanding of the people around me (with the implied snobbery that the others were not). And so, this is a book less of introspection and more of first, second, and thirtieth impressions of a cultural, political, religious, and economic experience still confusing to Volunteers after two or three years of living as close to another culture as deemed “safe” and “useful” by the US government.

This is not an official Peace Corps publication. Naturally this has its pros and cons. A mixed blessing is that the texts have not been sanitized, cleared, censored, or otherwise edited by the US government. Also, the selection is visibly skewed to those the editor and publishers were able to contact and coerce into writing. One of the concessions, it would seem, is that no rights are being claimed – the stories are all listed in the back as “published with permission from the author,” though most have never appeared in print before. Judging from the countries and times represented, this book is not an overall representation of Peace Corps’ efforts in Eurasia – but it does not claim to be such. There is a heavy emphasis in two areas: Kazakhstan in the mid-2000s (seven chapters) and Turkey in the 1960s (thirteen chapters). One of the contributors, Sandy Lee Anderson, is described as active in maintaining ties with her fellow 1960s Turkey Volunteers. Combine that with the fact that she lives in Washington, D.C. – a stopping point or career location for many RPCVs – and the focus on Turkey becomes less surprising.

The editor has gathered a group of stories that span the gamut of writing styles and tones. There are stories of those who loved their sites and those that were less comfortable. There are humorous stories and touching stories. There are more than a few of the type so common in Peace Corps: I learned a lot more about myself when I learned a little bit about others. And yet there is also the lingering sense of career guilt – more than a few express pride or defensiveness, “I have never regretted my two years.” I certainly don’t regret my time in the Peace Corps – but why should anyone that returns safe and suffers no criminal or other actions during their term?

I recommend this book to those looking for a very human, realistic, organic view of Peace Corps from within. In the same way that I cannot prove that no PCV ever went on to become a CIA spy, these stories make it clear that the majority of volunteers would constitute an unwise investment on the part of America’s clandestine actions. A spy does not want to learn another person’s culture – he must do so in order to better oppose it. Spies spend less time on understanding and more time on mimicry. PCVs may not be as linguistically skilled as the more serious Foreign Service employees and missionary workers – but they bring a very different mindset to the game. A valuable mindset that does not always compute to those only concerned with geopolitics and Great-Game style intrigues. But those who deny its value and impact do so out of ignorance.

Story contributions by Country, Term of Service

Mongolia, 2001-2003
Turkey, 1969-1970
Moldova, 2000-2002
Ukraine, 2003-2005
Turkey, 1966-1968
Ukraine, 1993-1995
Bulgaria, 2004-2006 (2 stories)
Macedonia (evac), Romania, 2001-2002
Turkey, 1965-1967
Tom Fleming, 2003-2005
Mongolia, 2000-2002
Turkmenistan, 2003-2005
Armenia, 2003-2005
Kazakhstan, 2006-2008
Turkey, 1966-1968
Uz 2005 (evac), Kaz 2005-2006
Poland, 1994-1996
Turkey, 1962-1964
Ukraine, 1993-1995
Turkey, 1966-68
Romania, ??-??
Mongolia, 2006-2008
Turkey, 1964-66
Armenia, 2007-2008
Ukraine, 1999-2001
Mongolia, 2001-2003
Turkey, 1963-1965
Kazakhstan, 2005-2007
Ukraine, 2005-2007
Turkey, 1962-1963
Bulgaria, 2002-2004
Albania, 1995-1997
Kazakhstan, 2005-2007
Turkey, 1960s (??-??)
Kazakhstan, 2005-2008
Moldova, 1991-1993
Turkey, Yemen 1960s (??-??)
Kazakhstan, 2005-2007
Kyrgyzstan, 1997-1999
Ukraine, 1993-1995
Kazakhstan, 2004-2006
Turkey, 1964-1966
Poland, 1991-1993
Kazakhstan, 2001-2003
Bulgaria, 2004-2007
Iran, 1965-1968
Turkey, 1960s (??-??)

The failure to find bin Laden was a seminal moment in the history of the war in Afghanistan. And it was a catastrophe. From that moment—the moment he escaped his apparent hideout in Tora Bora and went on to make his sneering speeches and send them out to the world—from that moment everything about the Afghanistan war became unclear, unfocused, murky and confused. The administration in Washington, emboldened by what it called its victory over the Taliban, decided to move on Iraq. Its focus shifted, it took its eye off the ball, and Afghanistan is now what it is.

You’d think, nearly a decade after the events of Tora Bora, that Mr. Rumsfeld would understand the extent of the error and the breadth of its implications. He does not. Needless to say, Tora Bora was the fault of someone else—Gen. Franks of course, and CIA Director George Tenet. “Franks had to determine whether attempting to apprehend one man on the run” was “worth the risks.” Needless to say “there were numerous operational details.” And of course, in a typical Rumsfeldian touch, he says he later learned CIA operatives on the ground had asked for help, but “I never received such a request from either Franks or Tenet and cannot imagine denying it if I had.” I can.

—Peggy Noonan, of all people, dropping a neutron bomb on Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, in the Wall Street Journal. I’m sad she never said this sort of thing while Rumsfeld was in charge, but it’s gratifying to see her say it now.

Previously:
Don Rumsfeld luvs teh Central Asias
The Rumsfeld Foundation, focusing on Central Asia in partnership with S. Frederick Starr and the Central Asia Caucasus Institute.

My friend Manan Ahmed has a brilliant essay in The National, on the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s rejection of expertise:

Both [Rory] Stewart and [Greg] Mortenson illustrate one particular configuration of the relationship between knowledge and the American empire – the “non-expert” insider who can traverse that unknown terrain and, hence, become an “expert”.

Even a cursory examination of the archive dealing with the American efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan demonstrates that there has been no related growth in specific scholarly knowledge about those sites of conflict. The knowledge of Arabic, Urdu or Pashto remains at extremely low levels in official corridors. There is, one can surmise simply from reading the back and forth sway of military and political policy in Afghanistan, very little advancement in understanding of either the text or context of that nation.

In America’s imperial theatre, Stewart and Mortenson exemplify a singular notion of “expert”. We can build, based on the profiles of other specimens – Robert D Kaplan, Fareed Zakaria, Robert Kagan – a picture of what the ideal type looks like from the official point of view. Such an “expert” is usually one who has not studied the region, and especially not in any academic capacity. As a result, they do not possess any significant knowledge of its languages, histories or cultures. They are often vetted by the market, having produced a bestselling book or secured a job as a journalist with a major newspaper. They are not necessarily tied to the “official” narratives or understandings, and can even be portrayed as being “a critic” of the official policy. In other words, this profile fits one who doesn’t know enough.

At the same time there are greater claims, and greater efforts, towards satellite cameras and listening devices; drones which can hover for days; databases which can track all good Taliban and all bad Taliban. Yet who can decipher this data? When one considers the rise of “experts” such as Stewart or Mortenson against the growth of digitised data which remains elusive and overwhelming, one is left with a rather stark observation – that the American war effort prefers its human knowledge circumspect or circumscribed and its technical knowledge crudely totalised.

Read the whole thing in full. He is getting at something I’ve noticed within the government, which became so intently frustrating I had to seek employment outside of it: the quest for, and consumption of, knowledge not for its own sake, but merely for exploitation. It was the heart of my fundamental disagreement with the Intelligence Community’s attitude toward knowledge. Learning something without bias (or at least an honest attempt to avoid bias, in the sense of understanding a thing, place, people, or idea on its own merits) will reveal things you will never learn if you start, from day one, filtering for information you can exploit for action.

That is, at its heart, what is wrong with our policies in Afghanistan, and why we’re struggling to maintain the stalemate we’ve been able to achieve. The people in charge of Afghanistan never learned about Afghanistan the people—they only learned about Afghanistan the war zone. Stephen Tanner’s influential 2002 book, Afghanistan: A Military History From Alexander The Great To The Fall Of The Taliban, exemplifies this, for it sees Afghanistan as nothing but millenia of conflict and war and conquest. Seen through this lens, its people can never develop agency save as spoilers for tyrants and marauding kings; Afghanistan as a place filled with people can never have history, culture, customs, or self. It is only a vessel for war.

That mindset infects U.S. policy thinking utterly. And it is why you can still read government reports about exploiting tribes or pushing various inane ideas but never questioning what a tribe is, or if it matters, or if any of those ideas had been tried again. As Manan argues quite eloquently, it is based upon a rejection of expertise, and in many ways a rejection of knowledge. Which is precisely what I, too, angrily rail against routinely.

Well done.

Thanks to those of you who’ve gone out and bought my book, Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. Long term readers will find much that is familiar, though I’ve noticed, leafing through it, that having it packaged in a book makes the story of the war in Afghanistan make a tiny bit more sense.

CJ Chivers at the New York Times wrote a very nice review of it. I thank him for that, as there are many flaws in it he could have pointed out. “Though he has softened his language and tone lately,” Chivers writes, “[Mr. Foust] often does not play nice.” Too true! My tone is something I need to soften, if for no other reason that I’m realizing people actually read this stuff, so I can’t mouth off and make a joke out of ridicule the way a total unknown can.

Anyway, it is still on sale. I’m trying to get some more events lined up, so if you want me to come somewhere (and know how to pay for it!), I’m all ears.

I rarely read fiction anymore, so this book is one of the rare exceptions:

Andrei Volos, Hurramabad, Moscow: GLAS Publishers, 2001. Translated by Arch Tait.

Hurramabad is a collection of short stories on the theme of ethnic Russians in Tajikistan. The Russians of Tajikistan, who arrived as Soviet administrators and skilled workers, emigrated en masse in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in the lead-up to the civil war. The English translation of Hurramabad includes seven short stories, only one of which does not have ethnic Russians as the protagonist(s). Russians (and other ethnicities) had many reasons for leaving Tajikistan. Fleeing a country at war is obvious enough, but there where many other factors, including rising nationalism and economic problems. I don’t suggest here that Russians were the primary victims of the war, as it was Tajiks, Uzbeks and Pamiris who made up the overwhelming majority of casualty figures. But many Russians were victims in the broad sense. Volos should know, as his family was forced to leave this country where he had been born and raised.

Volos’ book falls into the category of historical fiction, as real people, places and events form the backdrop for the fictional protagonists. But the fiction is barely fiction. “Hurramabad” is obviously Dushanbe, and the events in the book all match up nicely with what actually happened. That may lead some readers into not seeing as large a picture as those who know the history of Tajikistan. For example, in one passage men have a cantankerous debate about which public square to go protests at, an anecdote that lets the informed reader know that the date is April-May 1992. In another instance two Russian women discuss riots that occurred in February, an obvious reference to the February 1990 riots and demonstrations in Dushanbe. And “that snake Yusupov” is clearly Shodmon Yusuf, the then leader of the Democratic Party of Tajikistan, who scared the hell out of ethnic Russians when he got on the radio and strongly hinted that bad things may happen to non-Tajiks (although in the novel the event is out of its proper place in time).

In the first short story an elderly Russian lady is being walked up a hill to a graveyard by her grandson. On the way to the grave of her husband she recounts – for the hundredth time – how she arrived in Tajikistan, or rather the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, in 1930. Her account of a boat ride up the Amu Darya and the Panj river is one of trepidation, as anti-Soviet Basmachis rebels still make incursions across the river from Afghanistan. She has no idea if her husband, sent as a Soviet administrator, is still alive. As she struggles up the hill towards the graveyard you are left with the image of a dying old woman who, despite not being a Tajik or other local nationality, knows nothing but Tajikistan, and who will never leave.

The second, and my favorite, is the story of a Russian man who never lived in Tajikistan, but who became enchanted with the country and desperately wanted to “go native” and stay in the country. Abandoning his wife and children in Russian he takes a low-paying job in a bazaar and marries a Tajik. He becomes fluent in Tajik, much to the confusion of locals who mistake him for Tatar, as almost no Russians ever bothered to learn the language, even if born and raised in Tajikistan. Desperate to be accepted, but considered an outsider by locals, the man suffers through his daily existence as the country falls apart on the streets of Hurramabad (Dushanbe). And then finally, there is a chance to be accepted as a local… and it’s not what he wanted.

In the next story, an old Russian lady welcomes what she thinks is a harmless grass snake into her home while expressing her desire to remain in Tajikistan, whatever the terrible consequences may be. Nothing is what it seems, especially the snake. I guess this is where the English and Literature students take over and pull out the symbolism, metaphor, whatever… I get it, but I didn’t dwell to much as I was eager to move on to the next story.

In ‘A Decent Stone for a Father’s Grave’ you already know what the story is about. Searching out a decent gravestone the Russian protagonist encounters locals trying to buy his possessions at a price suitable to be asked by a man desperate to leave the country and who can’t bring all his possessions with him. The greed and opportunism of a local prospective buyer of the Russian man’s car is then put into perspective when the Russian finds out that the Tajik man who could build the gravestone to his specific needs was executed on the street recently.

The other stories include the kidnapping of foreign journalists by a local warlord, the trading of a kidnapped Tajik girl for a weapon, the theft of a Russian man’s dream house by armed commanders of the winning side, and the account of a man waiting to leave to Russia.

And the writing style? It’s quite clearly realism. The descriptions of activities on the streets and in the bazaars is nothing grand, but it’s gives you a clear image in your head. And the stories are mostly of very small events punctuated by the crisis droning on in the back ground. Things seem normal, and then you are given passages like this:

“The crucified city was howling in fear and pain; the air itself seemed full of violence, rape, and robbery. It would have been better if the telephones had not been functioning at all, because rumours of what was going on in the outskirts of Hurramabad were enough to drive you mad.”

But at times the characters’ – and indeed the author’s – love for the land is clear:

“I’m a foreigner here now,” Dubrovin forced himself to say, shrugging his shoulders. He frowned as he repeated the word to himself. A foreigner, a foreigner! He found it to be a meaningless aggregate of sounds, because everything around him gave it the lie: this hilly, jagged land lit by a reddish moon in which two generations of his ancestors had been laid to rest; the hot violet sky in which the pure stars twinkled moistly; the smell of sunbaked dust and camel thorn; the chirring of the crickets; the outbursts of barking dogs in the kishlak.

Volos is not often this florid in his writing style, and he wisely saves it for the right moment. Overall, you are given a vivid image of the place and time. You may not get all the references, and having been in the country may help you to imagine things more “accurately.” But you should get the same satisfaction even if you don’t understand the war, the country, or even the sprinkling of Tajiki. And despite the cruelty on the part of some of the locals, the book does show affection for the people and the country – so many of which were victims of the civil war. I don’t often recommend fiction, but I do strongly recommend Volos’ book.

As I’m sure many of you blog (but not RSS!) readers have noticed, I have a book coming out this month with Just World Books. Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net is an edited compilation of the last four years of blogging in this space: starting with my trip there last year with the Human Terrain System, and incorporating the last several years of wrestling with the country’s social and political environment, along with the messy and often incoherent intricacies of American policy.

To celebrate, I’m holding a launch party at 4 pm on Tuesday, November 9 at The Stimson Center. It’s a busy day—there’s another Afghanistan conference (invitation only!) at the New America Foundation, and later that evening is Robert Kaplan’s glittery launch party at the Willard Intercontinental.

However: this is a special occasion for me—not the latest in a long string of conferences on the same topic, and not my millionth book. This is an important project on the part of JWB, by adding significant value to the blogs they publish by organizing and editing them, and making them easy to digest in a single sitting (something many blogs, especially ones with thousands of entries over many years of multiple authorship, like Registan.net, do not make easy). Plus, I think this is an important perspective to be heard—no less than Anatol Lieven declared Afghanistan Journal it to be “deeply depressing,” and former Ambassador Ron Neumann has both endorsed it, and offered to host my party at Stimson.

So, dear readers: if any of you are in the Washington, DC area on November 9, come out to the Stimson Center at 4 pm! I’d love to meet every single one of you!

I always hate reading lists. They usually lend insight to the lister, rather than the subject the list is ostensibly about. That being said, this Afghanistan Politics reading list—for Foreign Affairs, of all places!—by Zalmay Khalilzad is just bizarre:

• A Thousand Splendid Suns. By Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead, 2007.
• The Places in Between. By Rory Stewart. Harcourt, 2006.
• In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan. By Seth G. Jones. W. W. Norton, 2009.
• Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. By Ahmed Rashid. Viking, 2008.
• After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan. By James F. Dobbins. Potomac Books, 2008.
• Reconciliation in Afghanistan. By Michael Semple. United States Institute of Peace, 2009.

Now, most of those names will be familiar to readers of this site… in a negative way. In fact, almost all of these authors I have derided for lending misleading or outright factually incorrect portrayals of Afghanistan. Judging by the last few years of the Afghanistan conference circuit, it’s kind of obvious these guys are all friends (Seth Jones in particular outright admits he’s friends with Dobbins and Khalilzad, for example). Probably the least objectionable book here—and that is saying a lot—is Hosseini’s book, which is maudlin, yes, and unrealistic in how it portrays Afghan families (they’d be aghast to have only two children, for example), but genuine to a large degree.

The other people on that list are bizarre choices, whether Rory Stewart’s consequence-free advocacy of withdrawal in prestigious magazines, or Seth Jones’ factually troubled and confused “history” of post-2001 Afghanistan, or Ahmed Rashid’s reckless fear-mongering about not just the Taliban but Muslims in general (his first book, Taliban, I thought a good primer), or Michael Semple, or even James Dobbins, whose tenure as “special representative” in the country didn’t exactly leave him blameless for how badly the early years got screwed up.

There is something of an ideology to how one chooses books about Afghanistan, which then propagates whatever variant of selection bias the list maker already has. In Khalilzad’s list (note: I am not a fan), we can see he likes his friends and doesn’t really care for any discussion of Afghan politics that is critical of Hamid Karzai. That’s great—I’m all about insiders patting insiders on the back in moderation—but none of those books actually discuss “Afghan Politics” in any real way. You don’t learn about the goings-on in Hamid Karzai’s administration from any of those books, for example. Nor do you learn about Karzai’s outreach efforts to competing political interests in the country—say, the many stages of Hekmatyar’s reconciliation talks, or Haqqani’s contentious relationship with Kabul going back to the late 1980s. You don’t even get a history of how politics tend to work in the country in recent history—like, before 2001—nor do you learn about the government’s structure or a history of its decisions.

In fact, Khalilzad’s book list doesn’t actually discuss Afghanistan’s politics, but western political interests in Afghanistan—which are very much not the same thing. He says that these books will “illuminate the main factors that will help determine the struggle’s outcome,” but I don’t know how Hosseini’s book about spousal abuse (for example) does that. While he mentions the international scramble for influence in the country, only maybe Rashid’s book discusses it in any detail; the rest don’t, except for the expected mentions of Pashtun communities in Pakistan’s border regions.

So now is the point where I cast irony to the winds and the Lords of Kobol, and list what I would recommend reading to understand Afghanistan’s domestic and regional politics. Just to be clear: I tend to favor academic books for history and personal memoirs for context, because that’s how I roll. It’s my own selection bias—in general, I write off or ignore pop history or pop political books about the place (and the region!) as being too shallow or too obvious. So anyway, in no particular order:

• Afghanistan by Louis Dupree and Taliban by Ahmed Rashid (reviewed here). Combined, the two books offer the most concise overview of Afghanistan up to the late 1990s or so. Dupree’s encyclopedic work remains the bible of how Afghanistan was organized before 1979, how its culture and religions (note the plural) used to work, and so on. It should be the foundation from which we understand Afghanistan’s more recent history, as it not only shows how horrible things have become (think of the Paghman Gardens, for example), but also the myths of Afghanistan that many of its leaders are still trying to recreate. Rashid is useful because Taliban, though by no means perfect, is nevertheless his most rigorous and interesting book, and forms a good introduction to understanding the Taliban movement and how it found support abroad.
• Land of the High Flags: Afghanistan When the Going Was Good, by Rosanne Klass (reviewed here). Klass’ memoir of when she was the first female teacher at an all-boy’s school in 1950′s Kabul is remarkable. There are sociologically fascinating tidbits to be gleaned from it. The Kuchi, for example, were exempt from Zahir Shah’s purdah, so the women walked around, even onto the grounds of the U.S. embassy, uncovered and unmolested, as did the Western women (there is a fascinating photograph of Klass, wearing a delightful sun dress, walking through a market past burqa-clad women in heels). But just as important is her overwhelming sense of grief—grief at what Afghanistan did to itself in the 60s and 70s, and total grief at what the Soviets did to it in the 1980s. Though personal in the extreme, hers was an experiential book, one that lent a feeling of place more than a history of it, and should, I think, form at least one basis for understanding Afghanistan as a nation of people and not just a nation of events.
• The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan, edited by Robert Crewes and Amin Tarzi. This is a thickly-written book for scholars, but it contains some real gems. One of the biggest is chapter one, written by Abdulkader Sinno, which is basically a shorter (and more easily comprehended) version of his dissertation/book about Pashtun social and political organization. His theory, greatly boiled down, is that the Taliban of the 1990s succeeded because they were good at mobilizing Pashtuns. M. Nazif Shahrani’s portrayal of the Taliban in an historical context is equally compelling, highlighting the emergence of the Taliban as a consequence of Afghanistan’s century-long status as a buffer state, with outside powers seeking power through the mobilization of Pashtun communities (see a theme here?). There are other compelling chapters—including a history of non-Pashtun tanzims during the Soviet War, and how incredibly brutal they were toward their own people—that establish a context beyond the superficial “good v. evil” portrayal of the mujahidin.
• Before Taliban, by David Edwards (Christian heartily recommended this and its predecessor, Heroes of the Age). Edwards charts, basically, the destruction of the dream of Afghanistan—how the country changed from a beacon of progressivism and growing modernity to a collapsed nightmare of terrorism and narco-trafficking. His ruminations in particular on identity and place are deeply revelatory, and have helped me to contextualize some of the often contradictory messages Afghan informants have told during interviews over the last several years.
• The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, by Barnett Rubin. This is probably the best single source one can read to get an idea of the continuity of Afghanistan’s politics. Many of the same figures he details in the late 1980s and early 1990s are still dominating the landscape today. In particular, I would suggest reading chapters 8 through 11, which discuss in excruciating detail how the imposition of the tanzims and other outside influences destroyed traditional tribal and community groups, leading to the radicalization and militarization of politics within the country. Understanding this context—written as Afghanistan was failing into utter darkness—is crucial to understanding how and why many of these players, and communities, currently behave and believe the way they do.
• The Afghanistan Wars, Second Edition, by William Maley. This is related to Rubin’s book, above: a comprehensive, detailed discussion of Afghanistan’s recent wars. This helps you understand the major conflict points, and which actors have influenced and ruined Afghanistan over the last 30 years or so. Along with his previous book, Fundamentalism Reborn, Maley must be considered one of the major authoritative sources on Afghanistan’s conflicts and the significant figures who drive them.
• “Afghanistan: Politics, Elections, and Government Performance,” by Kenneth Katzman, Congressional Research Service (download, PDF). This is not a book like the above selections, but it is one of the more concise pictures of what modern politics inside Afghanistan look like. Good comprehensive sources on how the government operates and how it relates to society are few and far between (though AREU has by far the most high quality research in one place), but this is a pretty decent overview of the latest elections. I do wish Katzman had discussed further the surprising 3rd place finish of Ramzan Bashardost (just named by Radio Free Afghanistan “Person of the Year, a vast improvement over when they gave the same honor to Gul Agha Sherzai in 2008), who is probably the most interesting person in Afghan politics. There are other articles and books that discuss these things in a reasonable detail (see here, for example, especially the two Glatzer articles and Giustozzi’s book), but rarely do they focus on Afghanistan’s politics instead of its conflicts.

We should take that last bullet point to heart. Despite Khalilzad’s earnest list-making, there is almost no comprehensive studies of Afghanistan’s politics—most studies seem to focus on American politics within Afghanistan, and especially the military’s politics within American politics. There are studies of the Taliban, to be sure, but rarely do they include a deep discussion of the government itself (I have, glaringly, omitted My Life with the Taliban by Abdul Salam Zaeef, as I have not yet read it and therefore cannot comment on it). There are scattered feature-length magazine articles about various figures within the government, but little if any comprehensive analysis of the country’s politics. Most of it is experiential, a memoir of an author’s experience trying to understand these things. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t really help us understand how things function, and how they are likely to function under a given set of stresses and predictable events.

Khalilzad’s list is, basically, light reading: none of the books he listed are terribly complex, and none should take more than a day or two to read and really comprehend. The books (and article!) on this list, however, are substantial: Dupree’s book alone is 804 pages, and all told these eight books total well over 3,000 pages of very dense mostly academic text. It would probably take a normal person with a day job well over a month of dedicated reading, hours a day, to work through all of this (and few of these books are available very cheaply), but that is necessary to get more than a shallow, and frankly misleading, understanding of Afghanistan as a place rather than as a talking point. Unfortunately, lists like Khalilzad’s tend to promote the latter, rather than understanding… which is why I’m so baffled as to why the Council on Foreign Relations not only asked him—hardly a disinterested scholar of Afghanistan—to assemble that list in the first place, but then accepted what many scholars of the country would dismiss as shallow and frivolous works. It makes no sense.

Back in January, Drew Conway, Thomas Zeitzoff, and I co-wrote a response to a high-profile study on ecologies of conflict. Our primary complaint wasn’t that quantitative study per se was wrong—after all, Thomas and Drew are primarily quantitative in their work—but that it requires a lot of context and understanding to give the numbers meaning beyond themselves.

Naturally, Andrew Exum joined the fray, calling the three of us a gang of assassins and generally going on about his opinions of the entire field of quantitative study. He eventually distilled his thoughts on the matter into a “manifesto,” which, being outright skeptical of quant studies’ value, generated severe angst in the academic blogosphere (our friend Drew wrote an engaging response).

Exum shot back by saying he was only kidding, and the post was meant to be flippant. Which is fine—he certainly has the right to write satire (though I hope he leaves a few more indicators he’s being silly next time). But what I found most interesting in all the fallout from this was a bloggingheads thingy between Dan Drezner—whose blog I don’t read (boring!) but whose professional work I enjoy—and Heather Hurlburt, the executive director of the National Security Network. They have a lengthy section where they discuss, essentially, the wonks vs. nerds debate:

I’m only a little shocked to see Drezner so willingly admitting the faults of academia—after all, he has tenure up at Tufts and doesn’t have to face reprisals from badmouthing any potential selection committee. But what was so tellingly absent from this discussion were the failures of the policy community. Both have serious issues: despite Hurlburt’s insistence policy work is grounded in the real world, any cursory glance at the kinds of work we discuss on here is ample evidence that just in our teeny, tiny world of Central Asia (and sometimes the Caucasus!) the actual real world very seldom factors into the analysis.

Indeed, I’d feel comfortable placing academia and policy in contrast merely for how each community chooses to ignore or simplify reality: academia retreats into theories and numbers, while policy retreats into ideologies and wish-fulfillment (and both struggle with serious bias issues and stereotypes).

So while it’s nice to see Drez (can I call him that?) admitting his field has it’s issues—it does!—I was surprised to see Hurlburt so unwilling to admit her own field’s issues as well. The reality is, reality is more complex than either field really gets comfortable admitting in papers and journals and books. And the reality is, fluently discussing anything in the real world is going to require understanding both worlds, since at the end of the day they focus on different things. And they kind of sorts of said that. I just wish they’d made that point clearer.

Originally posted to Steve LeVine’s excellent Oil and Glory blog.

It can be difficult to stand out in the somewhat crowded field of Russian scare-books. Whether arguing for the resumption of a “new cold war” or whatever conspiracy happens to be topical, recent years have seen an avalanche of books arguing that Russia is not the somewhat broken creature it is often portrayed in the West.

Boris Volodarsky, however, has a leg up. A former Captain in the GRU, he has first-hand access to many of the files, personalities, and programs one would need to discuss Russia’s international espionage activities. It is just this encyclopedic understanding that he brings to The KGB’s Poison Factory. Though often confusing because of the sheer volumes of names, pseudonyms, shadow programs, and overlapping personalities he puts into play, Volodarsky very clearly argues that the posture of Russian intelligence is essentially the same as has been throughout the 20th century.

Volodarsky argues that Russian intelligence holds as much venom for its individual detractors as for its international opponents, And it is venom that he seems primarily concerned with. Assassinations obviously can take many forms — the U.S. prefers flying robots these days. But Volodarsky argues that Russia has a special affection for poison.

And what a poison it is: The particular hallmark of Russian poisons, besides their creativity, seems to be their relatively long kill time. A victim will languish for weeks, even months, in sheer agony before either barely surviving or dying. Volodarsky describes this tradition while tracing Soviet and Russian poisoneers (for lack of a better term) through early uses of merely unusual plant extracts to the industrial development of unique compounds. The resulting potions are engineered specifically to mimic other problems, usually some form of gastritis, so that by the time doctors eventually realize what’s happened, it’s too late to fix.

The inspiration for Volodarsky’s history is the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the KGB defector slowly poisoned with Polonium-210 in 2006. While it can be difficult to parse the complicated history that Volodarsky writes — this is a book by and for insiders — the picture that emerges is damning of Russia going back decades. This might be where the book would fit in the pantheon of anti-Russia books: Volodarsky argues that the post-USSR poisoning activities of Russian intelligence demonstrate a strong continuity between Soviet and Russian activities.

In fact, if we were to read this in the context of similar books of the Russian government’s capriciousness — those by Anna Politkovskaya, for instance — it would be easy to think that it is more dangerous to oppose Moscow today than it was, say, in the 1970s, even though there was much more concern over it back then. Since Vladimir Putin left the Kremlin, Volodarsky writes, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, no longer has to report to the President — they only have to inform him, the prime minister. Given Putin’s almost legendary intolerance for dissent, and the environment he’s created, in which unofficial murders aren’t exactly approved but aren’t exactly punished, it is a pretty terrifying realm that Volodarsky explores.

Unfortunately, that exploration is a real bear to sift through. While the book is engaging as a work of espionage, I found it difficult to keep track of the tangle of personalities and operations. That is in part because Volodarsky’s footnotes aren’t exactly immaculate. Mixed with clinical discussions of operations are Volodarsky’s ideas about what constitutes good or poor tradecraft. While it’s certainly fun to see how central Vienna is to Russian-European espionage, my eyes glazed over during long expositions of place and timing. That’s not to fault Volodarsky’s writing. But for those who aren’t borderline obsessives with the mechanics of tradecraft, the endless detail can become exhausting. It is a little too inside baseball for a layman to pick up and comprehend, and Volodarsky doesn’t provide enough documentation for a layman to follow the breadcrumbs and learn more (though he does, to his credit, highlight other books for more information on individual kills.).

The KGB’s Poison Factory is still a fascinating to read. As long as you can slog through. Whether you’re looking for a concise history of Russian intelligence assassinations, or even a taste of how bewildering the intelligence hall of mirrors can be, it is a pretty severe indictment of how the former Soviet capital operates.