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The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan By David Kilcullen and Greg Mills Hurst, 2021 352 pp. $19.95 ISBN: 9781787386952
The American War in Afghanistan: A History By Carter Malkasian Oxford University Press, 2021 561 pp. $34.95 ISBN: 9780197550779
The American war in Afghanistan has finally come to an ignominious end, but the inevitable post-mortems have only just begun to trickle in. No doubt soon they will become a flood, adding to the mountains of studies, analyses, and full-length volumes that have appeared virtually since the onset of the war two decades ago. In no small part because of the chaos that surrounded America's final withdrawal from that embattled country, many analysts and observers have been quick to draw parallels with its equally chaotic departure from Vietnam nearly a half century earlier.
For David Kilcullen and Greg Mills, co-authors of The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan, Vietnam is as much a part of their story as is Afghanistan itself. Kilcullen, a former Australian army officer who practiced counterinsurgency in East Timor, earned a doctorate in political anthropology after which he served in a variety of posts both in the Pentagon and at the State Department before moving on to become a senior advisor to General David Petraeus, initially in Iraq and then in Afghanistan. He is credited with translating "theoretical insights into practical tactics soldiers could apply in the field" and with being among the first to advocate "conducting a 'population-centric' rather than 'enemy-centric' counterinsurgency,"1 an approach that Petraeus adopted with significant success in Iraq. Mills, who directs a South African foundation that assists African economic performance, has advised a number of African governments, and also was on four deployments to Afghanistan where he advised the Commander of the International Security Assistance Force.
Described as "outspoken and cheery,"2 and highly thought of by senior military colleagues who worked with him in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the book certainly reflects Kilcullen's outspoken nature. It is hardly cheery, however, perhaps because what worked for him and Petraeus in Iraq was not enough to turn the increasingly successful Taliban tide in Afghanistan. He and Mills engage in an array of finger-pointing, blaming presidents, prime ministers, generals, and successive Afghan governments. They also state in passing that they...