The Gamble and Stones Into Schools

My two most recent reads have been The Gamble, by Thomas Ricks (the atuhor of Fiasco, which I read several years ago), and Stones into Schools, Greg Mortenson's follow-up to Three Cups of Tea. They were both impulse purchases from Porter Square Books; I should know better than to wander in there with my wallet.

The Gamble continues Ricks' description and analysis of the war in Iraq. It's a good follow-up to The Fourth Star, as it deals with many of the same people and issues. Ricks does a great job explaining how "the surge" became U.S. policy, why it succeeded - and why the war so far has been only a prelude to what promises to be a long saga. The successful revolution in U.S. military thinking brought about by General David Petraeus and his like-minded colleagues is extraordinary, but it can't make up for the preceding years of mismanagement and woefully misguided civilian leadership. Ultimately, the surge succeeded in its goal of providing "breathing space" for Iraqi politicians, but the politicians failed to use it. General Ray Odierno, who succeeded Petraeus as the top military commander in Iraq, said, "As Iraq has become more secure, they've [Iraqi politicians] moved backwards, in some cases, to their hardline positions..." Ricks believes that,like it or not, the U.S. is going to be in Iraq for a long time, and closes the book with the words, "...the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened."

Stones into Schools is similarly a good foil to Sarah Chayes'The Punishment of Virtue. Chayes' experience in in southwestern Afghanistan, while Mortenson has focused on the northeastern areas (as well as Pakistan), so their perspectives are very different. Where they agree is on the increasing competence of the U.S. military in Afghanistan over the past decade of war. They disagree somewhat on their outlook for the future. Mortenson is relentlessly optimistic; Chayes is much more guarded. For the sake of the people of Afghanistan, I hope Mortenson is right.

The Punishment of Virtue and The Fourth Star

I'm currently reading The Punishment of Virtue, by Sarah Chayes, and enjoying it immensely. Chayes covered the fall of the Taliban as an NPR correspondent in and around Kandahar. She left Kandahar in mid January, 2002, and returned a few months later, not as a journalist, but as a field director for Afghans for Civil Society. She has lived in Afghanistan episodically since then and has a unique perspective on Afghan society and politics.

Chayes has done three interviews with  Terry Gross on the NPR program Fresh Air. All of them are riveting, but I really urge you to listen to the most recent, from February 2009. Chayes argued (just at the outset of the Obama administration) that the U.S. should drastically increase its military presence in Afghanistan, as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for bringing stability to Afghanistan.

Chayes clearly loves living in Afghanistan, and her words resonate with my own experiences of living in India. Rather than residing in the "journalist colony" in Kandahar, she lived just outside of town with an Afghan family, enabling her to largely escape the kind of western bubble I found so stifling during my first trip to Hyderabad. She also shares my dismay with the state of U.S. and western society. As she was about to leave Quetta in January 2002, she was asked by Hamid Karzai's uncle, Aziz Khan, to return to help rebuild Afghanistan. She relates her feelings at this request:

...this was, unwittingly, what I was waiting for. Well before 9/11, a part of me had been casting about for such a sense of potential as I was feeling now. I could no longer bear to watch our Atlantic democracies go through the motions, in a business of democracy, while half our people didn't even vote. That couldn't be right. Through my reporting, I had gained the conviction that somewhere out there, from one of these post-conflict disaster areas, a phoenix was going to rise. Someone from some other place - not America or Western Europe - was going to winch us up out of this rut.

I have one stylistic complaint about the book: the references are relegated to the back of the book, rather than footnoted the bottom of the referencing page. Chayes' footnotes are very much worth reading, and I wish they more easily accessible.






The evolution in U.S. military thinking that leads Chayes to call for in increase in troop levels in Afghanistan is skillfully chronicled in The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army, by Greg Jaffe and David Cloud. This is an interwoven account of the careers, through early 2009, of John Abizaid, George Casey Jr., Peter Chiarelli and David Petraeus, four key officers in the U.S. response to 9/11. For someone like me who has never served in the U.S. military, this book provides a terrific description of how the system operates, and especially how West Point culture and the "up or out" career path affect military policy, for both good and bad. We're very fortunate to have a system that produces leaders like these, especially Petraeus and Abizaid. It's tragic that the civilian leadership of the Bush era fell so far short of their quality.

Update: I removed the link to Chayes' web site, www.sarahchayes.net, because it seems to contain malware. Thank you, paz, for pointing this out.

Updated Update: The URL now belongs to someone else entirely. But here's a link to the 2010 version of www.sarahchayes.net, courtesy of the Internet Wayback Machine,

The Reading List

I like to read. I start most days with at least a cursory reading of the New York Times (which we have delivered) and usually spend at least a few minutes reading before popping off to sleep at night. I like to think my taste in prose is pretty eclectic, but in reality, it's not. My favorite categories are:

• news and periodicals (the NYTimes, The New Yorker, National Geographic, AMC Outdoors, sometimes The Economist)
• science fiction (Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson are exemplars of the kind of writers I favor)
• mountaineering and orther outdoor adventure writing
• politics and history (leftward leaning...)
• novels, especially if they relate in some way to current life events (such as The Namesake, which I read on my way to India for the first time in April 2005)

I've decided I'm going to start blogging what I read, in part so that I can simply remember what I read. I'm often reading several books concurrently, and while I usually recall what I like and don't like, titles and authors don't necessarily stick. This has gotten worse since I've started doing much of my reading on a Kindle; I no longer see book covers very often (an interesting side effect of the Kindle...).

I'll tag these entries with "reading". I'll start by listing a few of the books I've read "recently" (for large and selective values of "recently"...).

Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie. I borrowed this from my friends Dan & Sue; it's a novel about a man born into a Muslim family at midnight on August 15, 1947 - the date of India's independence. It's nearly impossible to summarize, but because it's set in Srinagar, Bombay, Delhi, Karachi, Bangladesh and contains characters that ring very true to my experience of India, I really enjoyed it. I found it hard to start, but once I finished "Book 1" (of 3), I was into it.

Forever on the Mountain, James Tabor. My coworker Bill loaned me this tale of the summer, 1967 ascent of Denali that left 7 of the 12 climbers dead. Reading this motivated the next book:

Minus 148 Degrees, Art Davidson. This is the story of the first winter ascent (in early 1967) of Denali (aka Mt. McKinley), written by the climber who conceived of the expedition. Only fair - the story is compelling, but the writing is only so-so.

The Last War, Ana Menendez. This novel is a veiled autobiographical account of a portion of the author's life as a war correspondent and photographer in "the war on terror." The setting for most of the book is Istanbul, with forays to Afghanistan and elsewhere. Her partner, "Brando", is Dexter Filkins. I loved this book. If you read it, I encourage you to first read...

The Forever War, Dexter Filkins. Filkins is a highly-published foreign correspondent, whose articles have appeared regularly in the New York Times and elsewhere. This book is a deeply personal account of what it was like to be that correspondent.

More to come.