Little America.

• Author: Dillen, Mark
• Position: Book review

Little America

Review by Mark Dillen

Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Knopf: New York, 2012, ISDN-13: 978-0307957146, 384 pp., $27.96 (hardcover), $13.99 (Kindle edition).

In Obama's Wars, Bob Woodward's thorough account of Afghanistan decision-making during the first year of the Obama Presidency, Woodward notes an iron law of American politics--that wars and other costly undertakings must show forward progress within a President's first term. Woodward says, Obama was conscious of time constraints as he reviewed Afghanistan policy in the fall of 2009 and considered Gen. Stanley McChrystal's request for a surge of 30,000 additional U.S. forces. "I have two years with the public on this," Woodward quotes Obama as saying.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran's new book, Little America, is an extended commentary on what happened on the ground in Afghanistan in those two or so years as a consequence of this logic, but it begins its narrative a half-century earlier, during the U.S.' first foreign aid project there, which came to be known as "Little America." That experiment, in the small town of Lashkar-Gah, was propelled by a 1950s American optimism that our knowhow and modernity could transform an arid corner of Helmand province into a model American-style community. Chandrasekaran, a senior correspondent and associate editor at The Washington Post, lets the irony and hubris sink in as he sets this stage, then jumps forward to the present day to paint a portrait of American involvement in Afghanistan that, while huge in scope and ambition, was somehow still not enough to meet the challenge. "Obama should have gone long, not big," Chandrasekaran concludes, making a grand indictment:

0 I kept hearing promises of how it all would be fixed ... but none of it remedied the core problem: Our government was incapable of meeting the challenge. Our generals and diplomats were too ambitious and arrogant. Our uniformed and civilian bureaucracies were rife with internal rivalries and go-it-alone agendas. Our development experts were inept. Our leaders were distracted ... It wasn't Obama's war, and it wasn't America's war. "

Before reaching this sweeping conclusion, Chandrasekaran sketches a few vivid portraits from the time he spent with McChrystal and the American military that populated the Helmand outposts of Nawa and Marja. He moves smoothly between the field posts where he was an "embedded" journalist witnessing...