Making the same mistakes again.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: TILTING at windmills - Brief article - Book review

Read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Little America and weep. In Afghanistan, Foreign Service and USAID employees are largely sealed off from Afghans, rarely fluent in the local language, frequently serving tours too short for them to understand the people or the country, and throwing too much money at problems that are usually far more complicated than we understand. It is the same story that we found in the Green Zone of Baghdad, which in turn repeated the sad story of all our mistakes in Saigon in the 1960s and early '70s.

Chandrasekaran tells how the late Richard Holbrooke at a 2009 strategy...