Before we go THINK a lot more!

[davidbfpo]

A NY Review of Books piece by Rory Stewart of a 2014 book on Afghanistan, which he uses to ask hard questions about other places:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arch...ng-indictment/

On the book:

But Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living shows that everything has not been said. His new and shocking indictment demonstrates that the failures of the intervention were worse than even the most cynical believed.

On Afghans Rory is critical of the author:

Gopal’s astonishing stories are not, however, a complete portrait of Afghanistan. He is so immersed in the mayhem and abuse that he seems genuinely to believe—as the title of the book suggests—that in Afghanistan there are “no good men among the living.” The more difficult truth is that it is hard to describe living among Afghans without falling back on words like dignity, honor, courage, strength, and generosity. Many of the Afghans I have worked with epitomize these virtues so clearly, and even quixotically, that they can seem almost a rebuke to our age.

On state building:

..Gopal shows us clearly how easy all this is to say, and almost impossible to do.

Building a state or tackling an insurgency therefore requires deep knowledge of the history and character of an individual country. And such activity demands that Western governments acknowledge how little they know and can do in most of these places and cultures. But the startling differences within the countries in which we intervene are only exceeded by the startling uniformity, overconfidence, and rigidity of the Western response.

Link to Amazon, with eight reviews plus and 80% excellent:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080...SIN=0805091793

[davidbfpo]

I was so taken with the review I missed this previous thread from late 2014, with 900 views and a couple of posts. Now the threads have been merged.