Gregory Feifer has a new book about Afghanistan. Here's the brief review at The New Yorker: Feifer’s history of the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan, in the nineteen-eighties, comes just in time for a proposed expansion of the seven-year-old American effort there. It ought to be instructive, because the Soviet experience (“an increasingly senseless conflict”) closely mirrors our own—a lightly contested invasion later thwarted by a homegrown resistance and the “Afghan tradition of shifting allegiances.” Feifer assiduously chronicles Soviet errors; some, like the indiscriminate use of explosives when searching villages and the shelling of wedding parties mistaken for bands of the enemy, have close analogues in the current war. Yet, strangely, having pointed out all the parallels, Feifer persists in thinking of the American venture as a “historic opportunity” undermined by the second front, in Iraq, rather than as intrinsically hopeless.
From November 2008, an interview with a Soviet veteran of the Afghan war: I can tell you which mistakes you made and which mistakes we made. They are the same mistakes.
From January 2009: We will not be able to eliminate the Taliban from the rural areas of Afghanistan’s south, so we will have to work with Afghans to contain the insurgency instead. All this is unpleasant for Western politicians who dream of solving the fundamental problems and getting out. They will soon be tempted to give up.
Have you seen "Revolutionary Road"? Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.
The Great Gamble | 
