Doug Stanton's "Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan" is pretty extraordinary, and not just because of the length of its subtitle. I guess he didn't want people to confuse it with the John Wayne film of the same name. Stanton shows in the back of the book that he has done a good deal of research on Special Operations forces and in particular the events when they went into Afghanistan in October and November 2001. He goes into great detail as to what the US soldiers were thinking and saying during their deployment, - and not only them but their Afghani compatriots.
This gets a little annoying in some cases - I'm not saying that Stanton is making it up, but you get the impression that much of the book was "based" on actual events and that he developed the narratives. As a result, much of the dialogue (and even people's thoughts) is in short, clipped tones. The description of people, the terrain, and just about everything in the book pops with sound and color. "The Taliban were pouring through the Gap ... [c]oming at them like a storm." "At times, they couldn't see anything except the a skim of stars overhead, like ice crystals thrown against a black dome." It's as if it were prepared for a movie development.
The first teams who went into Afghanistan were really blazing the trail for everyone else, and you do get a good impression of the challenges they faced in preparing for and sustaining operations in the field. They had to work with Afghanis when none of them knew the language, and with a small group, advise two major Afghani commanders who really didn't like each other. It's a tribute to their skills that they were able to befriend the commanders and, supported by significant air power, to route the Taliban forces. The air coordination is particularly amusing, as the pilots and forward controllers initially tell the SF troops that they won't bomb below 20,000 feet (for fear of antiaircraft guns and rockets) and they won't bomb targets that are not definitively marked as enemy troops.
This book reads like a first-person adventure strip, complete with stories of Army wives worrying at home and the plucky Afghani resistance against the Taliban. As such, if you like melodramatic combat stories, this is a great book. Buried in the book are insights as to how the Afghani commanders think and act in the grand scheme of things - that is to say, casually at times, with their own agendas. Alliances go back and forth, and cultural differences complicate things. This book is not the one to pick up if you want to ask "so why are we still there?" I had to wonder myself, if we figured out how to work the Northern Alliance troops and were able to push back the Taliban, where did we lose the bubble? Was it when we "took" Kabul and declared victory, moving back to Iraq? You don't get that answer.
My one dislike was a sentence near the end of the book that talks to al Qaeda's ties to Pakistan and Afghanistan. "The CIA was picking up intelligence that approximately thirty-five Al Qaeda members, based in Pakistan, were planning to blow up the US Consulate in Peshawar. Moreover, it appeared that Al Qaeda planned to use Pakistan's nuclear capability for further attacks." I had to snort in amazement there - maybe, just maybe there was some dream in an al Qaeda leader's head about Pakistani nukes, but the book expresses this more as a fact - and it would be wrong. I think Stanton was way off in including that item without elaborating on it.
This book also covers the story of Michael Spann, a CIA field agent who was killed when a group of Taliban prisoners broke free and attacked their holders. Also involved in that story was the American John Walker Lindh who had joined the Taliban to fight for the Taliban and against bad Muslim governments. It's an interesting story, but again, told with a bit too much drama for my taste. Overall, though, this is a great book to get a feel for what the issues were at the beginning of the war and how the courageous troops overcame great adversity to win the initial conflicts. Many of those soldiers died later in Iraq, and that's more the tragedy. It makes you wonder how we could lose sight of what was initially a noble goal and that has turned into such a sausage-grinder.
Good review J. But perhaps Stanton chose the title "Horse Soldiers" was for the positive word associations with the John Wayne movie? He could've come up with plenty of more exotic titles, e.g., "Ride of the Khyber Cavalry"...
Posted by: Peter | 05 July 2009 at 03:03 AM
""I'm not saying that Stanton is making it up""
Yeah that kind of thing does get past you a lot of the time. I remember reading an exchange about enhanced interrogation decisions between 2 officials and I'd bet my left neither of them are talking to any author on that topic. You may know there's a meeting, you may know the context, you may know the outcome, but leave the quotation marks out of it.
Posted by: Kilo | 05 July 2009 at 08:43 AM