Book Review - The Terror Years - New York Times

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New York Times – 8/31/2016


The End of Intervention: Two Books Explore the American Catastrophe in the Middle East

Book Review by James Traub
James Traub -- Contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, where he has worked since 1998. From 1994 to 1997, he was a staff writer for The New Yorker. He has also written for The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy Magazine. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.


The Terror Years: From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State by Lawrence Right
The Mirror Test: America at War in Iraq and Afghanistan by J. Kael Weston

As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have begun to dwindle, however fitfully, in the national rearview mirror, they have come to be regarded not as, respectively, “the war of necessity” and “the war of choice,” or “the right war” and “the wrong war,” but rather as the two leading specimens of a catastrophically mistaken era of intervention. Realist scholars like Michael Mandelbaum and critics of American power like Andrew Bacevich tell us that the failure of such “nation building” efforts was foreordained — and richly deserved. If that’s right, perhaps the time has finally come to abandon our reformist mission civilisatrice.

J. Kael Weston may be better suited to answer this question than any man alive. He spent seven harrowing years on the front lines of both wars as a State Department official serving as a political adviser to American troops. Some readers may recognize his name, for Weston is the civilian hero of “Little America,” Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book about Obama’s counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan — a diplomat of great bravery, erudition and heart who befriended Afghans and stood up to his own superiors.

The author of “The Mirror Test” is recognizably that figure. Weston chose to spend three years in the Mad Max inferno of Falluja, much of it in a tiny post where he was the only civilian embedded with two dozen Marines. He had a front-row seat for the slaughter that ensued when American forces were ordered, in 2004, to retake the city from insurgents, obliterating much of it in the process. Weston essentially assigned himself the job of finding local partners willing to work with Americans to rebuild Falluja in exchange for endless stacks of American money, and, even more urgently, to function as the city’s informal government.

That, as Weston knew, is how counterinsurgency wars are won — not by killing bad guys but by defeating their cause in the minds of ordinary citizens. Counterinsurgency is a battle for political legitimacy — and the insurgents fought back remorselessly. Virtually every Iraqi courageous or crazy enough to join Weston’s cause was murdered. But Weston also describes America’s unwitting connivance with its enemies. In the fall of 2005, United States special forces troops in their ubiquitous Black Hawk helicopters swooped in to kidnap a young Falluja woman, Sara al-Jumaili, thought to be the girlfriend of an insurgent kingpin. They had not, of course, asked anyone about the political consequences of doing so. All Falluja assumed Sara had been seized in order to be raped at an American base. The city was up in arms. In a desperate act that he describes as insubordination, Weston wrote to George Casey, the commanding officer in Iraq: “It is 1651 [4:51 p.m.] on Thursday. If Sara al-Jumaili is not released before Friday prayers, Marines and civilians will die.”

Sara was released, but too late to prevent a disaster. Sheikh Hamza, Falluja’s revered grand mufti and Weston’s most prized recruit to local governance, had refused to publicly denounce the Americans, knowing that doing so would unleash a spasm of violence. One month later, Sheikh Hamza was gunned down outside his mosque. All of Weston’s efforts had been for naught. He was enraged — at political leaders in Washington, diplomats in Baghdad, special forces commanders in Tampa. Although counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq — the surge — is widely considered a success, Weston shows us, in miniature, how the military imperative of killing terrorists consistently trumped the political one of empowering local actors. Today, of course, Iraq has a dysfunctional Shia-dominated government threatened by the Sunni terrorists of ISIS.

“The Mirror Test” is a memoir, not a policy paper. Weston writes of the consuming guilt he felt after he authorized a mission that led to the death of 31 Marines in a helicopter crash. Large portions of the book are devoted to his travels back home, visiting the grave sites in a search for expiation, or working with wounded vets. Here Weston seems to be fulfilling an obligation to himself rather than to the reader. The emotional core of “The Mirror Test” is Weston’s profound love for the Marines, whose stoic warrior culture and bottomless commitment to one another he embraces. This reverence, however, blurs the book’s intellectual outlines, since Weston’s buddies don’t share either his horror of the wars or his commitment to putting politics and diplomacy first.

Like President Obama, whom he greatly admires, Weston considered the Iraq war an appalling mistake but Afghanistan the right war. Once he arrived in Khost Province, a lawless region bordering on Pakistan, Weston found, to his genuine delight, that the Afghans seemed to be open to American help in a way the Iraqis were not. Even enemies received him, if often stonily. Weston visited a madrasa run by a notoriously fundamentalist and anti-American imam. He befriended students there by speaking to them honestly, and by urging that they receive English and computer classes. He insisted, to the horror of his Marine guards, on meeting with allegedly reformed Taliban.

Yet Weston could not persuade Washington, or Kabul, to turn his daring initiatives into policy. And his superior under President Obama, Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, lost the argument for a ¬diplomacy-first policy. In Khost, Weston learns of a “Captain Barr,” a Marine commander from years earlier whom the Afghans still remembered with love. No doubt “Kael Weston” is another such name preserved among both Iraqis and Afghans. Yet what Weston built endures only in memory. The Afghan cause may have been just, unlike the Iraqi one, but the American solution has not worked in either place. Future Westons — and one hopes there will be many — will have to work on a more modest scale, with fewer Marines.

Lawrence Wright has reached the stage of journalistic eminence at which his magazine work is collected in an anthology. “The Terror Years” consists of 11 articles about terrorism that originally appeared in The New Yorker. In those pieces, Wright found people to talk to — relatives of Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahri — whom others had missed, and wove his research, in the New Yorker way, into a fine tapestry of personal experience and unobtrusive reflection. Whether we need to read them for a second time, however, is another matter. Wright has the good manners not to paste in contemporary reflections in order to pretend, as anthologists often do, that the parts somehow cohere into a whole. They don’t; they’re magazine articles.

That said, while the passage of time has rendered some of the pieces old hat, others are edged with retrospective significance. In “Captured on Film,” Wright offers a group portrait of the Syrian film scene. In this “stifled and paralyzed country,” directors while away endless hours in Damascene cafes, surviving on measly stipends from the National Film Organization, wondering just how far they can raise their voices, just how much they can slip past the censors. But Syria is no longer stifled; it’s shredded. Yesterday’s genteel melancholy is today’s unimaginable luxury. Maybe filmmakers still linger in the Rawda Cafe; but the truth about Syria now lies beyond the reach of satire, of allegory, of fiction itself.

It is worth noting that Syria has descended into nightmare not in the aftermath of American intervention, but in its absence. Perhaps the Afghanistan and Iraq interventions really were a terrible, irremediable mistake, but it is a delusion to imagine that these profoundly damaged places will survive, much less thrive, on their own. Americans have learned all too well that they can’t do everything in the Middle East; they are now also learning the dangers of doing nothing.