WHY WE LOST
A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars
Daniel Bolger
Eamon Dolan/ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
502 pages; $28
The author of this book has a lot to answer for. "I am a United States Army general," Daniel Bolger writes, "and I lost the Global War on Terrorism." The fault is not his alone, of course. Mr Bolger's peers offered plenty of help. As he sees it, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, abysmal generalship pretty much doomed American efforts.
The judgement that those wars qualify as lost - loss defined as failing to achieve stated objectives - is surely correct. On that score, Mr Bolger's honesty is refreshing, even if his explanation for that failure falls short. In measured doses, self-flagellation cleanses and clarifies. But heaping all the blame on America's generals lets too many others off the hook.
Before retiring in 2013 as a three-star general, Mr Bolger served 35 years on active duty, a career culminating with two tours in Iraq and another in Afghanistan. As he ascended through the ranks, he earned a Ph D in history at the University of Chicago. While teaching that subject at West Point and after returning to the field army, he published several books on military subjects.
Senior military officers - those wearing three or four stars - perform two functions. On matters related to politics and strategy, they advise. On matters related to campaigns and battles, they decide and execute.
Mr Bolger has next to nothing to say about the first function. He barely mentions the joint chiefs of staff, the military's senior-most advisory body. Members of the joint chiefs, we learn, opposed the Iraq surge "to a man". That apart, what issues did the chiefs care about? When were they heard and when ignored? On these matters, Mr Bolger leaves readers in the dark. "All too often," he writes, "the military offered advice hardly worth hearing." Maybe so, but Mr Bolger offers little to substantiate the charge.
In truth, it's the generals who have commanded in Iraq and Afghanistan, not those advising back in Washington, who interest him. With a single exception, he describes the three- and four-star officers who have run those wars as decent and well-meaning. That exception is David Petraeus, whom Mr Bolger clearly loathes.
"Petraeus was all about Petraeus," Mr Bolger writes. He was a charter member of "the careerist self-promotion society that hung out near the military throne rooms". "King David" excelled at selling - mostly himself, but also for a time the Iraq war. Toward that end, he assiduously cultivated journalists, academics and members of the United States Congress, who spread his message "like docile carrier pigeons".
That message credited Mr Petraeus with personally devising and then successfully implementing a novel formula for turning around the Iraq war. The formula was counterinsurgency, or COIN. The vehicle for implementation was the so-called Surge. Score Mr Bolger as unimpressed on both counts.
When Mr Petraeus arrived in Baghdad in early 2007 to take charge of a war gone wrong, he brought with him a new COIN manual, "right from the font, written by the master and his team". Field Manual 3-24 made quite a splash. Its "odd Zen-like counterinsurgency axioms", Mr Bolger writes, "played very well in the halls of academia and among the informed public…"; "what the hell it meant to a platoon sergeant or a lieutenant trading bullets west of Samarra", Mr Bolger grumbles, was another matter altogether.
What the Surge did or did not accomplish is central to the continuing debate over how to evaluate the Iraq war's outcome. In the one camp are those who even today describe it as an epic feat of arms. Mr Bolger situates himself squarely in the opposing camp. He describes the surge as a salvage operation intended to permit the United States forces to leave without admitting outright defeat. Of course, even as the Americans departed the scene - temporarily, as it turns out - the war itself went on.
In Afghanistan, rediscovered after years of neglect when President Barack Obama took office, a similar story unfolded. Another convert to the Church of COIN arrived, promising to reinvigorate the war. Although Mr Obama agreed to underwrite general Stanley McChrystal's proposed nation-building campaign, "the 2010 surge in Afghanistan achieved less" than had the prior surge in Iraq. Mr Bolger charges that this second experiment with COIN "reflected the near bankruptcy of military planning by that point".
Why exactly did American military leaders get so much so wrong? Mr Bolger floats several answers to that question but settles on this one: with American forces designed for short, decisive campaigns, the challenges posed by protracted irregular warfare caught senior officers completely by surprise.
Since there aren't enough soldiers - having "outsourced defense to the willing", the American people stay on the sidelines - the generals asked for more time and more money. This meant sending the same troops back again and again, perhaps a bit better equipped than the last time. With stubbornness supplanting purpose, the military persisted, "in the vain hope that something might somehow improve".
Toward what end? Mr Bolger reduces the problem to knowing whom to kill. "Defining the enemy defined the war," he writes. But who is the enemy? Again and again, he poses that question, eventually concluding, whether in frustration or despair, that the enemy is "everyone". But if all Iraqis and all Afghans are the enemy, then the American failure extends well beyond matters of generalship.
Perhaps Mr Bolger poses the wrong question. Perhaps instead of asking "Who is the enemy?" he should be asking "What is the aim?" What is the United States trying to achieve in the greater West Asia, and to what extent can military power contribute to that enterprise? Of course, that question is not for generals alone to answer. It rightly belongs to elected and appointed officials and more broadly to the American people. And that's why blaming generals alone won't suffice.
A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars
Daniel Bolger
Eamon Dolan/ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
502 pages; $28
The author of this book has a lot to answer for. "I am a United States Army general," Daniel Bolger writes, "and I lost the Global War on Terrorism." The fault is not his alone, of course. Mr Bolger's peers offered plenty of help. As he sees it, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, abysmal generalship pretty much doomed American efforts.
The judgement that those wars qualify as lost - loss defined as failing to achieve stated objectives - is surely correct. On that score, Mr Bolger's honesty is refreshing, even if his explanation for that failure falls short. In measured doses, self-flagellation cleanses and clarifies. But heaping all the blame on America's generals lets too many others off the hook.
Before retiring in 2013 as a three-star general, Mr Bolger served 35 years on active duty, a career culminating with two tours in Iraq and another in Afghanistan. As he ascended through the ranks, he earned a Ph D in history at the University of Chicago. While teaching that subject at West Point and after returning to the field army, he published several books on military subjects.
Senior military officers - those wearing three or four stars - perform two functions. On matters related to politics and strategy, they advise. On matters related to campaigns and battles, they decide and execute.
Mr Bolger has next to nothing to say about the first function. He barely mentions the joint chiefs of staff, the military's senior-most advisory body. Members of the joint chiefs, we learn, opposed the Iraq surge "to a man". That apart, what issues did the chiefs care about? When were they heard and when ignored? On these matters, Mr Bolger leaves readers in the dark. "All too often," he writes, "the military offered advice hardly worth hearing." Maybe so, but Mr Bolger offers little to substantiate the charge.
In truth, it's the generals who have commanded in Iraq and Afghanistan, not those advising back in Washington, who interest him. With a single exception, he describes the three- and four-star officers who have run those wars as decent and well-meaning. That exception is David Petraeus, whom Mr Bolger clearly loathes.
"Petraeus was all about Petraeus," Mr Bolger writes. He was a charter member of "the careerist self-promotion society that hung out near the military throne rooms". "King David" excelled at selling - mostly himself, but also for a time the Iraq war. Toward that end, he assiduously cultivated journalists, academics and members of the United States Congress, who spread his message "like docile carrier pigeons".
That message credited Mr Petraeus with personally devising and then successfully implementing a novel formula for turning around the Iraq war. The formula was counterinsurgency, or COIN. The vehicle for implementation was the so-called Surge. Score Mr Bolger as unimpressed on both counts.
When Mr Petraeus arrived in Baghdad in early 2007 to take charge of a war gone wrong, he brought with him a new COIN manual, "right from the font, written by the master and his team". Field Manual 3-24 made quite a splash. Its "odd Zen-like counterinsurgency axioms", Mr Bolger writes, "played very well in the halls of academia and among the informed public…"; "what the hell it meant to a platoon sergeant or a lieutenant trading bullets west of Samarra", Mr Bolger grumbles, was another matter altogether.
What the Surge did or did not accomplish is central to the continuing debate over how to evaluate the Iraq war's outcome. In the one camp are those who even today describe it as an epic feat of arms. Mr Bolger situates himself squarely in the opposing camp. He describes the surge as a salvage operation intended to permit the United States forces to leave without admitting outright defeat. Of course, even as the Americans departed the scene - temporarily, as it turns out - the war itself went on.
In Afghanistan, rediscovered after years of neglect when President Barack Obama took office, a similar story unfolded. Another convert to the Church of COIN arrived, promising to reinvigorate the war. Although Mr Obama agreed to underwrite general Stanley McChrystal's proposed nation-building campaign, "the 2010 surge in Afghanistan achieved less" than had the prior surge in Iraq. Mr Bolger charges that this second experiment with COIN "reflected the near bankruptcy of military planning by that point".
Why exactly did American military leaders get so much so wrong? Mr Bolger floats several answers to that question but settles on this one: with American forces designed for short, decisive campaigns, the challenges posed by protracted irregular warfare caught senior officers completely by surprise.
Since there aren't enough soldiers - having "outsourced defense to the willing", the American people stay on the sidelines - the generals asked for more time and more money. This meant sending the same troops back again and again, perhaps a bit better equipped than the last time. With stubbornness supplanting purpose, the military persisted, "in the vain hope that something might somehow improve".
Toward what end? Mr Bolger reduces the problem to knowing whom to kill. "Defining the enemy defined the war," he writes. But who is the enemy? Again and again, he poses that question, eventually concluding, whether in frustration or despair, that the enemy is "everyone". But if all Iraqis and all Afghans are the enemy, then the American failure extends well beyond matters of generalship.
Perhaps Mr Bolger poses the wrong question. Perhaps instead of asking "Who is the enemy?" he should be asking "What is the aim?" What is the United States trying to achieve in the greater West Asia, and to what extent can military power contribute to that enterprise? Of course, that question is not for generals alone to answer. It rightly belongs to elected and appointed officials and more broadly to the American people. And that's why blaming generals alone won't suffice.
© The New York Times News Service 2014