Reading for Afghanistan: 101st Airborne recommendations

Tue, 10/27/2009 - 8:49am

Smart brigade leaders in the 101st Airborne Division who compiled their company commanders' lessons learned also surveyed those captains about what reading they found helpful. Strikingly, the infantry guys emphasized "soft power" and cultural studies, while others went more with the Naylor and Bowden action stuff:

Lester Grau, The Bear Went Over the Mountain and The Other Side of the Mountain (multiple votes for each)

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (two votes)

Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

Sean Naylor, Not a Good Day to Die (two votes)

Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue

Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea

Nate Self, Two Wars

Steven Tanner, Afghanistan

Dave Grossman, On Killing

Ergun Caner and Emir Fethi Caner, Unveiling Islam

Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

And two from an artillery battery commander who didn't interact with Afghans:

Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young

Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down
Thomas E. Ricks | Permalink | | Comments? Login or register
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Tom I love the posts on

by Michael C on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 9:10am

Tom I love the posts on reading lists. This list too is one of the better ones by staying short and accessible.

My only gripe is a larger gripe about the "knowing-doing" gap inherent in these books. When you read Three Cups of Tea, you see a man doing his all to help people. The people Greg Mortenson help don't seem like our enemy one bit. After reading that, it is clear that the way out of Afghanistan is by providing security then providing real world help.

In all honesty, our civil affairs and reconstruction is a joke. Soldiers aren't good humanitarian aid workers, but they aren't supposed to be. When you put as little effort into developing civil affairs officers as the Army has for the last 8 years, then meaningful reconstruction will never happen.

Michael C

Please comment

by MDrew on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 9:26am

on the Marine-Captain-turned-FSO-in-Afghanistan whose resignation has just been reported by the Washington Post's Karen DeYoung.

Meat-grinder

by Rubber Ducky on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 4:19pm

Try "The Good Soldiers." Different country, same senseless use of patrols to stir up reaction. This tactic called go-out-and-get-shot-at reminds me of the body-probe method of finding crevasses in a glacier.

Let's give the basic tactic used in these two stupid wars its rightful name: Meat-grinder. Read the book.

what about

by Lure D. Lou on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 5:56pm

The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk? I would throw TE Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom on to any pile of this sort as well..

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Game-Struggle-Central-Kodansha/dp/1568360223

Descent Into Chaos

by John S. on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 7:27pm

Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid, although very detailed, provides a wonderful overview of the AfPak World....

Sarah Chayes' The Punishment of Virtue sheds light on the Karzai's and also shows the difficulty of reporting news for NPR and other mainstreamish media outlets....

The places in bewteen

by tfp_wnc on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 12:12am

by Rory Stewart is an excellent 'soft power' primer. In my book, it takes a lot of guts to walk across Afghanistan.

Prince of the Marshes, about Stewart's time as a Provincial Governor in Iraq is also interesting.

Les Grau books

by Graycap on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 8:23am

About Grau's books, maybe it could be useful to know that they are accessible for free through DTIC:

The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan--> http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA316729

The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War --> http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA376862

A nice thought

by Schmedlap on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 8:28am

If only they actually had the time to read all of those books.

SF recomendation

by SF Reed on Thu, 10/29/2009 - 2:48pm

I was asked to brief s SEAL team a few months ago. The team had extensive experience in Iraq, but not in Afghanistan, where I have spent years. I recommended to them:

1. The Punishment of Virtue (Chayes)

2. Descent into Chaos (Rashid)

4. Soldiers of God (Kaplan)

3. Come Back to Afghanistan

We need more books on Afghan culture and less on doorkicking!