Our Latest Longest War: Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan
Aaron O’Connell is a veteran of the Afghanistan war — the aptly dubbed ‘latest longest’ one for the United States — where he served as Special Assistant to General David Petraeus. The book’s title evokes both the spectre of America’s other endless war, that in Vietnam, as well as the pervasiveness of war in American political and cultural life. This is only the most recent of America’s ill-advised and destructive campaigns abroad, and it will not be the last. Yet while the war in Afghanistan occupies a place of particular importance in the litany of American wars, both because of its duration and its temporal location as a marker of the pre- and post-9/11 grand strategy of the United States, it is being fought at increasing distance from American consciousness. Indeed, one well-known political commentator recently remarked that America is no longer at war today, having apparently forgotten that this […]
Book Review: The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace by Susan L. Carruthers
Historical amnesia has created the impression that the reconstruction of Germany and Japan along liberal capitalist lines was a foregone conclusion in 1945. In reality, however, the decision to occupy was a contested question for both Washington’s decision-makers and for soldiers on the ground, many of whom would become reluctant participants in America’s project of democratic nation-building.