Maddening, but helpful in pointing the way toward meaningful reforms in the conduct of American policy in the region.
The U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion on the war in Afghanistan, with more to come. Journalist and military analyst Grindle shows why that loss of treasure has amounted to so little.
It seems hard to believe, but a couple of centuries ago, British rule in the tribal areas beyond the pale of colonial dominance was effective enough that the names of two towns embody those of the foreign administrators. That has not occurred in the instances of the Russians and Americans who followed. “In Afghanistan,” writes the author, “the central truism of counterinsurgency is that you cannot kill your way to victory.” Absent killing, nation-building is in order, yet American efforts have been thwarted by political opposition at home and corruption in the field. The sole path to success, Grindle argues, is to build an Afghan government that is capable of shouldering its own burdens, one that can overcome a predatory and corrupt constabulary, broken infrastructure, and a dead economy, all of which make the prospect of Taliban rule attractive to a broad segment of Afghani society. It’s not for want of trying: as the author notes, American commanders on the ground have ventured programs such as direct aid to women’s development NGOs only to be so often frustrated by inefficiency and worse. “Budget funds seldom trickled down to the province,” he notes in the case of one development program, “let alone from the province to the district in the form of projects.” In the place of the projected troop surge, then—and Grindle notes that it costs more than $500,000 to keep a single American soldier in the field for a year—he argues that greater attention be given to what American policy has studiously avoided: “finally trying to empower the people at the lowest levels.”
Maddening, but helpful in pointing the way toward meaningful reforms in the conduct of American policy in the region.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61234-954-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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