Why this book:  I had read a number of reviews of this book,  and thought it would be good to learn more about the war in Afghanistan from a respected journalist on the ground there.  I also agreed to read it with two of my friends still serving with the Naval Special Warfare community.  One would read War, by Sebastian Junger, one would read,  The Warriors, by J.Glenn Gray,  and I would read The Wrong War.

My Impressions:  The Wrong War is about our ongoing war in Afghanistan, and is essentially a compilation of Bing West’s personal experiences as an embedded reporter with US Army and Marine ground units in eastern Afghanistan on the Pakistan border, and in the south during the battle for Marjah.   He writes convincingly in the first person of battles he witnessed and participated in, offering anecdotal descriptions of his experiences with the troops, and he makes comparisons with his own experience as a marine in Viet Nam 40+ years ago.  He also offers his views on the political climate, not only in Afghanistan, but also in the US.   He has several messages that he reinforces throughout the book:  first, that nation-building is not an appropriate mission for line troops; it erodes their combat skills and requires skills the military generally doesn’t have, and nation building is a long term commitment that the military is inappropriate and unable to fulfill. Secondly, he challenges the current orthodoxy that we can win this war by winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.  He makes this point with numerous examples that show that the cultural divide between our military troops, and the relatively primitive agrarian world they are fighting in is a gulf that is almost too wide to breach.  Thirdly, he believes that our senior political and military leaders are out of touch with the realities on the ground, and their policies and strategies are born of wishful thinking rather than the ugly truths that the soldiers on the ground see every day.  And fourth, our troops are doing an extraordinary job carrying out a thankless and probably hopeless mission.

He offers a simple solution for how to get out – though for me and for other reviewers of this book – it is too simple:  turn this baby over to the Afghans as fast as we can and get the hell out of there.  He comments on the commonly articulated position that we cannot kill our way to victory, by noting that we will not win unless we kill a lot of bad guys who are intractable enemies of the West and all that we stand for.  Yes, the “accidental guerrillas”  described by David Kilcullen in his book of the same name  are there as well, but the Taliban is indeed fueled and led by people who are fanatic in their ideological  commitment to their cause.

Bing West reminds me somewhat of David Hackworth, the most decorated officer of the Vietnam War who became a renegade and then an iconoclastic journalist.  His book About Face was read by many of  my colleagues 20 years ago and it is still widely read by young men in the military.  Like Hackworth, Bing West has the going- in position that the troops know the truth, and their leaders, the ‘political generals’ are not worthy of them.  West, like Hackworth before him, derides the political and military leaders (who Hackworth called ‘bureaucrats in uniform’), without making any real effort to understand their perspective and their dilemmas.   Life on the front can indeed be very simple: Take care of your buddies, take care of your mission, write and call home, survive.  It can be much more complicated at the national strategic and political military arena with conflicting missions, conflicting principles, a complex and uncertain group of stakeholders.  This book is about the view and experience of the soldier or marine on the ground – a reality that West does a pretty good job of convincing me is not sufficiently taken into consideration by our policy makers and strategists.