“If there is any lesson to be learned from the intervention in Afghanistan, it is perhaps the difficulty of learning lessons.”

I got this through a Stanford University Press sale for a very good deal (they do this sale once a year, I believe, so keep an eye out). Then it sat on a shelf for a while until I finally determined last month to work through the books I got from this sale — the unintended consequences of too good a deal is a bunch of academic books that sit around for a few years. I’m glad that I did finally pick this up because it was an interesting look at failures in the American and international efforts to enact change in Afghanistan. Noah Coburn looks at the varying intersecting communities — the military, the diplomatic corps, the international aid organizations, and the Afghans themselves — and how they perceive and influence each other. At the heart of his argument is the idea, which I agree with, that the intervention became a thing all its own that was too removed from what would actually potentially be useful, and that the increasing physical and mental gulf between all the parties involved lead to inevitable failure. Even when people were well-meaning, and even with the huge amount of work and money being expended, the lack of actual collaboration, cultural understanding, and bureaucratic issues, as well as many other issues, all collided into a massive ball of problems.

Coburn examines these groups through an ethnographic lens, as he had spent time doing research in an Afghan village previously and was able to expand this work to the wider intervention forces. I thought this was a good way of approaching things and made the book more readable for the layperson. I did wish he’d been even more in depth into the lives and experiences of the four people he followed. This is also not a very long book (216 pages) for the complexity of the situation, and it felt like he was having to really work to compress large swathes of information, which inevitably leaves things out. However, Coburn does succeed in conveying the futility and frustration of well-meaning but ultimately counter-productive and actively harmful efforts masterminded from overseas. It was depressing reading this because this was published in 2016 and things were only going to get worse. This was a worthwhile read for me as it gave me more understanding about events that my tax dollars have gone into.