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Summary
Summary
A high-ranking general's gripping insider account of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how it all went wrong.
Over a thirty-five-year career, Daniel Bolger rose through the army infantry to become a three-star general, commanding in both theaters of the U.S. campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. He participated in meetings with top-level military and civilian players, where strategy was made and managed. At the same time, he regularly carried a rifle alongside rank-and-file soldiers in combat actions, unusual for a general. Now, as a witness to all levels of military command, Bolger offers a unique assessment of these wars, from 9/11 to the final withdrawal from the region. Writing with hard-won experience and unflinching honesty, Bolger makes the firm case that in Iraq and in Afghanistan, we lost -- but we didn't have to. Intelligence was garbled. Key decision makers were blinded by spreadsheets or theories. And, at the root of our failure, we never really understood our enemy. Why We Lost is a timely, forceful, and compulsively readable account of these wars from a fresh and authoritative perspective.
Author Notes
DANIEL P. BOLGER completed thirty-five years in the U.S. Army, retiring as a lieutenant general in 2013. He graduated from The Citadel and earned his master's degree and doctorate from the University of Chicago. He commanded the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team in Iraq in 2005-06, 1st Cavalry Division in Baghdad in 2009-10, and NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan in 2011-13. His military awards include five Bronze Star medals (one for valor) and the Combat Action Badge.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Despite this book's subtitle, this is not a first-person narrative detailing exactly how Bolger, who retired in 2013 as a lieutenant general, played a part in America's post-9/11 military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. Apart from a frank author's note, which opens with Bolger admitting, hyperbolically, that he "lost the Global War on Terrorism," the work presents an outside view of events, and Bolger doesn't say which specific decisions and battles he was party to. The opening section notes that "there's enough fault to go around, and in this telling, the suits will get their share. But I know better, and so do the rest of the generals.... This was our war to lose, and we did." That provocative stance, which runs counter to the conventional wisdom (that the Pentagon and White House, for instance, made poor political decisions), would be more persuasive had Bolger provided his eyewitness basis for it. On a different note, what feels like a strained effort to be hip undercuts the essential grimness of the books. Apart from these downsides, Bolger offers a comprehensive look at how these wars were fought during his tenure, which for some readers could be a useful introduction to the conflicts. Maps & 16p color insert. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Iraq was a sectarian mess even before U.S. combat troops left, and now it faces the possibility of being overwhelmed by the so-called Islamic Caliphate. And Afghanistan? Who knows, but it doesn't look like victory right now. Over his 35-year career in the military, Bolger commanded troops in both theaters and is perhaps the highest-ranking military figure with that experience to make some hard, tough assertions. He maintains both wars were winnable but nevertheless doomed by mistakes made in Washington and in the field. We never understood our enemies and how to fight them, and we never prepared the American public for the lengthy war and commitment that success demanded. Bolger suggests we might have been wiser to invade, topple the Taliban and Saddam, and then leave both places to chaos. Unfortunately, he never considers the deeper question: Can the so-called war on terror be fought best by invading Third World countries whose people are unlikely to embrace our social and political values? This is a necessary but, in the end, disappointing work.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK has a lot to answer for. "I am a United States Army general," Daniel Bolger writes, "and I lost the Global War on Terrorism." The fault is not his alone, of course. Bolger's peers offered plenty of help. As he sees it, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, abysmal generalship pretty much doomed American efforts. The judgment that those wars qualify as lost - loss defined as failing to achieve stated objectives - is surely correct. On that score, Bolger's honesty is refreshing, even if his explanation for that failure falls short. In measured doses, self-flagellation cleanses and clarifies. But heaping all the blame on America's generals lets too many others off the hook. Before retiring in 2013 as a three-star general, Bolger served 35 years on active duty, a career culminating with two tours in Iraq and another in Afghanistan. As he ascended through the ranks, he earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago. While teaching that subject at West Point and after returning to the field army, he published several books on military subjects. "Why We Lost" arrives well padded with war stories. Recounting combat actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, those stories testify to the bravery, resourcefulness and resolve of American soldiers - mainly sergeants, captains and lieutenant colonels. Yet "above that tactical excellence," Bolger writes, "yawned a howling waste." At the very top, the troops were ill-led. Perhaps so, but Bolger's critique of that leadership distorts even as it purports to expose. Senior military officers - those wearing three or four stars - perform two functions. On matters related to politics and strategy, they advise. On matters related to campaigns and battles, they decide and execute. Bolger has next to nothing to say about the first function. He barely mentions the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military's senior-most advisory body. Members of the Joint Chiefs, we learn, opposed the Iraq surge "to a man." That apart, what issues did the chiefs care about? When were they heard and when ignored? On these matters, Bolger leaves readers in the dark. "All too often," he writes, "the military offered advice hardly worth hearing." Maybe so, but Bolger offers little to substantiate the charge. In truth, it's the generals who have commanded in Iraq and Afghanistan, not those advising back in Washington, who interest him. With a single exception, he describes the three- and four-star officers who have run those wars as decent and well-meaning. That exception is David Petraeus, whom Bolger clearly loathes. "Petraeus was all about Petraeus," Bolger writes. He was a charter member of "the careerist self-promotion society that hung out near the military throne rooms." "King David" excelled at selling - mostly himself, but also for a time the Iraq war. Toward that end, he assiduously cultivated journalists, academics and members of Congress, who spread his message "like docile carrier pigeons." That message credited Petraeus with personally devising and then successfully implementing a novel formula for turning around the Iraq war. The formula was counterinsurgency, or COIN. The vehicle for implementation was the so-called surge. Score Bolger as unimpressed on both counts. When Petraeus arrived in Baghdad in early 2007 to take charge of a war gone wrong, he brought with him a new COIN manual, "right from the font, written by the master and his team." Field Manual 3-24 made quite a splash. Its "odd Zen-like counterinsurgency axioms," Bolger writes, "played very well in the halls of academia and among the informed public." As a marketing ploy, in other words, Petraeus's manual succeeded brilliantly. "What the hell it meant to a platoon sergeant or a lieutenant trading bullets west of Samarra," Bolger grumbles, was another matter altogether. Indeed, hoopla notwithstanding, Bolger contends that on the ground not much actually changed. Even without a new doctrine, units in the field had learned the hard way about dealing with insurgents. Well before Petraeus appeared on the scene, those lessons were already percolating up from the bottom. Chief among them was this one: When Sunni warlords promise to quit killing Americans if offered guns and money in return, say yes. Nowhere found in FM 3-24, the approach quickly won Petraeus's seal of approval. What the surge did or did not accomplish is central to the continuing debate over how to evaluate the Iraq war's outcome. In the one camp are those who even today describe it as an epic feat of arms. Bolger situates himself squarely in the opposing camp. He describes the surge as a salvage operation intended to permit United States forces to leave without admitting outright defeat. It did just that, a grudging Bolger concedes: "At least we left with our heads up." Of course, even as the Americans departed the scene - temporarily, as it turns out - the war itself went on. IN AFGHANISTAN, REDISCOVERED after years of neglect when President Obama took office, a similar story unfolded. Another convert to the Church of COIN arrived, promising to reinvigorate the war. Although Obama agreed to underwrite Gen. Stanley McChrystal's proposed nation-building campaign, "the 2010 surge in Afghanistan achieved less" than had the prior surge in Iraq. Bolger charges that this second experiment with COIN "reflected the near bankruptcy of military planning by that point." He reproaches Obama for giving his generals what they wanted. "The thoughtful, deliberate U.S. president thoughtfully and deliberately condemned Americans in uniform to years of deadly, pointless counterinsurgency patrols sure to end in a wholesale pullout." COIN had proven a bust. Why exactly did American military leaders get so much so wrong? Bolger floats several answers to that question but settles on this one: With American forces designed for short, decisive campaigns, the challenges posed by protracted irregular warfare caught senior officers completely by surprise. Since there aren't enough soldiers - having "outsourced defense to the willing," the American people stay on the sidelines - the generals asked for more time and more money. This meant sending the same troops back again and again, perhaps a bit better equipped than the last time. With stubbornness supplanting purpose, the military persisted, "in the vain hope that something might somehow improve." Toward what end? Bolger reduces the problem to knowing whom to kill. "Defining the enemy defined the war," he writes. But who is the enemy? Again and again, he poses that question, eventually concluding, whether in frustration or despair, that the enemy is "everyone." But if all Iraqis and all Afghans are the enemy, then the American failure extends well beyond matters of generalship. Perhaps Bolger poses the wrong question. Perhaps instead of asking "Who is the enemy?" he should be asking "What is the aim?" What is the United States trying to achieve in the greater Middle East, and to what extent can military power contribute to that enterprise? Of course, that question is not for generals alone to answer. It rightly belongs to elected and appointed officials and more broadly to the American people. And that's why blaming generals alone won't suffice. ANDREW J. BACEVICH is currently Columbia University's George McGovern fellow. He is writing a history of United States military involvement in the greater Middle East.
Kirkus Review
A former commander of advisory teams in Iraq and Afghanistan offers historical perspective and a forthright breakdown of the failure of those conflicts. A retired lieutenant general with 35 years in the U.S. Army and various commands in the Middle East over the last decade, Bolger admits he was "low[er] down on the food chain" but present enough to observe how "key decisions were made, delayed or avoided." In sharp, plainspoken prose, he sets out the scenarios, from the first victorious Gulf War against Saddam Hussein to the beleaguered U.S. military drawdown in Afghanistan in June 2013. Bolger characterizes the generals involvede.g., comparing each to a historical counterpart, such as David Petraeus to the "innovative yet overly ambitious" Douglas MacArthur and himself to "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, who "told it like it was" (and got sent home for it)and gives a clear sense of what the American forces possessed to their advantage: namely, an excellent volunteer military, top-notch military intelligence and workable joint operations. Bolger also explores what hindered them, including an amorphous enemy and a sense of damning hubris. The generals might have congratulated themselves on beating the "Vietnam syndrome," but some of the same issues haunted the current Middle East crisese.g., who was the enemy? "Defining the enemy defined the war," writes Bolger, and from the Sunni insurgents to the Taliban to al-Qaida to the "green-on-blue turncoats," the guerilla enemy retreated, changed and regrouped. Bolger does a fine job of delineating the technical aspects of military workings (while making good fun of the euphemistic names of the various operations labeled by the "guys in the Pentagon basement") and candidly describes America's efforts after a decade of attrition as "global containment of Islamic threats." With vigorous, no-nonsense prose and an impressive clarity of vision, this general does not mince blame in this chronicle of failure. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Retired U.S. Army general Bolger (Dragons at War: Land Battles in the Desert) provides an insider's look at the global war on terrorism and why he believes America lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. He reviews how the Unites States became embroiled in the conflict, victories that were achieved, mistakes that were made, and how, eventually, the decision was reached to pull troops out of both countries. This monograph is well researched, straightforward in its arguments, and exceptionally accessible. Bolger is, at times, brutal in his honesty, and what makes this book all the more refreshing is that he doesn't excuse his unflinching critique and acknowledges that as much as he might try to remain objective, his involvement in the conflict meant that he wouldn't always succeed. While that's true, his experience makes for a better narrative. Verdict This work will appeal to those with an interest in American history, military history, Middle Eastern studies, and autobiography.-Crystal Goldman, Univ. of California, San Diego Lib. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
### Excerpted from Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars by Daniel Bolger All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Maps | p. ix |
| Authors Note | p. xiii |
| Prologue; Apocalypse Then | p. xviii |
| Part I Triumph: The Global War on Terrorism, September 2001 to April 2003 | |
| 1 Harbingers | p. 3 |
| 2 9/11 | p. 25 |
| 3 The Hindu Kush | p. 46 |
| 4 Anaconda | p. 73 |
| 5 A Weapon of Mass Destruction | p. 97 |
| 6 Apocalypse Then Redux | p. 120 |
| Part II Hubris: The Iraq Campaign, April 2003 to December 2011 | |
| 7 "Mission Accomplished" | p. 147 |
| 8 What Happened in Fallujah | p. 171 |
| 9 The Color Purple | p. 192 |
| 10 Implosion | p. 214 |
| 11 Malik Daoud | p. 237 |
| 12 Requiem on the Tigris | p. 258 |
| Part III Nemesis: The Afghan Campaign, April 2003 to December 2014 | |
| 13 Undone | p. 279 |
| 14 The Good War | p. 301 |
| 15 Taliban Heartland | p. 325 |
| 16 Malik Daoud Again | p. 344 |
| 17 Attrition | p. 373 |
| 18 Green on Blue | p. 396 |
| Epilogue: Infinite Justice | p. 416 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 437 |
| Notes | p. 438 |
| Index | p. 486 |
