Just How Bad Is Pakistan?

Uneven but useful, Peter Tomsen’s The Wars of Afghanistan provides an Afghan retrospective from Roman times to the present. Ambassador Tomsen has been associated with Afghanistan for two decades, most intensively as U.S. special envoy to that country from 1989 to 1992. He believes strongly, as do I, that the failure of U.S. and Western efforts in Afghanistan will lead to “another inning of the long, bloody Afghan wars”, the likely expansion of the Taliban and of al-Qaeda’s presence in the country, and to new strikes against the American homeland. His basic thesis is that American policy has neither understood nor factored into its policies the lessons of Afghan history and culture. Having drawn extensively on declassified documents and English and Russian (but not Persian) language sources, Tomsen lays out his own proposals for a policy that he believes can and must succeed.