One Hundred Victories

July 22, 2013
Our elite forces fought brilliantly to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, writes senior RAND international policy analyst Robinson (Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq). Sadly, within a few years, the militant Islamist group was flourishing again. Its willingness to bully and murder its fellow countrymen and women created plenty of enemies, but the average Afghan kept quiet, expecting little outside help. American Special Ops leaders began brainstorming how they could change this pattern of silence, and after 2009, they were finally given the chance to put their ideas to the test. Here, Robinson delivers vivid, blow-by-blow accounts of a dozen Special Ops campaigns to train local Afghans to defend their communities. She recounts many victories—despite spotty cooperation from the Afghan government and conventional American forces—as well as a few failures. The success of counterinsurgency tactics can only be accurately assessed in the long term, yet America is committed to withdraw nearly all its forces from Afghanistan in 2014, and Robinson fears we may have started too late to see any lasting change. The author—who is no Pollyanna and is a much better writer than the average academic—delivers a painfully realistic account of how Special Ops have valiantly tried to turn matters around in Afghanistan. 8-page b&w photo insert. Agent: Philippa Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic.

October 1, 2013

Robinson (senior international policy analyst, RAND; Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces) spent much of 2010-12 visiting U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan. In this resulting book, he describes how amid the very difficult environment of the U.S. policy debate on the country's strategy for Afghanistan and splintered and disorganized internal Afghan politics, U.S. Special Forces (all branches) changed their mission. From commando hunting/killing operations, they moved instead to advisory/teaching operations to create community security through strong local Afghan police, militia, and special forces. Robinson enjoyed very open access to special forces, a world ordinarily cloaked in secrecy. She advocates that an integral element of U.S. military force should be those units and their demonstrated success at advisory missions that create local self-defense capacity. They should not be solely a hidden asset that strikes at night and then returns to secrecy. VERDICT Recommended to readers interested in delving further into the context of our special forces, the U.S. war in Afghanistan, or U.S. military affairs generally.--MJ

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2013
A sympathetic academic examines how American special operations came to dominate the Afghanistan war. RAND senior international policy analyst Robinson (Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq, 2008, etc.) concludes that the overall role of "special ops" in American military planning "became increasingly cloudy over the decade in Afghanistan, and for that matter, in the global war on terror." The author argues that storied units like the Navy SEALs and Army Rangers will increasingly influence the scope of American military interventions, yet the challenges of their training, logistics and supply will keep such missions expensive and complex. Robinson focuses on the experiences of several officers, who have generally made sincere, clever efforts to reach out to Afghans in rural tribal regions beset by the Taliban and have had success training the fledgling African National Police. Yet they have been stymied by the clash of military and diplomatic bureaucracies and the tendency of special ops units to rotate out quickly: "The ever-changing cast of American units sent to Afghanistan did not help the US learning curve." Still, the author builds a narrative of special ops gradually fostering a network of reliable peers within Afghanistan's political labyrinth. Writing in a clear, perceptive, though often dry fashion, Robinson makes a sincere effort to understand these elite warriors on human terms: "Special forces tended to view themselves as the stepchildren of the army, unloved by their 'big army' brothers." The author describes many remarkable operations yet underscores the limits of the special ops model by noting the rash of attacks in 2012 on team members by their Afghan trainees. Approachable, detailed account of the men for whom extreme warfare is a daily job and the American policies driving their expanded mission.

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