Mother Jones
The Dogs Are Eating Them Now
By Graeme Smith
COUNTERPOINT
With Iraq and Syria hogging the headlines, it’s remarkable how quickly we’ve forgotten our longest war. Graeme Smith’s memoir is a cutting account of how the Afghanistan conflict unraveled. His recollections—of embedding with a coalition offensive and covering a Taliban jailbreak, for example—underscore the emotions (revenge, hate, distrust) that made the fight unwinnable. Michael Herr’s Dispatches it’s not, but Smith’s illuminating postmortem is worth reading and remembering the next time we’re tempted to repeat our mistakes.
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