I just finished The Forever War, a enthralling collection of memoirs and reporting sown together from Dexter Filkins’s audacious journeys to Afghanistan, Ground Zero, and Iraq. It’s a spectacular work. His style of writing alone makes the book worth the read–stream of consciousness at its best. It’s hard to put down.
Filkins, a writer for both the LA and NY Times, provides keen insight into the cultures of Iraq and Afghanistan on the most basic level of individual interaction. He, dangerously, goes off the beaten path and engages Afghanis and Iraqis in fascination conversation that reveals much about their sentiments toward war and the United States. He brings us into the world of shape-shifting loyalties…soldiers in Afghanistan who fight for the Taliban one day and join the Northern Alliance on the next; of grotesque destruction…spinal cords strewn across the rubble of the Twin Towers; and of the eerie stratification of Baghdad, where concrete blast walls separate families and suicide bombers lurk around every corner.
Filkins is an insanely intrepid reporter, and in the course of the book, he dodges more sniper bullets and IEDs than I’d care to count. He nearly gets kidnapped and murdered on several occasions, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And most courageously of all, he travels to meet the parents of the soldier who was murdered by an insurgent while trying to bring Filkins and his photographer in for a closer shot.
This is not a glass half-full book. It is instead a bleak portrait of the heartbreaking tragedy that has unfolded over the last decade in the Middle East.
Filkins shows the barbarism of the Taliban and of Saddam in stark light–you can’t come away from his book thinking anything but the worst of these two odious regimes. However, he also paints the undeniable tragedy of war and anarchy–the gratuitous loss of life, destruction of society, and civil strife that followed our invasions.
Filkins finds many Iraqis who struggle to say whether they are better off today than under Saddam. Some question the value of the new civil and political freedoms that have arrived without security and basic necessities such as electricity and water. Others point to the growing role of Islam in public affairs across the South of the country, and argue that this is—like Saddam’s rule—stripping them of their civil and political freedoms. At this point, it is far from clear whether the average Iraqi is better off today than under Saddam’s regime. And even if a peaceful democracy develops somewhere down the road, was it worth the hell of the last five years? Was it worth destroying a country? Was it worth the loss of 4,216 Americans? Filkins makes it hard to say yes, but does an admirable job of not saying no and leaving it up to the reader.
I personally find it impossible to believe that taking out Saddam was worth the havoc, violence, and aggravated ethnic conflict that has ensued since April of 2003. To paraphrase George Packer, war is too blunt an instrument to be wielded when the chances of success are so slight.
Surprisingly, The Forever War makes me even less confident of our mission in Afghanistan–a mission that grew from uprooting al Qaeda into destroying the Taliban and installing a Western democracy. According to an article Filkins wrote just yesterday, the Taliban have established a permanent presence in 72% of Afghanistan, up from 54% a year ago. These guys are tough sons of bitches, and they aren’t going away, even after seven years of a global campaign to defeat them. The American-backed Afghani government has little authority outside of the major cities–a serious problem in a country where the overwhelming majority of 32 million lives in rural areas. It looks like when we eventually withdraw from Afghanistan, the Taliban may be no less in control than when we first went in. And Bin Laden and Zawahiri remain on the lam. If not a total foreign policy disaster, then certainly a waste of 623 American lives.
Besides reminding us of the awful toll of war itself, Filkins’s work serves to illustrate just how hard it is to shape the Muslim world into something of our own liking. Again, The Forever War is not light reading, but you should read it all the same.
