Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 53
2/2/2016
Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online
From Kabul to Baghdad and Back: The U.S. at War in Afghanistan and Iraq
By: John R. Ballard
David W. Lamm
John K Wood
From Kabul to Baghdad and Back: The U.S. at War in Afghanistan and Iraq. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012.
369 pp. 2012. $32.64. ISBN: 978-1612510224.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Grant Farr, PhD
Portland State University
Portland, OR
From Kabul to Baghdad and Back: The U.S. at War in Afghanistan and Iraq, by John Ballard, David Lamm, and John Wood, is a detailed military
history of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2000 to the summer of 2012. The book covers the major military decisions and actions of these
two wars in great detail. The central argument of the book is that a country cannot fight two wars simultaneously. By choosing to fight wars in both
Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time, the United States essentially guaranteed that one of those wars would go badly. And the one that went badly
was the Afghanistan conflict.
The war in Afghanistan, entitled Enduring Freedom, was a direct and rapid response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Towers and the
Pentagon. Its fundamental purpose was to find, apprehend, and punish those responsible for the 9/11 attack, largely Al-Qaeda and, by association,
the Taliban. The war, at least initially, was unconventional in many ways. Within weeks of 9/11, CIA operatives had connected with Northern
Alliance fighters in Mazar-e Sharif and in the Panjshir Valley. By October 7th air strikes were launched against Taliban targets. Mazar-i Sharif was
captured on November 10th, and Kabul surrendered on November 14th. Although pockets of Taliban fighters remained, the initial phase of the war
in Afghanistan was won in just a little over two months after 9/11 and with very little direct involvement of U.S. military ground forces.
Events continued to go well. In December of 2001, an Afghan Interim Authority was created at the Bonn Conference with a six-month mandate;
Hamid Karzai was named chairman. In June of 2002 the Afghan Interim Authority convened a loya jirga to bless the interim government; a second
loya jirga in October 2003 approved the new Afghan constitution. In October of 2004, the first successful presidential elections were held in which
nearly 12 million registered voters participated, electing President Karzai with over 70% of the votes. And in 1985 Afghan parliamentary elections
successfully took place and the first Afghan parliament of the new era opened.
In 2005, from the United States’ point of view, events seemed to have gone extremely well in Afghanistan, with little direct involvement of United
States troops. The authors attribute this to a combination of fortuitous events, but give much of the credit to Zalmay Khalilzad, who was named
ambassador to Afghanistan in November of 2003, and to General David Barno who assumed command of forces in October of 2003. The authors
credit these two leaders for working together closely in developing a new strategy for Afghanistan that focused on counter insurgency measures that
synchronized coalition military, civilian, and Afghan government activities and the development of a strong national government. By 2005, with
less than 20,000 coalition troops in Afghanistan, it appeared that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban had been defeated and that a fairly elected functioning
government was in place. What could go wrong?
The war in Iraq had a different trajectory. Although it was clear behind the scenes in Washington D.C. that an invasion in Iraq would soon follow
the operations in Afghanistan, the actual invasion, called Iraqi Freedom, did not occur until March of 2003, 19 months after the beginning of the
conflict in Afghanistan. Iraqi Freedom was a more conventional war than Enduring Freedom.