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Jacket Copy
BOOKS, AUTHORS AND ALL THINGS BOOKISH
Two war correspondents let the facts and the people speak eloquently of the conflict's
devastating effects in Carlotta Gall's 'Wrong Enemy' and Anand Gopal's 'No Good Men
Among the Living.'
Laura King
May 1, 2014 ,1:00 p. m.
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The war correspondents' view from Afghanistan
12
Wars are often at their most dangerous as they are winding
down, fraught with unpredictability and chaos. But that is
also the time when the conflict's true trajectory becomes
clear, and the perspective of thoughtful and seasoned
observers takes on greater urgency.
A pair of new books on the war in Afghanistan "The Wrong
Enemy: America in Afghanistan 2001-2014" by Carlotta Gall
and "No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes" by
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The cov er s of t he books, "The Wr ong Enemy " and "No Good Men Among t he Liv ing. " (Hought on Mifflin
Har cour t / Met r opolit an Books / Apr il 2 5 , 2 01 4)
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5/2/2014 The war correspondents' view from Afghanistan - latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-carlotta-gall-anand-gopal-20140504,0,4954234.story#axzz30Wr3PwTb 2/4
Anand Gopal both by journalists who spent years in the Afghan theater, provide a window not only
into what went wrong but why.
A highly respected New York Times correspondent, Gall spent a dozen years covering the war in
Afghanistan and, in tandem, the tumultuous events in neighboring Pakistan. In this important work,
she makes a compelling case that Pakistan an ostensible ally of the United States was a driving
force of the Afghan conflict, with its powerful intelligence service as a fateful instrument. (The
book's title comes from a quote from the late Richard Holbrooke, the American statesman who was
an architect of peace in the Balkans but was confounded by the Afghan war.)
Tracing the arc of the conflict from the days after the 9/11 attacks until the recent past, Gall's
narrative unfolds on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, employing both sweep and
dexterity as she weaves seemingly disparate events into a coherent whole. Telling details accrue like
a mosaic of coming calamity: mounting Afghan civilian casualties, maltreated Afghan prisoners,
disrespected tribal elders, profound cultural misunderstandings that contributed to everything from
a plague of "insider" killings to the unraveling of the American relationship with President Hamid
Karzai.
"I saw it time and time again in Afghanistan: foreign troops taking actions for their own protection,
alienating the local population, and thus undermining their security," Gall writes.
The authoritative tone that pervades "The Wrong Enemy" falters somewhat at what may be the
book's most crucial juncture: the circumstances underpinning Osama bin Laden's long sojourn in
Pakistan, which came to an abrupt and violent end when U.S. Navy SEALs raided his Abbottabad
compound in 2011, killing him. While Gall does unearth previously unreported revelations pointing
to official Pakistani complicity at the highest levels in the sheltering of the Al Qaeda chief, she is also
forced to rely on an unaccustomed degree of conjecture and intuition on the part of her sources "I
got a feeling he knew," one former associate says of former President Pervez Musharraf.
Perhaps mindful of the pitfall of journalistic memoirs in which the reporter's inner life takes center
stage, Gall only rarely lets slip an observation colored by her own feelings. She alludes briefly to
being deeply moved by the patience and stoicism of bewildered Afghan villagers in the horrific
aftermath of an errant U.S. strike. She tersely describes her reaction when, on patrol with troops in
an IED-ridden slice of Kandahar province, she hears a blast a short distance away and realizes from
soldiers' shouts that the powerful antipersonnel mine was triggered by Joo Silva, the New York
Times photographer traveling with her. "I cursed," she writes. (Silva lost both legs, one above the
knee and one below, but eventually returned to work after being fitted with prostheses and
undergoing dozens of surgeries.)
One might wish for a more emotionally resonant portrait of the remarkable events the author
witnessed at perilously close range over more than a decade. When I met Gall at the end of 2006 in
Quetta, Pakistan, where we had traveled separately on assignment for our respective newspapers, a
fresh bruise was blooming near her temple, inflicted hours earlier when men she believed were
military intelligence agents burst into her hotel room. What I most vividly recall is her utterly
uncowed demeanor: furious, really, but not scared.
Recognizing, perhaps, that reticence can be a strength, Gall here lets the facts she lays out for us
speak eloquently for themselves.
From three angles
With a plethora of policy-oriented works on Afghanistan having appeared in recent years, Anand
Gopal wisely chooses to tell the war's story from the personal perspective of three characters: a
Taliban commander, a U.S.-allied Afghan official, and an Afghan housewife who claws her way out of
a suffocating village existence and eventually becomes a lawmaker. While a younger and less
experienced correspondent than Gall, Gopal nonetheless displays a keen understanding of the levers
of power in Afghan society and their sometimes devastating effect on individuals trying to make
their way in the world.
Gopal's literary method - switching from one character's life story to another, adding in a wartime
chronology and blending in sometimes unwieldy chunks of explanatory prose - can create
something of a whipsaw effect. But he anchors his narrative with small, beautifully rendered Afghan
scenes: houses "built right into the mountainside hundreds of them, lit up like candles, like some
votive offering from the earth itself."
The portraits come alive to varying degrees. The Taliban commander, despite a wealth of detail
about his activities, remains an opaque presence. The Afghan warlord, enriched and relied on by
credulous-seeming Americans, is almost cartoonishly repellent; he is unrepentantly corrupt and
keeps a young boy close at hand, praising his "beautiful eyes." (In Afghanistan, many powerful men
regard pedophilia as a perquisite of authority.) The most conflicted but triumphant story is that of
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5/2/2014 The war correspondents' view from Afghanistan - latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-carlotta-gall-anand-gopal-20140504,0,4954234.story#axzz30Wr3PwTb 3/4
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the educated but long-thwarted Heela, offering a nuanced view of a loving marriage that was
nonetheless marred by domestic violence and the wrenching choices she must make at times to
protect herself and her children.
Like "Behind the Beautiful Forevers," Katherine Boo's luminous account of the travails of Mumbai
slum dwellers, this volume presents precisely rendered dialogue and detailed accounts of events that
would in many cases have taken place years earlier. For some readers, that might raise the question
of whether such a reconstruction, presented as nonfiction, can be considered entirely faithful. Gopal
addresses that in a postscript, telling of interviews with multiple witnesses, retracing subjects' steps
and careful use of existing documentation. The reader is left to judge the likely degree of veracity.
Many of the areas where both Gall and Gopal traveled over their years of reportage were extremely
dangerous at the time, and for the most part remain so. In both books, much of the action takes place
outside the capital, which is always a virtue in reporting about Afghanistan. Swaths of countryside
grow ever more violent, as exemplified by the shooting death last month of Associated Press
photographer Anja Niedringhaus in remote Khost province, near the Pakistan border. Her AP
colleague, Kathy Gannon, who had written about Afghanistan for decades, was seriously wounded.
Gopal's book, like Gall's, contributes to our understanding of a conflict that seemed at its outset to
hold such moral clarity but devolved into what Gopal calls "the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy" of
violence becoming its own end. Much to their credit, neither writer loses sight of the real lives caught
up in war's machinery.
King traveled frequently to Pakistan on assignment for the Los Angeles Times between 2006 and
2009 and was The Times' bureau chief in Kabul from 2009 to 2012. She is currently The Times'
bureau chief in Cairo.
The Wrong Enemy
America in Afghanistan 2001-2014
Carlotta Gall
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 329 pp., $28
No Good Men Among the Living
America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes
Anand Gopal
Metropolitan: 304 pp., $27
Copy r ight 2 01 4, Los Angeles Times
12
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