In his previous book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Rajiv Chandrasekaran exposed the failures and follies of the first years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. His new book, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (Knopf, $27.95), is a depressingly similar tale about wellintentioned military and development plans gone awry, this time in Afghanistan. The story is filled with inflexible generals, uninformed diplomats, misguided development experts, distracted political leaders, and squabbling administration officials. But for all the ineptitude, poor co-ordination, wasted resources, personal rivalries, and lack of effective oversight that Chandrasekaran documents, he maintains a very even, exceedingly non-polemical tone. “For years,” he writes in conclusion, “we dwelled on the limitations of the Afghans. We should have focused on ourselves.”
