Wrong Turn

Colonel Gian Gentile's 2008 article "Misreading the Surge" in World Politics Reviewfirst exposed a growing rift among military intellectuals that has since been playing out in strategy sessions at the Pentagon, in classrooms at military academies, and on the pages of the New York Times. While the past years of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan have been dominated by the doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN), Gentile and a small group of dissident officers and defense analysts have questioned the necessity and efficacy of COIN essentially armed nation-building in achieving the United States' limited core policy objective in Afghanistan: the destruction of al-Qaida. The argument over counterinsurgency has grown into a heated debate over the current direction of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan and the historical assumptions underpinning it. Drawing both on his experiences as a combat battalion commander in the Iraq War and his research into the application of counterinsurgency in a variety of historical contexts, Wrong Turnis a brilliant summation of Gentile's views of the failures of COIN, as well as a searing re-evaluation of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan and the dim prospects for American success there. Now director of the military history program at West Point, Gentile also critiques the misuse of history to support what he views as flawed current strategy focusing especially on the historical narrative of the Iraq war "surge" under General David Petraeus. As the issue of America's withdrawal from Afghanistan inevitably rises to the top of the national agenda, Wrong Turnwill be a major new touchstone for what went wrong, and a vital new guide to the way forward.