Eagle down The last special forces fighting the forever war

Initiated in response to the Global War on Terror, the war in Afghanistan has been raging for 19 years. As the U.S. scaled down its level of direct involvement, the tide of momentum shifted, with the Taliban re-emerging as a revitalized menace and regaining once-lost territories, such as Kabul and Kunduz. National security reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Donati here writes of her time embedded with Afghan forces beginning in 2015. She traces the ongoing efforts of the U.S. Special Forces advising the Afghan alliance in their brutal battles of supremacy against Taliban and their confederates. She covers deadly attacks (sneak attacks on U.S. and Afghan outposts), frustrating attempts at diplomacy (stalemates over parties involved), and questions of the U.S. presence during both the Obama and Trump administrations. The book hits its mark in its sympathetic portrayal of the boots on the ground, in particular the Special Forces and Green Berets of Operational Detachment Alpha. Their frustrations at the human costs, from deaths to homesickness to mission futility, will resonate with readers.

Wall Street Journal reporter Donati debuts with a gritty and well-informed look at the current state of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. After abandoning a plan to withdraw American troops by 2017, President Obama "turned the war over to secretive U.S. Special Operations Forces," Donati writes. She follows several Green Berets units from 2015 to 2020, and reveals how miscommunication and technology issues led one of her profile subjects to authorize the bombing of a hospital, killing dozens of patients and staff members. Throughout, Donati documents Afghan government corruption and the mismanagement of local security forces, and details the high costs borne by U.S. military families. In 2017 and 2018, the Taliban attempted to seize a series of provincial capitals, provoking Afghan and American troop surges. President Trump, like Obama, sought to deliver on his campaign promise to end the war, and, in 2020, reached a deal with the Taliban "to withdraw all U.S. troops and map out a path to reconciliation," though Donati notes that many impediments still stand in the way. Skillfully interweaving big-picture policy analysis with frontline reporting, Donati shines a stark light on this shadowy conflict. The result is a distressing yet vital update on America's longest war. (Jan.)

The American military effort in Afghanistan, which began in October 2001, has become the longest war in U.S. history. Donati, who served as national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Kabul from 2014 to 2017, has crafted an inside look at the military tactics of units with the Army's Special Forces (often referred to as Green Berets) that faced the Taliban in the Helmand area of southern Afghanistan. Similar to the observations in Wesley Morgan's The Hardest Place (2021), which recounted American efforts in the Pech Valley, Donati provides clear-eyed insights into the frustrations and challenges that confront American soldiers in a war that many Americans have either forgotten about--or would just as soon keep out of sight and out of mind. But American servicemen continue to die and experience illness and disability as a result of this war, and Donati's book is unflinching in the stories it tells about servicemen participating in an unforgiving war. The author also details the gridlock in Washington during George W. Bush's and Barack Obama's two terms in office as they sought to manage the war. VERDICT Featuring often-overlooked perspectives, this is an important read on America's military involvement in Afghanistan.--Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames

The former Kabul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal delivers a searing, dispiriting portrait of America's elite warriors in the field. If the title echoes Black Hawk Down, it's for good reason: One of the many tragic episodes in Donati's potent report from the front--not that there's one in guerrilla war, of course--has at its center a downed helicopter, besieged Special Forces soldiers, and all the miscommunications and misunderstandings that the fog of war enshrouds. A terrible death anchors that episode, but death is the business at hand. So it is with the Green Berets whom Donati profiles, most of them professional soldiers of a serious, even scholarly bent skilled in various martial disciplines. Nowhere is that more true than Afghanistan, where, over the years covered here, regular soldiers were withdrawn, leaving it to Special Forces to fight the Taliban in places like the Helmand region, whose Sangin district British troops had nicknamed Sangingrad, "after the World War II siege by German troops of Stalingrad, where thousands perished during the Nazi invasion of Russia." It's a place specially designed to draw out foreign blood but also that of the native people. Donati recounts the accidental bombing of a hospital, killing civilians and leading to stern letters of reprimand in personnel files, as well as the story of a dedicated soldier who stepped on a mine, lost his legs, and would up in a bureaucratic nightmare of a kind at which the military excels: "No one could tell him how to get new orders generated and restart his medical coverage. He had to wheel himself from office to office, asking questions." Donati's on-the-ground account--and it's clear that she put herself in constant danger to tell the soldiers' stories even as American officials dithered about how to deploy those troops--is sometimes as hallucinatory as Dispatches and as taut and well written as Mark Bowden's now-classic book. Exemplary journalism and a powerful argument for not putting soldiers in harm's way unless we're sure we know why. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.