★★★☆☆ There was never going to be an HEA

Warrior Diplomat: A Green Beret's Battles from Washington to Afghanistan

Michael G. Waltz

I picked up Michael G. Waltz's Warrior Diplomat: A Green Beret's Battles from Washington to Afghanistan because President-Elect Donald Trump nominated him for National Security Advisor. I saw that he had written this book and read it to get an idea of who he is. First lesson: Waltz is not a buffoon like Matt Gaetz or Robert Kennedy, Jr. "Not a buffoon" is a low bar, but with this administration a nominee who clears it is welcome. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Waltz is an intelligent man with serious experience relevant to the post of National Security.

If you are more than 30 years old, you have probably had this experience. You know a couple -- perhaps one of them is a friend of yours. Their relationship is always on the rocks. They fight, and the fights are serious. Because you're outside the relationship, you can see what neither of the principals can see (or perhaps only what they can't admit to themselves) -- there is never going to be a happy ending. Their differences, for simple or complex reasons, are essential and irreconcilable. After some time, it could be weeks or years, and often after some knock-down drag-out fights, they break up and go their separate ways.

That is Mike Waltz and Afghanistan. Waltz spent many moons in Afghanistan, trying to make the broken relationship work. Simultaneously he held policy positions in the Department of Defense and the White House under both George W Bush and Barack Obama. Warrior Diplomat is a long and, considering that it contains multiple first-hand accounts of lethal battles, surprisingly tedious account of his experiences in both places. The tedium arises in part from his descriptions of the many burocratic impediments to success in Afghanistan and how they impacted his ability to fight.

If Waltz had his way, the USA would still have troops in Afghanistan, not just now, in 2024, but for generations yet to come. His most bitter disappointment is directed at Obama's 2009 announcement that led the USA's allies in Afghanistan to believe the USA would leave in 2014. (In fact, the USA would finally leave Afghanistan, messily, in 2021, on Joe Biden's watch.) In Waltz's view, new tactics in 2009 were making a difference -- the relationship was getting better, this time FOR SURE it was gonna work!

And Obama's announcement destroyed that progress.

Warrior Diplomat is simultaneously an argument that Obama's announcement was terribly harmful and, at the same time, was the right thing to do. Although the opposite of his intention, Waltz convincingly shows that there was never going to be a Happy Ending for the USA and Afghanistan. Three US presidents in a row (Obama, Trump, and Biden) recognized that they had to get out.

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