For the most part, our world has little in common with the world of a hundred years ago. Planes, computers, cars, robots, vacuum cleaners, particle accelerators, space shuttles, submarines... The list of 20th century innovations is endless. And so it's easy to forget that some people still live in a world of horses and buggies, shamans and shepherds. When now collides with then, which wins out? In Horse Soldiers, a chronicle of the first American missions to oust the Afghani Taliban after the 9/11 attacks, now may win the battles, but then may well take the war.
It is impossible to imagine a starker clash of civilizations than that which came together in Afghanistan after 9/11. CIA operatives, trained for insurgency, supported by the best in American air power, kept communicable by satellite phones and tracked 24/7 by GPS satellites, joined forces with the Northern Alliance, a collection of horse-born tribesmen, to uproot the Taliban. Religious zealots birthed from fundamentalist, Islamist schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Taliban had risen to power in 1996, sweeping away what it saw as a corrupt state and replacing it with a regime which sought to re-create, in the 20th century, the 7th century world of the Prophet Mohammed. No technology, no idolatry, no electricity, no skyscrapers, no telephones... Perfect religious adherence in a world as it ought to be. Known to have given shelter to Osama Bin Laden, and the perpetrators of the senseless and incalculable destruction of the two, 1500-year-old Buddha statues, the Taliban in Afghanistan was the most logical country in which to respond to 9/11. And so these special operatives poured into a country in the process of being degraded into the Middle Ages and, with their guns and their bombs, they helped the Northern Alliance force the Taliban into numerous retreats designed to encourage the Afghanistan people to rise up against their zealous rulers.
Though Mr. Stanton spends considerable time depicting the incredulity of American soldiers calling in bomb strikes with satellite phones while on horseback, Horse Soldiers ultimately concerns the new face of war, insurgencies backed by small, supremely trained soldiers, armed with the latest technology. Far more flexible than mechanized armies, these infiltrators can be anywhere, can blend into any population, and, with a single command, call in a bomb strike on the enemy. Though the infiltrator is far more vulnerable to reprisal when caught -- after all, he doesn't have a thousand soldiers and a hundred tanks next to him --, the benefits of excellent intelligence and swift action surely outweigh the costs of transporting whole armies halfway across the world to fight in a country no modern army has ever conquered, against an enemy who can't be found by conventional weapons. Mr. Stanton points out that the program that authorized the CIA operatives to execute this plan in Afghanistan cost the American taxpayer but a tiny fraction of the overall war in Afghanistan. And who knows; had the program continued in lieu of a war which devastated that pitiable nation, perhaps local sentiment would be more concretely with the West.
Horse Soldiers tells the story of these American infiltrators and their remarkable achievements, but it also speaks to the lessons we should learn about war. The two narratives come together to entertain and edify. (4/5 Stars)
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