You yourself fought in Afghanistan. I was wondering why you suggested understanding the war there as the title. Is there a lot about it people don’t understand?

I’ve had a varied life over the past decade. I really started my professional life after the 9/11 attacks, as a young platoon leader in Afghanistan. I went back to Afghanistan in 2004 as a ranger platoon leader and I then went off and studied the Arabic-speaking world for several years. I earned my master’s and PhD focused on Lebanon. But I started working on Afghanistan again in 2009 when I served as an adviser to General McChrystal and then went back briefly in 2010 to do an assessment for General Petraeus. If I look at my life over the past decade, even though I’ve probably spent more time in the Arabic-speaking world, Afghanistan is a place that I have kept going back to, much like the soldiers who are in the US military.

So you definitely know what you’re talking about.

I’m not really sure. I would start with a position of intellectual humility. When I left the army I moved to Lebanon and spent several years studying the people, politics and cultures of the Arabic-speaking world. I think that regional studies background has made me much less likely to make broad claims about the people, cultures and languages of Afghanistan. When I first went into Afghanistan in the winter of 2001 and fought in Operation Anaconda in March of 2002, I thought I knew pretty much everything I needed to know as a young platoon leader. I knew how to manoeuvre my squad, I knew how to fire my weapon with accuracy, I knew how to run my platoon and to engage with the enemy. I thought that was enough. But one of the books I cited was Clausewitz’s On War. The first and most far-reaching act of judgement that the statesman-commander has to make is to establish the kind of war on which he is embarking. For me, that means studying the human terrain of the environment in which you’re operating. Like a lot of young military officers, I don’t think I was humble enough about the environment in which I was operating as a young officer. I would like to think that over the years I have become more aware of all that I do not understand about the environment. When I went back to look at Afghanistan from the perspective of a think-tank scholar and as a civilian adviser to the commander there, I like to say that I knew more of what I did not know.

And knowledge of the environment is essential for success?

Yes. I remember when I first went to Afghanistan I’d read Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban, which is a great book. But the soldiers who work in Afghanistan today – especially those that spend over a year in the country – need to have a much more granular understanding of Afghan culture. They’re never going to be anthropologists with machine guns, but they should be able to understand the local dynamics better than I did when I first went there. One of the problems you have with military officers – and I speak as someone who used to be a military officer – is that they want to know the one book they need to read. The one thing they need to do. Often, working in an environment like Afghanistan or the Arabic-speaking world, more important than having the right set of data is being comfortable with all that you’re not going to be able to understand. I especially like the David Edwards book, Heroes of the Age, for this. It highlights a lot of the ambiguities and contradictions within Afghan society and culture and history that are unrealistic for a US military officer to try to wrap his head around in a nine-month tour.

In terms of people not understanding this decade-long war, what is it that frustrates you most?

As a veteran of the war, what frustrates me more than anything else is that, for the most part, American society has waged war in a country that it hasn’t bothered to learn much about, and it has waged the war with young men and women that it really doesn’t know. Only 0.5% of America’s population serves in the military, so the percentage of soldiers, marines and airmen that serve in Afghanistan is smaller than that. So there is this disconnect between American society and the military that serves in Afghanistan, and there is this disconnect between this large national project in Afghanistan – this conflict that we’re waging and a variety of developmental activities associated with that conflict – and the American people. They really don’t have any connection with it. As someone who has, at times, advised military commanders and often finds myself in conversations with younger military officers, guys that are doing the types of job that I used to as a young officer, I just try to promote a degree of learning about the environment before people go into it.

Which gets us into the books.

The one-volume introduction to Afghanistan that I always recommend to people is Thomas Barfield’s Afghanistan. The two others that I really enjoy are by David Edwards, who is a social anthropologist at Williams College [Massachusetts]. He is just a delightful writer and an accomplished and fantastic anthropologist working on Afghanistan. So those three books by those two anthropologists I always recommend to people. If you only have time to read one book on Afghanistan, make sure it’s Tom Barfield’s – if you have time to read a little more, make sure it’s the two books by David Edwards.