Boots on the Ground Book Review

The Fight to Liberate Afghanistan from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. 2001-2002
by Dick Camp
$30.00; 320 pages

I receieved this book for free from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program.

Boots on the Ground, as the subtitle indicates, only covers events until 2002. The book does briefly cover events in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion until 2001, to provide some background. While the material is natively interesting, the book is not. You need to work pretty hard to make war in Afghanistan boring, but Camp definitely succeeded.

The one thing I took away from Boots on the Ground is the US clearly learned from the mistakes of the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Soviets failed to engage the locals or properly control territory, and they paid heavily for it. What remains to be seen is whether the ultimate result will be any different.

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