How We Got There: A Short Bibliography

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Jeremy Ward, former Marine Corps SIGINT Specialist, provides a short bibliography explaining how we got there — how our military ended up in Afghanistan:

Ghost Wars by Steve Coll: This is the single most important book about Afghanistan and the CIA involvement there prior to 9/11. Coll did a brilliant job. A historian working for the CIA could not have done much better. This is a great reference.

Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile: The film sucked. Read the book. It’s a focused history that fits in well with Coll’s broad strokes. An enjoyable and entertaining read too.

The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander by Pete Blaber: This is a great book. Covers some stories from his time as a Delta officer as well as life and philosophical lessons. Blaber was the AFO Commander during Operation Anaconda (from Naylor’s book). He’s a bright guy. Can’t recommend this highly enough.

Not A Good Day To Die by Sean Naylor: This is great. A very Army-centric view (Naylor writes for Army Times and is predisposed to take their side of this story), but still a great account of what is right and wrong in our approach to Afghanistan. Read Blaber’s book to figure out why he got it right and the desk jockeys in high places got it really wrong.

Kill Bin Laden by Dalton Fury: Not a well written book, but still a great treasure trove of info about spec ops dealings with the Afghans and their culture. A lot of other good stuff about Tora Bora too. A very worthwhile read.

Jawbreaker by Gary Berntsen: Heavily redacted by the CIA, but if you read this in conjunction with First In by Gary Schroen, you’ll be able to piece most of it together. Berntsen relieved Schoen as commander of the CIA Jawbreaker team in Afghanistan. He was the CIA commander at Tora Bora. An insightful read.

First In by Gary Schroen: This is Schroen’s first hand account of taking the CIA team into Afghanistan just after 9/11. It’s great. Can’t say enough good about this book. (Note: Schroen is also featured in Ghost Wars by Coll).

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Jim: Phileas Frogg: “No, just start at Wikipedia, move onto google, try archive or project Gutenberg, and finally, just buy a book from Amazon on the cheap.” In other words, what, if anything, is “the marrow of college”?
Phileas Frogg: A guy standing there lecturing, even a highly entertaining and captivating lecturer, is competing with the internet, both from an information efficiency and entertainment standpoint. He’s screwed. Best I can tell it looks like auditing rates have dropped by around 40% since 2005, and I can imagine they were higher even before that if we go further back. Add in the fact that college education has been, “democratized,R 21; and universalized, and it’s no wonder fewer...
McChuck: It’s hard enough to figure out what classes are even being offered by the average university. Learning who teaches them, along with where and when the classes are held, is generally a secret more closely held than most military plans.
Phileas Frogg: Raw ability vs Signals about ability Some disassociation is inevitable as per Goodhart’s Law, but total alienation is practically impossible (despite some of our best efforts).
Bob Sykes: Which degree you get is far more predictive of future income than mere levels of degrees. Degree field is also an indirect measure of IQ. It requires substantially more native intelligence to earn a mathematics or physics degree at any level than to get a Ph. D. In the humanities or social sciences.
Felix: “I don’t think our public schools have been working hard to assimilate everyone into our shared culture in a long, long time.” The key word is “our”. Schools, world-wide, certainly teach a shared culture. Out in the sticks there may be a few unenlightened, deplorables of the lower orders who have issues with that shared culture. But, pfft.
Gaikokumaniakku: “In 2003, the United States Department of Education gave about 18,000 randomly selected Americans the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL).” Of course, these must have been 18,000 randomly selected white Americans, to make a reasonable comparison with the historically white population of the majority of America, right? … right? The ghost of William Shockley is hovering silently over me and shaking his head from side to side in a manner I can only interpret as ominous.
Phileas Frogg: Every educational concern or observation in the modern world comes down to this: “Unless and until we finally accept that people are no more equal in their educability and intelligence than they are in their ability to sprint 100m, dunk a basketball or stand 7 feet tall, we will continue to waste limited time, energy, and resources on solving a problem without a solution: men are not equal.” God needs all sorts. And yet, every class of person projects their narrow measure of...
Jim: The labor market pays you for what you know now… The “labor market” is a centrally planned, authoritarianly organized corporate economy, a free market for employers as against employees, not a free market for employees as against employers. Fortunately, the Singularity is poised to render mutational load a thing of the past.
Isegoria: Caplan’s response would be that almost no one uses any of those skills, and those skills don’t generalize or transfer, at least not for most people most of the time.
Gaikokumaniakku: Geometry can be taught in many ways. Knowledge of proofs might be more useful than knowing the volume of a sphere. A bigger problem is that school is intended to reinforce the social order. If schools taught students how to resist cops and lawyers, government would find maintaining power to be more difficult. Another angle is skills versus facts. I probably don’t need to know the year in which Shakespeare wrote (a fact) but I certainly do benefit from understanding how Shakespeare...
Isegoria: Excellent example, Bob. I’m reminded, oddly enough, of how Musk calculated that on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the floor of his Tesla factory: “At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we’re going to alter them later,” he said. “But if I don’t make decisions, we die.”
Bob Sykes: I once had a family doctor who commented that doctors knew when to to add new prescriptions but not when to stop old ones.
Isegoria: Bryan Caplan is definitely allergic to shared culture. On the other hand, I don’t think our public schools have been working hard to assimilate everyone into our shared culture in a long, long time. I was just reading Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, and that is one of his main points: The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the reading textbook used in elementary school, the variants of which were modeled on the overwhelmingly most popular series, the McGuffey Readers. They...
Phileas Frogg: Caplan is one of the most hit/miss popular academics today. He goes from cogently and insightfully detailing the flaws and issues with a complex system or behavior, to proposing the most obviously asinine and unworkable solutions imaginable to anyone with practical experience in that field, to slipping a totally original and unlooked for consideration into the mix that gives you pause, all within the span of a small handful of pages, only to do it again a few pages later. Reading Caplan...
Bob Sykes: One argument in favor of Emily et al is social cohesion and group self-identification, national-building. Caplan seems to think humans are identical, interchangeable atoms, without history or culture. Or is he just furthering the usual sabotage of the surrounding, somewhat alien, culture in which he is embeddded
David Foster: “The great 20th-century composer Igor Stravinsky wrote, in The Poetics of Music, “You cannot create against a yielding medium.” Stravinsky’s innovations were nothing if not revolutionary, but he knew that he could not have produced them if he had not been constrained by the traditions of music and the mathematical strictures of tone. “Let me have something finite, definite,” he wrote. “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the...
Jim: “They were free to imagine and play and invent and write,” he said. “They were inventing one thing after another, after another, after another and for an engineer, what more can you ask for?” That’s the worst imaginable environment for engineers, who invariably need to be held down and whipped with soapful socks like Private Pyle at boot camp.
Jim: Yet maintaining the universalist, human-rights based legal infrastructure constructed after the Second World War takes priority over addressing these issues. The fact that this infrastructure was created for an entirely different world, where there was much less international migration, and where “asylum seeker” meant a political dissident from the Eastern Bloc, does not matter. If the post-WWII occupational court infrastructure were universalist, it would be possible for Englishmen to immigrate to...
Isegoria: That’s exactly the kind of thing he’s talking about, Phileas. I don’t want to share too many lengthy excerpts from a brand new book, but I’m happy to pique everyone’s interest.

Isegoria

How We Got There: A Short Bibliography

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