A War on Terror: Afghanistan and After Book

It's a shame that Kaplan's method is so poor and his approach so impressionistic, unfair, and polemical, because I find plenty to agree with in his opinions about policy.

Irritated by Kaplan's haphazard method for substantiating assertions, I started paying attention to which factual claims in the text were sourced at the back of the book and which were not. Kaplan lists 232 source notes for his 200-page book. On about page 32, I began making a marginal note every time I came across a quote, a paraphrase, a factual claim, or a precise statistic that deserved sourcing and didn't get it. The result? 234 missed notes over the 156 pages of body text between page 32 and Kaplan's op-ed-ish concluding chapter'and that's even leaving out the things that could be relatively easily found in contemporary media accounts. Surely these weren't all from background interviews.

I recognize that standards are different in journalism and scholarship, and this isn't about plagiarism or anything like that. But if you're going to say that the "Pentagon's Office of Special Plans... was tasked with finding any evidence that might suggest Iraq had weapons of mass destruction" (p. 126), that's a claim that you need to document or substantiate in some way. Show me why you believe that! It may well be true'I just want you to convince me with something more than assertion.

In other cases it's a matter of simply being unable to follow Kaplan's footsteps and find the source of an interesting piece of information (which is, after all, why scholars footnote their work). For example, I'd really like to find some documentary evidence that Paul Wolfowitz defied the president's orders not to put a "thumb on the scales" of Iraqi democracy and instead arranged transport for Chalabi's militia fighters'but Kaplan gives me nothing to work with.

I'm not even going to get into the numerous absolute laughers in the way Kaplan characterizes doctrine development or the role of various military iconoclasts of the 1970s and 1980s, or the way that he repeatedly refers to famed British strategist J. C. C. Fuller (that's right, not J. F. C.; this happens three times), but the chapter on doctrine development has plenty of what are by now the predictable sort of flaws: characterizations of people, events, and ideas that very clearly reflect the opinions of one or two of Kaplan's sources, representing contentious debates and complicated events in such a way as to suggest that reasonable people could only have come down in one direction.

Two stars is generous... and I generally AGREE with the guy. Avoid.