The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan
By Doug Stanton
Thorndike Press, Large Print Edition (2009), 771 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4104-1720-6
Genre: History, American
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Horse Soldiers The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan By Doug Stanton Thorndike Press, Large Print Edition (2009), 771 pages ISBN: 978-1-4104-1720-6 Genre: History, American |
Reviewed by Israel Drazin - October 5, 2009
Doug Stanton, New York Times bestselling author of In Harm’s Way wrote this spellbinding history of the early American war efforts in Afghanistan. The book reads like a well-written novel.
When the terrorists struck New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the United States was not prepared for a retaliatory war or even adequate preventive measures to protect US citizens. President Bush declared war on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan the next day, on September 12. But the military had no contingency plan for war in Afghanistan, and certainly did not have soldiers who knew how to fight a war riding on horses, the way the Afghans fought, or even men or women that spoke the Afghan language.
One would think that the US could draw a strategy from the Russian experience, but this was not possible because the Russians failed. The Russians had fought in Afghanistan for ten years, from 1979. They introduced a fighting force of a half million men into the country, and lost fifty thousand of them. In fact, historians write that their defeat was one of the causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The US was involved in the Russian war. The Americans backed the anti-Soviet forces called the mujahideen. The US turned a blind eye to their extremist religious views and supplied them with sophisticated weapons.
But then the Taliban rose from the ranks of the mujahideen, well armed and well trained, as an enemy of the US and of civilization.
The Taliban, who followed an extreme version of the Sunni religion, were religious zealots determined to turn back civilization to the fourteenth century, to an ancient generally imagined time that they considered the golden age, when people were ruled by the stringent dictates of Islamic law.
The name Taliban is ironically built on the Arabic talib, meaning "student" or "seeker of knowledge." These seekers of knowledge felt a religious obligation to slit the throats of non-believers, castrate them and leave their bodies to rot in the road.
They insisted that husbands paint their windows black so that no one could see the women within. They forbid women from leaving their homes without a male family escort. These seekers of knowledge forbid over 100,000 girls to attend school and the literacy rate in the country slipped precipitously to only five percent. Women, in short, were to be as pliant as cattle and as silent as stone, a thing, barely human.
The initial US reaction was to bomb the Taliban enclaves, but the bombs generally hit nothing, and the Taliban laughed at America. The US only began to have an effect upon the Taliban when they sent a unit of twelve Special Forces soldiers to fight against them in Afghanistan itself. The Taliban’s enemy was a group of Afghans called the Northern Alliance. The mission of the twelve was to join with and fight with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban.
The Special Forces was founded in 1952. Its soldiers were trained in guerrilla warfare. They wore a cap with an insignia of a red arrowhead with an arrow drawn down the middle, the sign of American Apache Indian scouts.
The regular Army generals were opposed to using Special Forces troops aided by some CIA officers as America’s lead element in the war. They had never used Special Forces in this way before. However, President Bush approved the plan to use them.
Their mission was to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan and to find Osama bin Laden and his senior lieutenants and kill them; specifically, to bring back bin Laden’s head to Washington, shipped in a box of dry ice.
People who want to read what happened when the US first came to Afghanistan, the many problems they faced and what occurred to the dozen Special Forces soldiers, that is told as well and as interesting as a very good novel, will want to read this book.
Dr. Israel Drazin is the author of fifteen books, including a series of five volumes on the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible and a series of four books on the twelfth century philosopher Moses Maimonides, the latest being Maimonides: Reason Above All, published by Gefen Publishing House, www.israelbooks.com.
