Yon's Gripping Block-By-Block Chronicle of the Hard-Won, Heartrending Success in Iraq Holds Lessons for Afghanistan
Soldiers mastered excruciatingly difficult balance between destroying brutal foes and nurturing brutalized noncombatants
MOMENT OF TRUTH NOW IN PAPERBACK
A model of counterinsurgency that ought to be copied in Afghanistan
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"He's fearless"
-Gen. David Petraeus
"Michael Yon's voice is the voice of the soldier-mission focused and battle-hardened."
-Brian Williams, Anchor NBC Nightly News
"Vivid...shocking and mesmerizing"
-The Boston Herald
"His readers have learned what most Americans would not know from NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS and NPR"
-Former New York Times foreign correspondent Clifford May
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As coalition forces prepare for a major summer offensive in Kandahar province, the war's longest-serving battlefield writer is warning that military leaders are in over their heads in Afghanistan, seemingly incapable of applying their own hard-won lessons from Iraq.
Michael Yon, the independent writer who has logged more embedded hours in Afghanistan and Iraq than any journalist, started a long mission with the U.S. military in Kandahar earlier this year, but his tour was abruptly curtailed by the military in May—right before the battle for Kandahar was to commence in earnest.
Yon has made dire assessments before, influencing policy with tough dispatches posted directly from the front lines. The first American war writer to describe how U.S. blunders plunged Iraq into a civil war that imperiled our entire mission, Yon campaigned for the 2007 troop surge, then chronicled its hard-fought and often heartrending success in MOMENT OF TRUTH IN IRAQ, now out for the first time in paperback.
His gritty block-by-block, battle-by-battle account showed how American soldiers mastered the excruciatingly difficult balance between destroying brutal foes and nurturing terrorized civilians. It is a model of counterinsurgency that has not yet been used to similar effect in Afghanistan, Yon says.
Instead, Yon warns that Afghanistan looks more like the U.S. military's Viet Nam-era approach to counterinsurgency, plagued by short-term military victories that are immediately overrun when coalition forces move on and the Taliban retakes villages and brutalizes terrified noncombatants.
Read MOMENT OF TRUTH today to see what it would take to turn Afghanistan around.
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