Counter Jihad: America’s Military Experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria by Brian Glyn Williams (review)

Counter Jihad is a thoroughly researched, easy to read, informative, and important book. It is a thorough accounting of how and why the United States fought (and is fighting) wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and the key events that led to these wars. “This book is an effort to stand back from these seminal events that were followed by millions, but not fully understood at the time, and make them comprehensible with the aim of understanding why U.S. forces are today involved in wars in three Muslim countries” (p. xii). This is a worthy goal and an interesting frame. The goal of making these “seminal” events comprehensible is going to require a frame that unifies history, politics, economics, identity, and other psychological factors such as fear, pride, and national interest. That is a tall order. It is also one thing to explore and explain possible causal relationships that gave rise to certain developments and unify those to explain an event, and yet quite another to extend those in time to explain what is currently occurring. In other words, there are two distinct and difficult tasks being undertaken here.

This is something that Williams more or less acknowledges:

On one level the aim of this book is to chronicle this constantly unfolding story that takes place on shifting sand and provide specific details of “granularity,” as the military calls it. On another level it is a broad, sweeping overview spanning events from the 1948 conquest of Palestine by Israeli troops to the beginning of the collapse of the ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham] state in 2016 (p. xii).

On the “granularity” level this work is a very worthy read. Williams provides an impressive background to each conflict and an even more impressive amount of detail in explaining the lead up to and effects of each conflict. For example, in explaining the war in Afghanistan Williams walks us through the messy and ever-present world of conspiracy theories, including the early determination of the neoconservatives in the administration of President George W. Bush (2001–9) to take the war on terror to Iraq, even though all intelligence pointed to al-Qa‘ida as having perpetrated the attacks on September 11, 2001 (pp. 65–78). Williams then proceeds to describe the subsequent events surrounding the successful toppling of the Taliban and the propping up of the current Afghan government, including the plan to reach out to Pakistan as a necessary partner (pp. 79–96). For those unfamiliar, or passingly familiar, with these events this work brings a lot of value in rich detail that still manages to read well.

The third chapter, “Hype: Selling the War on Iraq to the American People,” is also rich in detail and reads well, but here there is a precise and well-researched response to every argument the Bush administration put forth to invade Iraq (pp. 97–168). These include the infamous argument surrounding weapons of mass destruction, with specific references to the yellowcake uranium from Niger (p. 104), the aluminum tubes (p. 109), the fleet of Iraqi unmanned planes loaded with weapons of mass destruction drones (p. 115), the mobile weapons lab (p. 119), and claims of stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons (p. 127). Williams also dissects the arguments connecting Iraqi president Saddam Husayn with 9/11 mastermind Usama Bin Ladin (pp. 138–60). Again, the granularity offered here is a great service for those without deep familiarity with these events, as are the subsequent chapters on the Iraq War (p. 169), a further analysis on Afghanistan (p. 220), and the final chapter on the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and the war in Syria (p. 258). To put it simply, on the level of granularity this book works.

Where the book runs into difficulty is in the frame it uses to provide the sweeping overview it promises...