Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency

Colonel Gian Gentile's 2008 article &quot;Misreading the Surge&quot; in <i>World Politics Review</i> first exposed a growing rift among military intellectuals that has since been playing out in strategy sessions at the Pentagon, in classrooms at military academies, and on the pages of the <i>New York Times</i>. While the past years of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan have been dominated by the doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN) , Gentile and a small group of dissident officers and defense analysts have questioned the necessity and efficacy of COIN - essentially armed nation-building - in achieving the United States' limited core policy objective in Afghanistan: the destruction of Al Qaeda.<br><br>Drawing both on the author's experiences as a combat battalion commander in the Iraq War and his research into the application of counterinsurgency in a variety of historical contexts, <i>Wrong Turn</i> is a brilliant summation of Gentile's views of the failures of COIN, as well as a searing reevaluation of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan.<br><br>As the issue of America's withdrawal from Afghanistan inevitably rises to the top of the national agenda, <i>Wrong Turn</i> will be a major new touchstone for what went wrong and a vital new guide to the way forward.<br><br><i>Note: the ideas in this book are the author's alone, not the Department of Defense's.</i><br>