Rating: 
Summary: When you Ride with Bush you ride with Bin Laden!!!
Review: This book is a wild ride into the reality of Al Qaeda's Afghanistan. With a fair and balanced approach. Mr. Smucker, who has written for right-wing (Telegraph,Wash. Times) and moderate publications (TIME, USNews, CSMonitor) for nearly two decades, debunks the Bush Administration's assertions that it has been successful in its war on terror. (Two-thirds of the Al Qaeda leadership captured??? Who is crunching the numbers???) Not only did poor strategic planning allow bin Laden to give us the slip in Afghanistan, but Donald Rumsfeld and company never came up with a "Plan B" to deal with the escaping Al Qaeda fighters -- for a full three months into the Afghan campaign. Even though Bush had vowed to get bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11, "dead or alive," this account proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the blunders of his security team allowed Osama and his associates to escape to fight another day. We are paying for the mistakes at Tora Bora to this day -- as al Qaeda regroups around the Bush team's fantaisical democratic haox in Iraq. The side show in this wild ride is the tale of how jerks like Geraldo Rivera have made a bad name for reporters around the world. Here is a guy who parades himself as "fair and balanced" but reports hearsay and makes up tall tales when it serves the purpose of his producers back home who want to feed the drooling beast. I'd put this book on a par with the best, short military histories I've ever read. There will be more histories of the Afghan war, but it is doubtful any of them will be quite as entertaining as "Al Qaeda's Great Escape."
Rating:
Summary: The Best so far
Review: When historians finally begin writing the comprehensive stories of the "War on Terror", something better willl probably come along than this book. But for the time being
this is a very enjoyable and enlightening read. Enjoyable because the author - a bit of an eccentric perhaps - takes us
along with him as he wanders througout eastern Afghanistan in the hope of interviewing or capturing Bin Laden. Along the way we are given snapshots of other
member of the foreign correspondant trade - with the
exception of Geraldo Rivera, who's arrival and subsequent
reporting fills five pages, with a mixture of respect, bemusement and envy at the whole coterie of assistants that accompany him. And then we have the two Afghan warlords hired by the Pentagon to conduct most of the ground operations. Smucker captures their ideosyncrasies perfectly, and the reader is not ultimately surprised to learn that they find no problem in being bribed by both sides.The second half of the book is less folksy, as it concentrates
on the two major battles the US took part in: Tora Bora and
the Anaconda campaign. Here we learn how Rumsfeld's naivety perhaps didn't cost us Bin Laden per se, but allowed most of his high command to cross the border to Pakistan.
As for Anaconda, the only drawn out battle, Smucker reports it mainly from interviews and military records, describing it with a journalistic "you are there" eye. And it is an eye-opener to see that were it not for our air power our ground forces might have actually taken a beating. Smucker wisely refrains from writing about what he doesn't either observe or learn first-hand. For that reason the reader doesn't get much insight into what the Pentagon was thinking when it did what it did. In any case, this book will help prepare for the fact that the "war" in Afghanistan is far
from finished, and may not yet turn out the way we want.
Rating:
Summary: The Best so far
Review: When historians finally begin writing the comprehensive stories of the "War on Terror", something better willl probably come along than this book. But for the time being
this is a very enjoyable and enlightening read. Enjoyable because the author - a bit of an eccentric perhaps - takes us
along with him as he wanders througout eastern Afghanistan in the hope of interviewing or capturing Bin Laden. Along the way we are given snapshots of other
member of the foreign correspondant trade - with the
exception of Geraldo Rivera, who's arrival and subsequent
reporting fills five pages, with a mixture of respect, bemusement and envy at the whole coterie of assistants that accompany him. And then we have the two Afghan warlords hired by the Pentagon to conduct most of the ground operations. Smucker captures their ideosyncrasies perfectly, and the reader is not ultimately surprised to learn that they find no problem in being bribed by both sides. The second half of the book is less folksy, as it concentrates
on the two major battles the US took part in: Tora Bora and
the Anaconda campaign. Here we learn how Rumsfeld's naivety perhaps didn't cost us Bin Laden per se, but allowed most of his high command to cross the border to Pakistan.
As for Anaconda, the only drawn out battle, Smucker reports it mainly from interviews and military records, describing it with a journalistic "you are there" eye. And it is an eye-opener to see that were it not for our air power our ground forces might have actually taken a beating. Smucker wisely refrains from writing about what he doesn't either observe or learn first-hand. For that reason the reader doesn't get much insight into what the Pentagon was thinking when it did what it did. In any case, this book will help prepare for the fact that the "war" in Afghanistan is far
from finished, and may not yet turn out the way we want.
Rating:
Summary: Great read!
Review: When my friend recommended this book, I wasn't too interested because I don't usually like tedious military histories or heavy analysis. This book had enough of that kind of stuff that I felt like I learned something, but it is written in such a way that the book read like an adventure novel. I finished it in a couple of days. A great read!
| 
