Robin Moore who wrote "Green Berets" during the Viet Nam war follows Special Forces units 40 years later in Afghanistan. He documents Task Force Dagger launched after 9/11 to topple the Taliban government in order to get to Bin Laden. ( )

Robin Moore is the author of the classic The Green Berets. He’s also the only civilian I know of to complete Special Forces qualifications and has spent decades befriending and palling around with members of the SF community. As such, it’s only natural for the reader to expect an unapologetically triumphalist narrative of SF exploits in Afghanistan, and that’s more or less exactly what we get here. With a book like this, we have to take the bad (unabashedly pro-SF bias, tone, lack of citations) with the good: unfettered access to SF operators and a clear, exciting, eminently readable account.

The book is organized in roughly chronological fashion, from soon after September 11 through September 2002. Each chapter is composed of a series of sub-sections that are really more like a set of vignettes. The book would have been stronger, I think, had these vignettes been woven into a coherent, flowing narrative. As it is, the work comes off as being relatively choppy and disjointed, and seems almost hastily constructed, with much of the connective tissue the reader would expect missing.

The book’s greatest strength (and perhaps its greatest weakness) is the narrow – at times extremely parochial – focus on SF operations in Afghanistan in 2001-2002 through Tora Bora and Operation ANACONDA. In the rush to get the book out roughly a year after September 11, the chronological focus of the book is necessarily compressed. Sadly, as of this writing (December 2010), the US is still in Afghanistan, and the “hunt for Bin Laden” is, as yet, unsuccessful, and the last eight years of SF and other operations in Afghanistan are not chronicled here. This is not by any means the definitive history of SF operations in Afghanistan, or even the definitive history of the first year of those operations (e.g., while Moore devotes a few pages to the Battle of Roberts Ridge, that battle is detailed exhaustively in Malcolm MacPherson’s Roberts Ridge: A Story of Courage and Sacrifice on Takur Ghar Mountain, Afghanistan). This work is a snapshot in time, and an early one at that, so it has to be taken on its own merits. It does include a number of details on particular operations that I have not seen elsewhere. For example, Moore includes an account of the Battle of Qala-i-Jangi (the prison uprising where CIA officer Mike Spann was killed and where John Walker Lindh was captured) that is at odds – dramatically so – with other accounts, so Moore’s work is useful for these kinds of details as well.

The book suffers from a lack of attention to detail on what CIA paramilitary forces were doing in Afghanistan (Schroen’s First In and Berntsen’s Jawbreaker will help fill in this gap) – what little Moore does say about the CIA is almost unrelentingly negative or dismissive – nor does it say much about what other SOF teams were doing. It is simply a highly-focused account of what the SF A-Teams were doing, no more, no less. Moore is clearly channeling the frustration of many SF operators with conventional forces and US military leaders without SOF experience (Franks, for example). That’s fine, I share that bias to some degree, and these frustrations are visible in a variety of sources, but readers should be aware of Moore’s (and his subjects’) positions and biases.

The book is exciting, interesting, and generally well-written, though its organization needs work, and I wish that Moore had taken another year to polish and expand the book before publishing. I give it 3 stars out of 5, but would very much like to see Moore do an expanded second edition of the book.

Review copyright 2010 J. Andrew Byers ( )

Not a perfict book,but one published at the very beginning of what I am sure the author did not know was a war going on now 10 years later.These early accounts are important, and should be reread frequently.Think of those first hand accounts...1968,1969 of Vietnam.
The Irony of the book is that it is still a current title.We could be adding a Hunt for Bin Laden part ..what 2,3,4 ? right now
I recommend. ( )

To me, this book felt more like it was notes for a book, than a book. I feel like it should have been written a bit later on when the author could gain more perspective and parts of the book could have been made more cohorent. On the other hand, as with Jawbreaker, another subpar book, it does offer unfiltered, first hand accounts of what happened in Afghanistan. If one is deeply interested in the "war on terror" or the Afghanistan I would recommend it. It will be sometime before an excellent book on our war in Afghanistan can be written. Until then the I would recommend Ghost Wars by Steve Coll and select chapters form Forever War by Dexter Filkins. ( )

Great book on our work in Afghanistan. This is really uplifting to see how if you let a small team of people work as they see best you can see dramatic results. Applied to the business world I think its poignant and I have used it to clearly point out how large organizations need to think in this way to drive radical change. We need these type of front-runners to drive change and results. ( )