From the award-winning author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City comes a riveting, intimate account of America's troubled war in Afghanistan.

When President Barack Obama ordered the surge of troops and aid to Afghanistan, Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran followed. He found the effort sabotaged not only by Afghan and Pakistani malfeasance, but by infighting and incompetence within the American government: a war cabinet arrested by vicious bickering among top national security aides; diplomats and aid workers who failed to deliver on their grand promises; generals who dispatched troops to the wrong places; and headstrong military leaders who sought a far more expansive campaign than the White House wanted. Through their bungling and quarreling, they wound up squandering the first year of the surge.

Chandrasekaran explains how the United States has never understood Afghanistan - and probably never will. During the Cold War, American engineers undertook a massive development project across southern Afghanistan in an attempt to woo the country from Soviet influence. They built dams and irrigation canals, and they established a "comfortable" residential community known as Little America, with a Western-style school, a coed community pool, and a plush clubhouse - all of which embodied American and Afghan hopes for a bright future and a close relationship. But in the late 1970s - after growing Afghan resistance and a Communist coup - the Americans abandoned the region to warlords and poppy farmers.