The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia
James Bradley. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015. 384 pp. Notes. Index. $35.
Reviewed by Captain Fred W. Kacher, U.S. Navy
Fifteen years after writing Flags of our Fathers, a landmark bestseller that explored the lives of the men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, James Bradley returns to Asia in The China Mirage. In his newest book, Bradley aims to recast the very way we view the United States’ relationship with China in the 20th century. He shares a hope that “Perhaps the cautionary tale revealed in this book will motivate people in both countries to strengthen that bridge across the Pacific before it’s too late. Again.”
Rather than highlight more familiar episodes such as Nixon’s opening relations with Communist China, Bradley introduces earlier figures such as Warren Delano Jr., the grandfather of Franklin Roosevelt who found his fortune in China, and Henry Luce, a missionary’s son also born in China, who founded Time magazine and, in Bradley’s assessment, helped create the “mirage” of an Americanized, democratic, and potentially Christian China.
Although his book focuses on China, Bradley relates how a rising Japan played a key role in how the United States viewed a more benignly perceived China, particularly in the decades preceding World War II. Bradley concludes that the United States’ aspirations for China clouded its foreign-policy judgment in its dealings with Japan, leading to an oil embargo that compelled the Japanese to strike first at Pearl Harbor.
Bradley’s is a story with a dizzying array of characters, relationships, and subplots. In what seems to be an effort to help the reader, Bradley takes to assigning actions and motives to groups rather than individuals, using names such as the Wise Men, the China Lobby, and the Hotdogs (named for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter’s Harvard Law protégés who joined the administration of Franklin Roosevelt).
Echoing David Halberstam’s classic The Best and the Brightest, Bradley presents a seemingly endless (and often fascinating) stream of American elites who got it wrong in China and Greater Asia. Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, and Dean Acheson are among those who Bradley believes misread China, in part because of a skillfully orchestrated campaign by Chiang Kai-shek, his wife Madame Chiang, and American religious groups who viewed China as a vast land worth saving.
Bradley drives his point home more deeply, tying this misperception to the roots of both the Korean and Vietnam wars. He writes, “American misunderstanding of China caused the nation to support Southern Methodist Chiang, bring on a world war that didn’t have to be, oppose the bandit Mao, and go on to fight two bloody Asian wars.”
Bradley further details the rise of Mao Zedong, whose forces outmaneuvered the better-funded and American-supported forces of Chiang Kai-shek. Despite a few lone voices of dissent, U.S. senior leaders seemed unable to depart from their preconceptions that the converted Christian, ostensibly democratic Chiang was China’s future.
Although Chiang is assessed unsparingly, Mao fares much better. Oddly, Mao’s failings (such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in which millions of his countrymen died) do not warrant mention. Perhaps Bradley did not deem these details central to his narrative, but there are times the author appears to press too hard to secure a clear-cut indictment of America’s foreign-policy establishment. He may be right, but it’s also possible that in dealing with one of the great foreign-policy questions of the 20th century that capable, well-intentioned people simply fell short as they struggled to make sense of a region they did not know as well as they should have.
Ultimately, that may be the book’s most effective lesson. The China Mirage makes a solid case that a nation must develop an expertise in a region before it truly needs it. In both the war in Europe and the execution of the Marshall Plan following World War II, Bradley correctly points out that our nation benefited from an expansive cadre of experts (with personal experience in Europe) to lean on.
Conversely, there was no such regional expertise in the U.S. government as leaders attempted to navigate the swift and treacherous diplomatic waters of Asia during the last century. Having pledged to rebalance to the Asia-Pacific this decade, our nation would be wise to remember this lesson as we operate and engage in a region that many believe will shape the 21st century.
88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary
Robert L. Grenier. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. 442 pp. Illus. Index. Maps. $28.
Reviewed by Captain Joseph Mazzafro, U.S. Navy (Retired)
88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary presents itself as the story of how, with CIA and special-forces assistance, Afghani tribal leaders pushed out al Qaeda and defeated the Taliban for political control. Author Robert Grenier’s account, however, is part history, part memoir, and part political commentary, and he is at his best while describing the complex relationships that exist in Afghanistan between al Qaeda, the Taliban, the tribal warlords, the Northern Alliance, Pakistan, and India.
This book is not the complete story of the war in Afghanistan, as it only covers the period from just before 9/11 to the fall of Kandahar on 7 December 2001, when Mr. Grenier was the CIA chief of station (CoS) in Islamabad, Pakistan. 88 Days to Kandahar will be useful to anyone interested in better understanding Afghanistan’s place in the global war on terror, but scholars will be frustrated by the book’s lack of footnotes and bibliography.
Grenier says he was motivated to write the book because the United States’ victory in the “First Afghan War” was so short-lived that he wanted to document how success was achieved with a small U.S. footprint. The author says these lessons were forgotten three years later in the “Second Afghan War” (2005–14), when the United States overreached with military power and money in an effort to achieve a politically stable nation. Given the sordid history of America’s Afghan policy since 9/11, I am willing to forgive Grenier’s efforts to “firewall” his reputation by telling his story his way.
The explosion of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the defeat of the Taliban in its Kandahar stronghold began in earnest for CIA Station Islamabad when CIA Director George Tenet called Grenier on 23 September 2001 to ask for his advice on the U.S. strategy for Afghanistan. Grenier recommended in an eight-page cable to use CIA paramilitary and DOD special forces to exploit the differences between the grander goals of the interloping Arab jihadists (al Qaeda) and the more local concerns of the Taliban. If this could not be accomplished, as proved to be the case, he recommended that U.S. efforts shift to supporting the Pashtun warlords in Kandahar Province against al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. Regardless, he warned that it must be the Americans in support of the Afghans and not the other way around.
Without any more discussion or documentation, Grenier writes that he regards this cable “as the best three hours of work I ever did in my 27-year [CIA] career” and that it is extraordinary for a CoS’s recommendation to become essentially the basis for how the United States would proceed against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. I too find it extraordinary that U.S. plans for taking on these adversaries were not also informed by similar inputs from the State Department and the Defense Department.
That said, based on the details he provides, there is little doubt that as the Islamabad CoS Grenier was running the political, intelligence, and military operation that culminated in the defeat of the Taliban and the rise of former Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai. With a CIA case officer’s zeal, Grenier recounts his near-continuous interactions with the leadership of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the negotiations with Mullah Omar intermediaries to encourage the Taliban leader to turn on Osama bin Laden, the at-times harrowing efforts to get warlord Gul Agha Shirzai and Hamid Karzai the military and logistical support they needed to reach Kandahar, and the regular contentious teleconferences with the CIA’s counterterrorism center (CTC) and DOD regarding how events were unfolding and what the next steps should be.
Along the way, Grenier recounts how Pakistani and Indian tensions over Kashmir almost morphed into open warfare. What is interesting is Taliban fighters’ importance to protecting Pakistan’s regional interests. Intrigued by how Osama bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora, I was surprised by Grenier’s assertion that “. . . I strongly suspect that even effective American action to block the southern passes into the Kurran Agency would not have resulted in bin Laden’s capture.”
The last 60 pages of the book cover Grenier’s career at the CIA after leaving as the CoS of Islamabad and his reflections on Afghanistan since his departure. Before his forced retirement in 2006 after becoming cross-threaded with CIA director Porter Goss and his “Gosslings,” he served as the CIA’s Iraq mission manager during the run-up to the war to remove Saddam Hussain and finally as CIA CTC director as al Qaeda became increasingly menacing in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan began to return to power. Throughout the book, Grenier never waivers on his belief in and support for “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but he says unequivocally that “interrogation is neither a core function, nor a traditional skill of the CIA.”
Reflecting on the current situation in Afghanistan, Grenier observes that the United States has come to overwhelm this poor country with military force and more economic aid than it could absorb. He says, “We triggered massive corruption through our profligacy [and] convinced a substantial number of Afghans that we were, in fact occupiers,” all of which facilitated the resurgence of the Taliban. Grenier goes on to warn, “Having failed by trying to do too much, we are set to compound our failures by doing too little.”
Strategy in Asia: The Past, Present, and Future of Regional Security
Thomas G. Mahnken and Dan Blumenthal, ed. Stanford University Press, 2014. 320 pp. Maps. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by Captain Dale C. Rielage
Strategy in Asia gathers a notable collection of essays from some of the top established and emerging scholars of Asia and strategy in the United States. While intended as a scholarly work, this volume fits well on the bookshelf of military officers looking for insights on the Pacific region.
Tom Mahnken and Dan Blumenthal, both prominent experts in their own right, edited this volume from papers presented at an Asian Security Studies Conference held at the U.S. Naval War College in August 2011. The contribution of so many prominent scholars to the volume is a testament to the ability of the Naval War College to channel significant intellectual energy to issues that matter to the Navy. Though not published until three years later, the papers have clearly been updated and do not have the dated feel that is often found in conference proceedings.
Any thought that this is a typical academic work is put to rest by the focus of the first essay, “Asia as a Warfighting Environment,” in which Roy Kamphausen parses Asian geography with a military planner’s eye, concluding that maritime features are Asia’s decisive terrain. In a following essay, Toshi Yoshihara suggests that Chinese strategists view this geography “in claustrophobic terms.” While noting the pivotal strategic position of Taiwan in the First Island Chain, he points to the growing Chinese military focus on island-seizure operations as a reaction to these fundamental geographic restraints.
Rounding out this review of strategic geography, James Holmes uses Alfred Thayer Mahan’s writings on the naval geography of the Caribbean to develop a parallel Mahanian assessment of the South China Sea. Unfortunately, Holmes’ analysis is predicated on the geography of the South China Seas staying relatively fixed. The recent People’s Republic of China reclamation of hundreds of acres of land to support naval operations has changed this calculus. While none of these new places offer the permanent bases that the growing 19th-century U.S. Navy found in Cuba and Puerto Rico, Mahan would have appreciated the value of China’s modern-day “coaling stations” offering naval resupply athwart vital sea lanes.
Bruce Elleman introduces China’s cyclical relationship with sea power. The nation has asserted itself as a maritime power during four historic periods, including the present era, all marked by national unity and relative security. While the first three periods ended when land-based threats and invasion drew China’s focus back to its continental roots, Elleman points out that these periods of maritime focus lasted hundreds of years and produced a notable maritime tradition that inspires Chinese strategists today.
In perhaps its most interesting section, the book focuses on issues of strategic culture. While there is a discussion of the political-science theory behind the idea, most military professionals will instinctively conclude that considering the strategic culture of other nations has utility and skip to Andrew Wilson’s excellent consideration of the Chinese “way of war.” Examining five major myths surrounding Chinese military thinking, he upends each with clarity and economy, making this perhaps the best essay of the collection.
S. C. M. Payne explains how the Japanese warrior code impacted strategic thinking before and during World War II. Unfortunately, she suggests that the experience of World War II ended this tradition, but never develops the question of whether modern Japanese strategic culture is still influenced by this romanticized warrior ethos. Finally, Tim Hoyt looks at whether India has a distinct strategy culture, concluding that Indian history presents a range of unique threads of strategic thinking, but no unified Indian way of war.
Considering whether there is an arms race in Asia, Tom Mahnken offers an excellent essay on the complexities of how nations chose to develop, purchase, and employ weapon systems. Taking the development of the Chinese DF-21D antiship ballistic missile as an example, he argues that perceptions of U.S. actions and developments were only one of the factors in Chinese decision calculus. The volume concludes with solid essays on the economics of strategic competition, nuclear issues, and irregular warfare.
For a substantive work on major strategic issues, Strategy in Asia is a surprisingly quick read. The length of each paper (about 20 pages) and their origin as independent works allows them to be sampled individually by the busy reader, while their scholarly depth and suggestions for further reading and future research mean that the specialist will also find much to enjoy.