Few observers are better placed than Carlotta Gall to judge what has gone so badly wrong in Pakistan and Afghanistan since 2001. She spent more than a decade reporting for the New York Times in both countries, often from remote corners. She has a family connection, too: her father, Sandy Gall, is a British television journalist who covered Afghanistan for many years, notably during the war of the 1980s. In "The Wrong Enemy" Ms Gall offers a provocative and compelling thesis: that America and its allies are leaving Afghanistan as a weakened state, plagued by violence and vulnerable to ambitions of its neighbours. That is despite the deaths of perhaps 70,000 Afghans, 3,400 foreign soldiers and a trillion-dollar bill. Yet the outcome was probably inevitable, since the West's efforts were badly misdirected. In the words of America's late special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke: "We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country."
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