What General Petraeus is reading

The Boston Globe‘s H.D.S. Greenway finally tells us, after a whole lot of throat clearing, what the U.S. commander in Afghanistan is reading these days:

Thomas Barfield’s Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History; Ali Ahmad Jalali and Lester W. Grau’s The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War; Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea; and Sir Winston Churchill’s The Story of The Malakand Field Force, about frontier fighting in the late 19th century. In Churchill’s time there was a similar tremendous debate about Britain’s "Forward Policy,” whether to really go in and build up civil institutions, pacifying the Pashtuns, or whether to maintain a lesser footprint, punishing the frontier tribes when necessary; the 19th century equivalent of drone attacks and special-ops, nicknamed "butcher and bolt.”