Searching for an AfPak peace proposal with legs

Anatol Lieven, a professor in the War Studies Department of King’s College London, outlines what he believes are the essential elements of a settlement in "Afghanistan: The Best Way to Peace," a sober review of new releases in The New York Review of Books that includes:

• Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–89 by Rodric Braithwaite  
• A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan by Artemy M. Kalinovsky 
• Killing the Cranes: A Reporter’s Journey Through Three Decades of War in Afghanistan by Edward Girardet 
• Ghosts of Afghanistan: Hard Truths and Foreign Myths by Jonathan Steele 
• The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers by Peter Tomsen 
• Afghanistan and Pakistan: Conflict, Extremism, and Resistance to Modernity by Riaz Mohammad Khan 
• Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan by the US Department of Defense, available at www.defense.gov                                             
• Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field edited by Antonio Giustozzi 
• An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970–2010 by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn. (due September 2012)           

 Levin’s latest book, Pakistan: A Hard Country, was published in 2011.