Reviewer: Ronmel Navas
Original Publication: The review was previously published by Charged Affairs but is no longer available online, so a link can’t currently be provided. The link will be added if it becomes available.
Date of Publication: Unavailable.
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External Review
This external review of America in Afghanistan: Foreign Policy and Decision Making from Bush to Obama to Trump is written by Ronmel Navas for Charged Affairs.
Key Comment
“His is the art of synthesis: of letting the known, verifiable facts speak for themselves… America in Afghanistan documents forensically how the incapacity or unwillingness of the powerful to imagine the conditions of the conquered can prove devastating to the imbalances of geopolitical power.” — Ronmel Navas, Charged Affairs
Summary of the Review
In his Charged Affairs review, Ronmel Navas commends Dorani’s ability to present a clear and forensic analysis of US policy in Afghanistan. He notes that Dorani shows how strategic misjudgements and policymakers’ limited imagination helped entrench the conflict’s complexity.
Navas highlights that the book’s greatest power emerges when Dorani centres the voices of ordinary Afghans. Their hopeful, intimate, and often painful reflections give the narrative emotional depth and a human scale that distinguishes the work from more conventional policy analyses. The pervasive sense of loss captured in these testimonies, he writes, is what gives the book its lasting impact.
Overall, Navas regards America in Afghanistan as a vital contribution—combining rigorous analysis with grounded, humane storytelling that illuminates both the political failures and lived experiences of the Afghan people.
*Dr Sharifullah Dorani holds a PhD from Durham University on America’s Afghanistan War, a Master of Laws from University College London, and a degree in law from the University of Northampton, all in the UK. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and two acclaimed books: The Lone Leopard, a novel set in Afghanistan, and America in Afghanistan, published by Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the founder of CEPSAF and serves as the South Asia and Middle Eastern Editor at CESRAN International. All of Dr Dorani’s work is written to the highest academic standards, is widely indexed through Google Scholar, and is available in the libraries of hundreds of institutions worldwide, including Oxford and Harvard.