Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan by Rajiv Chandrasekaran: review By 2006 a Taliban comeback required Britain to send 3,000 troops to Helmand province, which was by then producing so much opium that the world's junkies couldn't cope with the supply. The Brits, and the Canadians next door in Kandahar, were under-equipped and in danger of being overwhelmed until a new US president, Barack Obama, decided in 2009 that it was time to win the "good war" in Afghanistan and end the bad one in Iraq. It was then that Chandrasekaran began reporting extensively for the Washington Post from Helmand, where Obama's military chiefs decided to devote nearly half of the 47,000 new troops that were sent in two waves, even though the province accounted for only four per cent of the Afghan population, and to flood the arid plains with aid money. The author soon spotted a delicious parallel: in the early Fifties the Americans invested millions in Helmand, aiming to prevent the Soviet Union from gaining a foothold. Idealistic Californian engineers arrived to build irrigation canals and ditches intended to turn the Helmand River Valley into a lush oasis of free enterprise. The Afghans called the project "Little America." After 30 years of mistakes, wrong assumptions and wasted millions, farm yields were just beginning to improve when Afghanistan's communist party staged a coup in Kabul, which was followed in 1979 by the arrival of Soviet tanks. As Chandrasekaran notes drily, "it would not be the last time America would fail to achieve its goals in Afghanistan." Rather than providing slow, steady aid to Afghan ministries and organisations that Chandrasekaran argues would have been far more effective, the US administration was preoccupied with big aid projects and what they imagined was the best route to fast results. That meant hiring major US contractors who employed Americans and other foreigners demanding hefty salaries, ample time off, constant air-conditioning and plenty of armed protection. As a result, only 30 cents on a US aid dollar went to help Afghans. The State Department struggled to find people of the required calibre. Those it did hire were often obsessed with the deadline when their one-year stint would end. Alcohol and antidepressant use soared as those in the fortified Kabul embassy compound were prevented by security concerns from leaving. As he showed in his first book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, the prize-winning account of life in Baghdad's Green Zone, Chandrasekaran has a fine eye for the absurd parallel universe of the cosseted control centres of modern American warfare. His new book may lack some of the black comedy of the first, but as an examination of the follies and failings of American decision-making it is second to none. Chandrasekaran contends that haste, ineptitude, poor co-ordination and political considerations largely squandered an opportunity created by the Obama troop "surge" to provide sustainable aid and force elements of the Taliban to talk. Most disheartening of all is his intimate reporting - he clearly has the confidence of Washington's big wigs - on how personal rivalries among the president's inner circle scrambled those efforts. This chapter of Afghanistan's history is not over - Nato troops do not leave for another two and a half years - and all is far from lost; al-Qaeda has at least been removed. But Washington's ambitions in Afghanistan have been scaled down from building a reliable, democratic friend to leaving behind a scarcely credible state barely capable of withstanding the Taliban onslaught expected after 2014. After nearly 11 years, that is sadly not saying much. by Rajiv Chandrasekaran 384PP, Bloomsbury t £13.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £16.99, ebook £17)