Tale of botched terror war marred by errors (AP)

"Hunting Bin Laden" (Skyhorse Publishing. 229 pages. $24.95), by Rob Schultheis: Veteran war correspondent Rob Schultheis draws a line in the sand early in his new book, "Hunting Bin Laden."

"There's never been a stranger war than the one America has been waging since the events on 9/11," he writes.

The United States is occupying a country -- Iraq -- that had nothing to do with the attacks, while Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, "the real powers behind 9/11," are honored allies receiving billions in U.S. funding, Schultheis says.

One army officer he knew in Iraq put it this way: "It's as if on December 8, 1941, we declared war on Brazil, Iceland, and New Zealand, and announced that Japan, Germany, and Italy were our closest allies in the conflict."

While reasonable minds can debate the rationale for invading Afghanistan and Iraq, everyone should be alarmed at the errors committed as part of that response. These mistakes, Schultheis convincingly argues, have become serious obstacles in the fight on terrorism.

Schultheis is one of the few reporters on the planet in a perfect position to make this argument given his firsthand knowledge of the countries, the players and the history.

This is no journalist researching conflicts by way of the Internet. He's been to the heart of the storm numerous times, in places so remote and dangerous that Westerners, soldiers included, dare not tread.

His previous book, "Waging Peace: A Special Operation Team's Battle to Rebuild Iraq," was based on six months in 2004 he spent embedded with a seven-member U.S. Army Civil Affairs team working in a Shi'ite neighborhood in Baghdad.

His new book starts by reviewing Afghanistan's recent bloody history from the perspective of a journalist who was reporting on the country long before the Taliban was a household name.

There's the Afghani campaign to oust the hated Russians. The destructive infighting of the warlords who destroyed their post-Soviet country and laid the ground for the Taliban's rise. And then the Taliban itself: "fanatical brainwashing totalitarians ... gangs of murderous misogynistic boys."

Schultheis' tale is one of the rawest accounts of Afghanistan's suffering to emerge from a growing library documenting the country's misery. Those include Khaled Hosseini's novel "The Kite Runner," the Tom Hanks film "Charlie Wilson's War" and other nonfiction accounts, such as, "I Is for Infidel," by Kathy Gannon, based on her 18 years covering Afghanistan for The Associated Press.

"Poor Afghanistan, you navigated across it from one disaster or atrocity site to another," Schultheis writes. "... the country was a map of miseries, most of them visited upon the innocent."

Schultheis has great regard for many of the soldiers he met in Iraq. But he's also contemptuous of the ways many other soldiers undermine the U.S. mission with boorish behavior and open hostility toward the people whose country they're occupying.

In one painful anecdote, Iraqi colleagues and their families spend hours preparing a huge feast for a departing military intelligence officer, only to see him and his buddies announce they're leaving in search of a party with alcohol.

Such troops, Schultheis writes, "were sent to provide security for nation-building efforts and to help create allies; they ended up creating enemies and undermining the reconstruction process."

Unfortunately, the passion and solid reporting that Schultheis brings to his subject is undercut by the book's slapdash approach. "Hunting Bin Laden" is unorganized and lacks a consistent voice, and, most annoying of all, is rife with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and dropped words.

It's frustrating to see such sloppiness in a book whose subject matter is so important. Sadly, the errors of the printed page will cause some to overlook the errors of a country at war. And that can't have been Schultheis' intent.