In Octo­ber, an avalanche of events crashed down on the Bush administration’s unbe­liev­able state­ments about sta­bil­i­ty in Afghanistan.

Sto­ries emerged, doc­u­ment­ing the con­nec­tions of Afghan Pres­i­dent Hamid Karzai’s broth­er to the opi­um trade. Then, the U.S. mil­i­tary released a report stat­ing that 30 civil­ians had been killed in an August airstrike – not the five to sev­en deaths it had pre­vi­ous­ly claimed. The new fig­ures were still well below 90 deaths the U.N. and Afghan gov­ern­ment esti­mat­ed. This was fol­lowed by a leaked ver­sion of a Nation­al Intel­li­gence Esti­mate that stat­ed Afghanistan was in a ​“down­ward spi­ral,” and warned of increas­ing Tal­iban attacks from with­in Pakistan.

Even the administration’s most tepid crit­ics won­dered how sev­en years after the inva­sion of Afghanistan, the sit­u­a­tion there has dete­ri­o­rat­ed so dras­ti­cal­ly. For sev­er­al months, mil­i­tary casu­al­ties in Afghanistan have out­num­bered those in Iraq, while the Tal­iban has begun to focus its attacks with­in the ter­ri­to­ry of America’s ally Pakistan.

Two recent books exam­ine America’s mil­i­tary and diplo­mat­ic for­ays into South and Cen­tral Asia over the past sev­er­al decades. Togeth­er, these books – Pak­istani jour­nal­ist Ahmed Rashid’s Descent Into Chaos (Viking, June) and British-Pak­istani jour­nal­ist Tariq Ali’s The Duel (Simon and Schus­ter, Sep­tem­ber) – sur­vey the man­gled wreck­age of failed states, war­lords and dic­ta­tors, refugees, and nascent social jus­tice move­ments crushed by brute force.

With Oba­ma elect­ed on promis­es of increased mil­i­tary deploy­ments to Afghanistan and action against the Tal­iban with­in Pak­istan, these books appear at a crit­i­cal time.

Couched in the most gen­er­ous terms, Rashid and Ali depict Amer­i­ca as an incom­pe­tent and ill-informed actor, woe­ful­ly igno­rant of the region’s his­to­ry and pol­i­tics. Fre­quent­ly, though, the authors show us a vicious nation that show­ers bombs upon Afghan vil­lages or gives a nod and a wink to Pak­istani repres­sion of stu­dents, lawyers and the low­er class­es. And they describe the haunt­ing world of America’s his­toric sup­port for Islam­ic extrem­ists – the very ones who are sup­pos­ed­ly at the heart of the war on ter­ror, but are reap­ing the rewards from it.

Rashid’s decades of report­ing expe­ri­ence in the region are on dis­play in Descent. His gloss of the region is thick with intrigue and over­flow­ing with detailed accounts of Afghanistan, Pak­istan and the five inde­pen­dent states of Cen­tral Asia. No region­al con­flict is left untreat­ed – be it Kash­mir, Baluchis­tan or the Uighurs in China.

Rashid opens with a twined sto­ry of Karzai’s return to Afghanistan and a his­to­ry of that nation, then moves through an ency­clo­pe­dic account of the push and shove between Pak­istan and its neigh­bors – India and Afghanistan – the rise of the Tal­iban, and the U.S. role in the region. He moves method­i­cal­ly through the region’s post‑9/​11 shocks and the many failed inter­na­tion­al attempts to prop up a nascent Afghan state and to snuff out the Taliban.

Rashid also traces the influ­ence of Pakistan’s mil­i­tary intel­li­gence agency, the Inter-Ser­vices Intel­li­gence Direc­torate, or ISI. What emerges is a fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry of this secre­tive agency’s tremen­dous pow­er over Pakistan’s inter­nal pol­i­tics. A con­sis­tent sub­plot to Amer­i­can fail­ure is the awe­some abil­i­ty of the ISI to play all sides, extract­ing much and giv­ing away lit­tle, all the while spawn­ing new extrem­ist cadres.

Rashid writes, ​“The U.S. fail­ure to secure this region may well lead to glob­al ter­ror­ism, nuclear pro­lif­er­a­tion and a drug epi­dem­ic on a scale that we have not yet expe­ri­enced and I can only hope we nev­er will.”

But Rashid’s sources – rang­ing from anony­mous U.S. gov­ern­ment offi­cials to Karzai – also cloud his analy­sis, par­tic­u­lar­ly of Afghanistan. Rashid views the fail­ures there as tech­no­crat­ic ones. In oth­er words, replace a few dim-wit­ted bureau­crats and ele­vate Afghanistan’s pri­or­i­ty with­in inter­na­tion­al diplo­mat­ic cir­cles, and the nation could be pulled from the jaws of failure.

But is this real­ly the case? It’s a mantra Rashid’s polit­i­cal elite sources repeat over and over. He seems nev­er to con­sid­er the con­tra­dic­to­ry imper­a­tives of a mil­i­tary dis­patched to extend U.S. pow­er abroad, on one hand, and the acute human­i­tar­i­an needs of the Afghan peo­ple – or the demo­c­ra­t­ic needs of those in Pak­istan and oth­er Cen­tral Asian states – on the other.

What Rashid inter­prets as an inco­heren­cy of inter­na­tion­al plan­ning is actu­al­ly a naked view of Amer­i­can pow­er at work. It mobi­lizes sup­port in Europe, Cen­tral Asia and Pak­istan in order to fur­ther its own inter­ests, not those of Afghans or Pak­ista­nis pin­ing for democracy.

Pro­vid­ing a need­ed cor­rec­tive, in The Duel, Ali focus­es on the con­flict­ing inter­ests of state pow­er and democ­ra­cy, which is what Rashid is most silent on. In Ali’s account, Pak­istan stands in oppo­si­tion to gen­er­a­tions of Pak­ista­nis, Bangladeshis and Baluchis seek­ing demo­c­ra­t­ic reforms and, some­times, rev­o­lu­tion­ary change.

Ali’s account tem­pers the sen­sa­tion­al­ist Amer­i­can spin around Pak­istani pol­i­tics. He writes: ​“The West prefers to view Pak­istan through a sin­gle optic. [The media gives] the impres­sion that the main, if not the only, prob­lem con­fronting Pak­istan is the pow­er of the beard­ed fanat­ics … who … are on the verge of tak­ing over the county.”

Para­noid about nuclear-armed mul­lahs, the U.S. gov­ern­ment heaps cash and arms upon the mil­i­tary régime. It’s a nar­ra­tive that suc­ces­sive Pak­istani lead­ers play to the hilt. But instead of using U.S. aid to fight jihadis in the Fed­er­al­ly Admin­is­tered Trib­al Areas, the Pak­istani gov­ern­ment deploys it against those seek­ing a demo­c­ra­t­ic change or a voice in Pak­istani affairs.

The Duel serves as an excel­lent corol­lary – albeit tak­ing a much more crit­i­cal view of polit­i­cal elites and inter­na­tion­al rela­tions – to Rashid’s Descent. But stark dif­fer­ences between the two exist – par­tic­u­lar­ly on the effi­ca­cy of mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion in achiev­ing human­i­tar­i­an ends. Yet togeth­er the books illu­mi­nate the his­to­ries of Cen­tral and South Asia and the per­ilous path that Amer­i­ca has under­tak­en by hitch­ing itself to Pakistan’s mil­i­tary leadership.

The ques­tion now is: How close will Pres­i­dent Oba­ma hew to this dis­as­trous path?