Books: October 2025
The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces — Seth Harp
⭐⭐⭐ This book, about a series of drug-related murders in Fort Bragg (Fayetteville, NC), can be read at a couple of different levels. The lowest level is “true crime”, where the book is simply reporting on these strange, scandalous murders in what seems, from a distance, like an elite, prestigious subset of the military. At this level, you wonder why not watch the Netflix/HBO docuseries that is surely already in the works.
One level up is a story about two “universal” dynamics in how countries prosecute wars. The first is about covert action, which the average person imagines is an important yet relatively small proportion of how wars are fought. Harp argues that covert actions are in fact a large proportion of fighting abroad, and that they look much closer to “domestic”, mafia-like forms of violence – assassinations, poisonings, blown up cars – than the image the public has of uniformed army personnel carrying out discrete missions abroad. An interesting claim is that the growth of special operations units like Delta Force takes off post-Vietnam and post-US public reckoning with the CIA’s actions abroad, which resulted in congressional intelligence committees to whom the CIA and FBI are supposedly meant to report their behavior. Delta Force-like units get to do the kind of stuff the CIA was doing during the Cold War without that oversight.
The second dynamic is about recruitment: who armed organizations (armies and rebel groups alike) recruit matters for how civilians are treated in war. Rely on conscription or provide “moral waivers” and you get lower quality recruits who are more likely to commit abuses and contribute to a culture of impunity. At an interpersonal level, there is something almost tragic for the operators themselves who, in receiving constant slaps on the wrist for egregious behavior, never receive the consequences that might help them correct course.
In the special forces case, Harp argues the US is effectively selecting for near-criminal types, who not only seek out and commit gruesome acts of violence but also blatantly engage in drug trafficking. The drug trafficking part is easily the most shocking: special forces troops spending years in places like Afghanistan, where there is both a lively drug trade in opium and a total corruption of the political system by the drug trade, creates opportunities for these operators to become involved. This is also a story as old as time: states make allies in foreign wars with groups who are often “unseemly”, since the groups most likely to ally with a foreign power in domestic conflict are those who are most rapacious to begin with.
One more level up is the level of “parapolitics”, a genre of writing about politics that leans conspiratorial, arguing that surface-level reality has been massaged by shadowy forces directing everything behind the scenes. Harp is clearly inspired by works in this genre and aims for some of his claims to land at this level. This kind of work makes me nervous because the scale of the claims is enormous; it is difficult to see how strong evidence would need to be for us to accept them. Harp casually claims that the war in Afghanistan was a kind of elaborate ruse to funnel taxpayer money to defense contractors who in turn kicked shares back to politicians to “keep the war going”. This feels too conspiratorial to take seriously without much more work, and it’s not there.
One reaction to Harp’s claims is to ask how new any of this is in world history. States carry out nasty, covert operations in their enemies’ territory; they hire brutal people who do brutal things; the gush of money used to fund this stuff is subject to substantial corruption. But most people living in the West imagine this only happens elsewhere.
A History of Modern Uganda — Richard J. Reid
⭐ With a title like this, you imagine an introductory, chronological history of Uganda, focused on the 20th century. This is instead a series of essays on the history of Uganda (in strange order), and not introductory; the level of detail is truly bizarre at times. If you read this without some basic Ugandan history in your pocket you will get lost. As always, however, there are interesting things here.
First are the parallels between Obote, Idi Amin, and Museveni, each of whom take office (by force!) on a mission of unifying the country, rejecting “sectarianism”, and whatever was in vogue at the time with respect to economic policy. These good feelings don’t last, at least in part because, in taking power by force, the country is left full of real and potential enemies that need to be contained or repressed. I ended up drawing on this a lot for my paper on Abiy Ahmed in Ethiopia.
Second is the deeper history of precolonial Uganda, a period I only had read passing reference to. Prior to the British Ugandan Protectorate there were a series of kingdoms that were fairly autonomous. The British team up with seemingly the most powerful of these, Buganda, to conquer and incorporate the others, although only partially; in the end, the North is left famously underdeveloped and there are other kingdoms that retain more autonomy. An interesting accident of history: the North, by virtue of being rebellious and “needing” to be forcefully conquered through military rule, comes to develop a kind of militaristic culture and becomes associated with militarism in the eyes of the British. The British then heavily recruit from the north to staff the Ugandan military, which ultimately lays the foundation for the conflicts and coups post-independence.
This precolonial history gets at the question of what role colonialism had in Uganda’s trajectory (and the development or underdevelopment of Africa more broadly). At least in Uganda, there are clearly large political units in existence, engaging in conflict and conquest with one another. Reid, in fact, describes the British as effectively being coopted by Buganda against its rival kingdoms.
The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World — Vincent Bevins
⭐⭐⭐⭐ It takes a long time for this book to get off the ground, probably 50-60% of the way in before I started hitting content that felt new. This is a shame because the book is pretty short. Bevins is looking at anticommunist campaigns globally, which means he moves very quickly over well-known cases. In the introduction, he foreshadows an incredible “coincidence” in the anticommunist campaigns he covered in his reporting.
The coincidence turns out to be something narrower and less obvious: that the anticommunist campaign in Indonesia was “ground zero” for the tactics that would be deployed in other contexts. Brazilian leftists in the 1960s might find “Jakarta is coming” spray-painted in their neighborhoods, and some of the cast of spooks in Indonesia also show up in Guatemala and Brazil. The details and scale of the extermination of the Indonesian left was entirely new to me.
Ft. Leavenworth also stood out as an understudied site of anticommunist training. The School of the Americas is infamous, but I’d honestly never heard of Leavenworth outside of my family. And here, an interesting personal connection: my grandfather was in the Colombian military and spent some years in Leavenworth in some kind of program. This is why my father was randomly born in the US, which in turn is why we were able to fairly easily acquire US citizenship after immigrating.
Another thing I found interesting was anticommunism as a “positive” ideology. Most people have some vague sense that many Latin American militaries had a strong anticommunist culture, but otherwise it’s perceived as this external, Cold War-contingent thing. What one sees in the book, however, is that even as the Cold War is winding down and the US doesn’t care as much, there are still some who are obsessed with purging society of communists.
At the same time, Bevins has some analytical tendencies that weaken the argument. First, the insistence that anticommunists were primarily driven by paranoia, that the communist “threat” was extremely exaggerated. Second, the insistence that openly communist movements were actually social democratic and not revolutionary. And third, that revolutionary communism was an obviously appealing ideology to people in the Third World.
These claims are in tension with each other (if communism was a naturally appealing ideology then it stands to reason it would be threatening during this period) and don’t deal with the fact that knowledge at the time was only partial. Indonesia at its peak had the largest communist party in the world outside of the communist regimes, with a staggering two million members. It may be that a correct reading of their programme would tell you the US should not have been concerned, but one can understand why that wouldn’t be convincing to national security officials.
The Cold War is more complicated than any single framing. As Bevins acknowledges, the US carried out shockingly radical levels of land reform via expropriation in some countries. And they tolerated open left-wing movements in Europe to a greater degree than in the Third World. It also seems hard to believe there would not have been more Soviet or communist-aligned regimes had these brutal anticommunist campaigns not happened. This is not an endorsement of those campaigns. More that the History 101 view of the Cold War as a battle between communist and capitalist ideologies is not entirely wrong and something you have to grapple with in reading about this period.
Overall, a worthwhile read with lots of little insights that can spin off into further reading or research ideas.