cover image Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire

Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, City Lights, $17.95 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-0-87286-513-6

Broadcast journalists and documentary filmmakers Fitzgerald and Gould (Invisible History) distill three decades of covering Afghanistan into a searing indictment of U.S. foreign policy in this predictable and unconvincing polemic. Dismissing the U.S. war in Afghanistan as "a thinly disguised effort to dominate South Central Asia," the authors conclude that the Durand (or Zero) line—the porous international border that separates Afghanistan and Pakistan—also marks "the vanishing point for the American empire, the point beyond which its power and influence disappears or simply ceases to exist." Pointing to the chaos in Afghanistan and an Iraq descending into violence, the authors evoke "a punch-drunk American leadership on the verge of collapse." While their contention that U.S. policy in Afghanistan is seriously, if not fatally, flawed is legitimate, it has been made less dogmatically and more convincingly by other recent critics, including war correspondent and former defense official Bing West in The Wrong War. (Apr.)