In the original dustsheet. Navy cloth binding with silver title on the spine.

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‘Unwinnable’ is a scholarly study and is extremely well written. It includes many fascinating observations made by British officers, Western officials and Taliban insurgents who were interviewed as part of Farrell’s research. He offers a meticulously detailed and authoritative analysis of the war in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan was an unwinnable war. As British and American troops withdraw, discover this definitive account that explains why. It could have been a very different story. British forces could have successfully withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2002, having done the job they set out to do: to defeat al-Qaeda. Instead, in the years that followed, Britain paid a devastating price for their presence in Helmand province. So why did Britain enter, and remain, in an ill-fated war? Why did it fail so dramatically, and was this expedition doomed from the beginning? Drawing on unprecedented access to military reports, government documents and senior individuals, Professor Theo Farrell provides an extraordinary work of scholarship. He explains the origins of the war, details the campaigns over the subsequent years, and examines the West’s failure to understand the dynamics of local conflict and learn the lessons of history that ultimately led to devastating costs and repercussions still relevant today. ‘Masterful, irrefutable… Farrell records all these military encounters with the irresistible pace of a novelist’ Sunday Times