In what is being billed as the battle of the books, advisers and strategists in the White House and the Pentagon who are trying to solve the Afghan conundrum have been reaching for two tomes on battle strategy in foreign lands that reach very different conclusions.

If you want to find either of them in bookshops anywhere close to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, good luck.

The favoured reading at the Pentagon is A Better War by Lewis Sorley. First published to little acclaim in 1999, it became a bible to counter-insurgency experts during the Iraq war.

Back in the White House, it is Gordon Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster that has mostly been passed from desk to desk. It is a painstaking look at how the national security adviser in the Kennedy and Johnson eras, McGeorge Bundy, marched the US blindly into the conflict in Vietnam with ever-growing troop numbers and how in later life he came to regret it.

Among those to have devoured this tome has been Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's chief of staff, who belongs to the cautious camp in the White House, with the Vice President, Joe Biden.

Once Mr Emanuel was done with the book, he took it to the President. But it turned out that Mr Obama was already midway through his own copy, so Mr Emanuel gave his to Tom Donilon, the deputy national security adviser.

That doesn't mean that A Better War has been consigned to the bottom shelf. Senator John McCain, who advocated the surge in Iraq ordered by George Bush two years ago, has long referred anyone who will listen to its pages, and in 2005, the then US Commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant-General David Barno, would regularly pass the book out to his staff.

A main thread of A Better War is that after the replacement of General William Westmoreland by General Creighton Abrams in 1968, and with additional troops, the fortunes of the US military in Vietnam began to change. By then, however, support for the war was crumbling at home and the change in strategy was too late.

By contrast, the moral of Goldstein's book might come from Mr Bundy's belated realisation that just putting more troops in play is a tempting but misleading approach. "Bundy said we debated a number and not a use," says Goldstein, referring to troop deployment. "That's a really critical observation which goes to the heart of what's going on right now."

^{Source: Independent}