1. For treatments of the rise of Petraeus and the evolution of US strategy in Iraq, see Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (New York: Penguin Press, 2008)
2. Linda Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq (New York: Public Affairs, 2008)
3. Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).
4. Joshua Rovner and Austin Long, ‘Dominoes on the Durand Line? Overcoming Strategic Myths in Afghanistan and Pakistan’, Foreign Policy Briefing, no. 92 (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, June 2011).
5. On Afghanistan’s history of weak central governance, see Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).