“The most intense fighting footage and the best anatomy of a battle I’ve ever seen.”Spike Jonze (academy-award winning director) on Ben Anderson’s film Taking on the TalibanInformed by over three hundred hours of frontline footage with the US Marines, critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ben Anderson (The Battle for Marjah – HBO) provides a gripping account of the Afghanistan war in Helmand province.The only journalist to have witnessed every Afghan military campaign under Obama, Anderson charts the progress of the President’s counter-insurgency strategy and shows how it has become a lost cause. Hamstrung by orders from up-high and contradictory objectives, frustrated soldiers have been fashioned into social workers while the Taliban pick them off in record numbers.Including interviews with military top brass, this book reveals the disturbing chasm between official rhetoric and the reality on the ground.While Afghan civilians doubt American resolve and miss the relative peace under the Taliban, the drug-addled local army is hopelessly unprepared for American handover. Enjoying unrivalled respect from the troops (one marine described him as a “brave motherf***er”), Anderson offers the most intimate depiction of the war seen in print. Eating, sleeping, and being shot at with the troops, he witnessed first-hand IED explosions, American casualties, civilian deaths and Taliban soldiers that melt into the local population. The definitive book on the struggle for Helmand, No Worse Enemy is a bold and frightening exposé of the longest war in US history.