‘The Watch,’ like Afghanistan, is a tough slog

We've sadly come to expect the debased political conversation on cable news: Oversimplified arguments, partisan posturing, hosts playing to one side of the aisle, hack consultants speaking their lines from talking points.

But literature aspires to a higher standard: Compassion, understanding, enlightenment, humanity, even truth. Classic war novels like The Things They Carried, The Thin Red Line, Catch-22, All Quiet on the Western Front may be deeply political, but they don't begin with ideology. Tim O'Brien, Joseph Heller and James Jones didn't write from talking points.

You can't say that about Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya's third novel, The Watch, which is set in Afghanistan's Kandahar Province during the now decade-long battle against the Taliban.

The novel opens after a deadly late-night firefight near an American outpost deep in the desert. Still reeling from the deaths of several soldiers and serious wounds to others, the troops find a single young Afghan woman outside their base. She wants the Americans to return her brother's body to her for a proper Muslim burial. The Americans, however, believe her brother was a high-ranking Taliban operative. They're under orders to helicopter the body to Kabul, so it can be displayed on the news as proof of his death.

The young Afghani is determined and unyielding. And as she continues her quiet vigil outside the base, she makes the already jittery young soldiers even more tightly wound – perhaps she is a Black Widow come to avenge her brother's death with a suicide bomb – before inspiring a debate about how to handle the situation and her possibly peaceful demands.

In the right hands, this premise is as potentially taut as Kathryn Bigelow's film The Hurt Locker, or as dramatic as a single Chinese man facing down a tank in Tiananmen Square. (Roy-Bhattacharya doesn't shrink from big historical analogies; he's patterned The Watch and its young heroine after the Antigone myth.)

His obvious plot lacks drama, all the way to the inevitable (and clumsy) last scene. His soldiers never come to life as real characters. He's cast marionettes with points-of-view, not people; they couldn't be more cardboard if they emerged from a package of Afghan war hero trading cards. They say things like: "Who're we trying to kid? Ourselves? Is it any wonder they're fighting back? We're not winning this war; we're creating lifelong enemies. It's time to admit that our own leadership has ring-fenced us with lies."

The Watch needs a lighter touch. Must the young woman also have lost her legs in an American bombing raid? Following a wedding? When a soldier compliments her lute playing, this is their wooden exchange: "It's good that you're able to play music again… Under the Taliban, it was forbidden, but we've made it possible. That's what freedom means." "Under the Taliban, my family was alive. Now they are all dead. What is better?"

You can't say Roy-Bhattacharya lacks earnestness or passion. But The Watch never gets beneath the surface, it never surprises or pierces or reveals. Ultimately, it's hard to shake the sense that the author's politics are guiding the story, not the characters. Even if you share his opinions, The Watch is as long and hard a slog as this decade-long war.