Dispatches From Afghanistan Show How the U.S. Lost Its Way — and the War

New York Times

3 days ago

TO LOSE A WAR: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban, by Jon Lee Anderson
In one of the final scenes of Mike Nichols's 2007 movie 'Charlie Wilson's War,' Representative Charlie Wilson of Texas, played by Tom Hanks, pleads with his colleagues to approve reconstruction money for Afghanistan. The country's mujahedeen, backed by the C.I.A., had by this point defeated the Soviets after a long and bloody war over the course of the 1980s.
American policymakers were ready to move on and Wilson, begging for one one-thousandth of the sum the U.S. government had recently appropriated to fight its secret war, says: 'This is what we always do. We always go in with our ideals and we change the world and then we leave. We always leave. But that ball though, it keeps on bouncing.'
Jon Lee Anderson's 'To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban' follows the bouncing ball. One of this country's pre-eminent war correspondents, Anderson covered Afghanistan for more than two decades as a reporter for The New Yorker; this collection of his dispatches, all but one published in the magazine, spans that time, beginning in 2001, shortly after the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the U.S.-affiliated Northern Alliance, and ending in late 2021, with a grim portrait of Afghanistan's myriad challenges — from crippling drought and economic collapse to political feuds — in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal.
In his preface, Anderson characterizes Afghanistan as 'more of a battleground of history' than 'a nation.' The early chapters deal with the rise of American power in Afghanistan in the aughts, as well as the Taliban's precipitate fall in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Weeks after those attacks, Anderson traveled to Kabul at an inflection point. The Taliban were on the run. Osama bin Laden was on the loose. And the country stood on the cusp of a promising future unimaginable only weeks before.
In those heady days, Anderson interviewed Ghulam Sarwar Akbari, a former Afghan communist who, like Wilson in Nichols's movie, blames U.S. disengagement after the Soviet defeat for Afghanistan becoming a terrorist haven: 'After the Soviets left, and the mujahedeen were victorious, America, instead of helping them to create a good government, forgot about Afghanistan. America shouldn't have done this.'
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