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To Lose a War: How the US slowly lost its way in Afghanistan conflict

A gripping account of two decades in Afghanistan, tracing the Taliban's fall, America's missteps, and the enduring human cost in Jon Lee Anderson's To Lose a War NYT TO LOSE A WAR: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban By Jon Lee Anderson Published by Penguin Press 371 pages $30 By Elliot Ackerman 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 CIA, 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 US 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, Mr 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 US-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 US withdrawal. In his preface, Mr Anderson characterises 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, Mr Anderson travelled 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, Mr Anderson interviewed Ghulam Sarwar Akbari, a former Afghan communist who, like Wilson in Nichols's movie, blames US 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.' Reading Mr Anderson's early dispatches is like stepping into a time capsule. His Afghan and American subjects give voice to the conventional wisdom of a period nearly 25 years behind us. In the aftermath of the US invasion, he meets with Jack Idema, a private security contractor, who cites the urgent need for a large American military presence, without which 'we're gonna be right back to where we were five years from now.' That interview took place in 2001. In a 2010 dispatch from Maiwand, in the country's south, Mr Anderson writes: 'The situation that the US military finds itself in in Afghanistan is an odd one. Formally speaking, it has been deployed in Afghanistan since the autumn of 2001, and yet, in areas like Maiwand, it is essentially a newcomer.' In the same chapter, he embeds with the US Army's Third 'Wolfpack' Squadron of the Second Cavalry as its soldiers struggle to contain the Taliban insurgency. Already, American military deaths are beginning to mount. One of those casualties is the clarity of purpose with which the US entered the war after 9/11. Afghanistan was supposed to be the 'good' war, fought for a righteous cause: The destruction of Al Qaeda and the dismantling of the Taliban regime that offered the group a haven. This was a government that inflicted human rights abuses on its own people, enforced a barbaric form of Shariah law and refused to allow girls to attend school, making Afghanistan the worst place in the world to be a woman. Despite such initial clarity, the US slowly loses the thread on what it's doing in the country. In one of his later chapters, Mr Anderson follows Lt Col Stephen Lutsky as he wages a failing counterinsurgency campaign in the restive Khost Province. Lt Col Lutsky describes how many Afghans were willing to cut deals that often undermined American efforts, saying: 'For Americans, it's black or white — it's either good guys or bad guys. For Afghans, it's not. There are good Taliban and bad Taliban, and some of them are willing to do deals with each other. It's just beyond us.' Ultimately, the tragic US withdrawal in August 2021 proved Lutsky's point: The war was 'just beyond us.' Today, the conventional wisdom from the end of the 1980s, when Tom Hanks's Charlie Wilson was pleading for reconstruction funds, has been turned on its head. Ideas like 'nation-building' and 'regime change' have become politically toxic on both sides of the aisle. Maybe that's sound policy. Or maybe those policymakers should read Mr Anderson's reporting. If they do, they will find a book that is as deeply humane and profoundly rendered as any I've read about Afghanistan, or any other war. To Lose a War is a monument to both good intentions and folly, a humbling reminder that the ball keeps on bouncing.