To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban

In this collection of his New Yorker dispatches from Afghanistan, Anderson (The Fall of Baghdad) narrates in vivid detail how America’s longest war became a bloody quagmire. His pieces cover the conflict’s 20-year arc, beginning with the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban by a coalition of warlords backed by American forces. Painting their downfall as less of a rupture than a reconfiguration of power, he profiles cagey warlords and ragged militiamen who abruptly switched sides and cut murky deals that allowed the Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership to escape to Pakistan. His reporting from later years finds him embedded with American military units fighting a revived Taliban insurgency. It’s a depressing grind of patrols, IED attacks, and brusque searches that alienated villagers—some of whom had lost family to American air strikes and firepower—all to prop up an unpopular, kleptocratic Afghan government. The final chapters cover the Taliban’s 2021 reconquest of Afghanistan, when Taliban leaders insist to Western donor agencies that they will respect women’s rights, only to reimpose a harsh fundamentalism that banned women from school, work, and eventually from even talking outside their homes. Anderson’s pieces are a triumph of high-wire journalism—often taking him into hair-raising action—that also offer a capacious, resonant panorama of Afghan society. The result is a captivating account of a military march of folly that ably dissects its many tragic delusions. (Aug.)