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.”

Reading 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 U.S. 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. One of the remarkable aspects of Anderson’s reporting is its scope of perspective as well as time. In his telling, the war — and, with it, Afghanistan’s promising future — deteriorates before our eyes, page by page.

In a 2010 dispatch from Maiwand, in the country’s south, Anderson writes: “The situation that the U.S. 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 U.S. 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. This chapter begins with the death of Joseph T. Prentler, a young U.S. soldier killed in an I.E.D. strike. Slowly, the dream of a quick American victory fades as the casualties — both American and Afghan — add up.

One of those casualties is the clarity of purpose with which the United States 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.

In one of his later chapters, Anderson follows Lt. Col. Stephen Lutsky as he wages a failing counterinsurgency campaign in the restive Khost Province. 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 U.S. 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 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.

TO LOSE A WAR: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban | By Jon Lee Anderson | Penguin Press | 371 pp. | $30