Suzy Hansen
The New York Review of Books
March 13, 2025 issue
A number of new books recount the horror America created and then left in Afghanistan. Can anyone grasp the realities of occupation and the “war on terror” if they haven’t been on their receiving end?
Twenty Years: Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation
by Sune Engel Rasmussen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 339 pp., $30.00
How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan
by Amin Saikal
Yale University Press, 306 pp., $30.00
The first time the Taliban asked Omari to place a bomb beneath a convoy of American soldiers, he was happy the detonator used a motorcycle battery rather than a cell phone battery because the latter often blew up in people’s faces. He buried the bomb in the sand moments before four American Humvees passed over it, and hiding in tall grass he watched as a door flew over his head and American bodies fell to the ground. It was 2011, he was sixteen, and he had been seeing Americans for seven years of what was then a ten-year occupation. The first time he saw them, they were friendly in their silly gear and armadillo backpacks, openly peeing on the side of the road; the next time, rounding up old men in black-and-white turbans, forcing them to kneel, and hitting them with the butts of their rifles; another time, pulling off the headscarf of an old woman who was begging to know why the Americans had detained her son.
But it was the buzzing of drones flying overhead that finally drove him to look for a way to join the Taliban and defeat the invaders. The drones left him “unable to sleep” and “foretold of night raids, of foreign soldiers who descended on ropes from the dark night sky,” dragging people away to one of the twenty-five detention sites in the country. Those people “quivered like children” when they came back, if they returned. Near the end of Sune Engel Rasmussen’s devastating book Twenty Years: Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation, Omari, now in his twenties, is so traumatized by the American occupation and war that his brain periodically freezes. He can’t remember the words he wants to say.
Rasmussen learns these details of a young Talib’s experience because of his attention and precision but also because of the techniques of immersion journalism. This type of reporting requires journalists either to constantly shadow their subjects or to reconstruct their stories through long interviews and the obsessive accumulation of facts. It is a form viewed by many journalists as the pinnacle of the craft, one that elevates mere reportage to literature.
The major American works of immersion journalism—such as J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground or Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family—often center on pressing social issues like race or poverty or immigration, which means that the authors’ subjects are vulnerable people, ones the journalist knows society ignores or misunderstands. Foreign correspondents have similar instincts. They long to humanize—a word criticized as much as it is used—the people they have lived among and gotten to know, especially when those people are victims of an occupation or war. For many, there is perhaps a deeper hope: that the humanization of these foreigners will somehow make war against them less likely.
Rasmussen, a Danish-born correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, is now based in London covering European security. Before that he spent some ten years reporting from Kabul during the United States’ twenty-year war in Afghanistan. His Twenty Years joins an ever-growing body of work on the occupation, alongside Craig Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers, Carlotta Gall’s The Wrong Enemy, Carter Malkasian’s The American War in Afghanistan, Andrew North’s War and Peace and War, and Vanessa Gezari’s The Tender Soldier. This isn’t an unwelcome glut; America’s many failures in Afghanistan mean there is still so much to learn.
The books, in fact, seem in conversation with one another. Rasmussen’s follows Anand Gopal’s magnificent No Good Men Among the Living, in both chronology and intent. That book, published in 2014, was perhaps the first major work to show the war from the perspective of Afghans, and it was a rebuke to newspaper reportage driven by American announcements and talking points. Gopal’s Afghan voices offered a more scathing indictment of American malfeasance, but Rasmussen has the advantage of reporting up until the Americans’ August 2021 withdrawal. He can deliver a character such as Omari, who laughs at peeing American soldiers in year one and has brain damage by year twenty. His book promises the whole arc.
Like Gopal, Rasmussen provides an impressive range of figures to follow. His second primary character, Zahra, is Hazara, part of the country’s Shia minority; her family had fled to Iran during the Afghan wars in the 1990s, twelve days after she was born, and returned after the American invasion. Omari’s story is a battle for “national self-determination,” Rasmussen writes, but Zahra’s is a “personal war against the conservative norms of her society,” though these clichés fall away as the book progresses. While still in Iran, Zahra’s loveless family married her off at thirteen to a man named Hussein, who raped her so brutally on their wedding night that she woke up in the hospital. Hussein, who also turned out to be an opium addict, beat her daily, even during her first pregnancy, causing physical and mental impairment to their child. Later, after they returned to Afghanistan and became a family of four, Hussein set fire to their one-room house while Zahra and her children were sleeping inside. When Zahra begged for a divorce, her children were taken from her and given to her in-laws (though eventually they were returned). A bout of depression almost killed her. Then she escaped—from the countryside to the new Kabul.
There, in the city Omari will later call “sin incarnate,” Zahra begins to work. She becomes a TV show host, a theater actor, an activist, and a published author. “Sometimes people deserve to be stars,” one of her colleagues says, “and she was a fucking star.” Rasmussen conveys the increasing disconnect between the more traditional countryside and the city through Zahra’s story, the way that those in Kabul tended to benefit more from the American presence than those in the provinces. But he never presents Zahra as simply a beneficiary of the Americans’ modernizing success. Her numerous and varied achievements seem particular to her will and talents, but also to the length of the occupation, which forces people to take on many roles in order to survive.
That is especially true of Fahim, who, at the time of the American invasion, worked at his father’s pharmacy in Kabul. His family was doing well enough that he was able to take extra lessons in English, so when a friend gets him an interview at the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul, he is immediately hired and assigned to translate for a unit of Scottish soldiers, and then for the US Special Forces. Through these connections he learns that the Western forces have initiated a program called Afghan First, intended to buy goods for the occupation—bedsheets, boots, bottled water—from the Afghans themselves. Fahim and a friend get in on it, eventually winning, improbably, a $120 million contract to supply fuel. (American defense contractors were also making millions, of course.) This was the free-market economy the Americans implanted in Afghanistan, “before the country’s political and legal institutions were ready for it,” as Rasmussen writes. The absence of such institutions encouraged corruption, which undermined the new state.
Like Zahra, Rasmussen’s fourth major character, Parasto, was born outside Afghanistan, but when her family returns post-Taliban, they allow her to thrive within a relatively tolerant home. Her family practices an Islam different from the one practiced by the Talibs; where they see God as vengeful, Parasto, Rasmussen writes, is taught to see God “as kind, forgiving, and motivated by love.” Under the American regime, Parasto joins the 1.7 million Afghan girls going to school, and Rasmussen infuses her boundary-breaking with a sense of foreboding. She sits on the couch with her legs crossed like a tomboy, speaks loudly, and doesn’t care about boys. “If only you had been a boy,” her grandmother once said, but Parasto vastly prefers Beyoncé’s version, “If I Were a Boy.” She also loves Jane Austen, Orhan Pamuk, Che Guevara, and Ahmad Shah Massoud, the anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban resistance leader, and she dreams of joining the front lines. Instead she joins the “anti-corruption secretariat” in the office of President Ashraf Ghani, the second president of the rapidly disintegrating country.
This is how Rasmussen’s characters end up, by the time of the American departure—as a woman in the president’s office, a young man in the Taliban, a businessman benefiting from a wartime boondoggle, and a mother of two living a life the Taliban will surely destroy. Rasmussen may have intended the four to represent “the broader divisions running through Afghanistan since 2001,” but their unpredictable stories overwhelm such simplicities.
With each character, Rasmussen almost has to start all over again from the beginning, explaining how the Mujahideen rose up against the Soviet army in the 1980s, armed with surface-to-air missiles from the Americans; how after the Russian departure the country devolved into a bloody civil war; how the Taliban rose to cleanse the country of corruption, warlords, and vice, turning it into an Islamic emirate in 1996; how they enforced an unusual “ultraconservative interpretation of Islamic law,” sequestering women behind walls and inside the blue burka; how they allowed al-Qaeda safe harbor in caves, refusing to extradite Osama bin Laden even as he built training camps and hit American targets; how armed resistance by Tajik and Uzbek fighters in the Northern Alliance had begun to challenge the Taliban’s rule just before the attacks of September 11. The repetition of this history might seem like a flaw of the book, but in another way it’s haunting. The blue burka, the turbaned fighter, Ahmad Shah Massoud’s handsome face, that moonlike landscape—these images were once such a large part of our lives, and how strange it is now that they are gone.
In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the Americans accumulated mistakes and crimes in the very first year, and those missteps damned the occupation for the next twenty. Many Afghans had fantasized about a new nation based on their own memories of a better time in their country rather than an imitation of the West. “For many Afghans, the arrival of the Americans and their NATO allies inspired hope of a return to a more liberal order of the past—in the 1970s,” Rasmussen writes. Omari’s father, who had once adopted the Mujahideen’s anti-Soviet, anti-imperialist stance before joining and quitting the Taliban, felt that “if the Americans could bring peace and prosperity to Afghanistan, he had no issue with them.”
But the Americans arrived with a crucial and possibly willful misunderstanding about the Taliban (and how much ignorance or spite caused the Americans’ blunders is always a question). The Americans believed that if the Taliban harbored international terrorists like al-Qaeda, that meant they were international terrorists, too. As Rasmussen writes, despite its anti-Western ideology, “the group had never carried out an attack against a Western country.” Some Talibs were even open to participating in a negotiated settlement with Hamid Karzai, the new interim president. The Americans refused this rapprochement. The Bush administration wanted to play the punisher. The Taliban escaped to Pakistan and waited.
Another major failure was not catching bin Laden. The Americans compounded this humiliation—after the humiliation of his September 11 attacks—by turning it into a vague crusade to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a haven for terrorists. The pledge to prevent another September 11 would become the excuse to enter a forever war. The Americans “were there to hunt every last terrorist in the country,” Rasmussen writes, but bin Laden’s Arab fighters had disappeared, and “there were very few terrorists left to be found.” That left the Afghans, whom the Americans rounded up, often in alliance with rapacious Afghan warlords. This effort could be called clownish if it weren’t so deadly. In Gopal’s book, for example, the Americans keep confusing Muslim first and last names, hauling innocent people to prison at the Bagram Air Base and Guantánamo.
As the Afghan academic Amin Saikal writes in How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan, a “sense of euphoria” in Washington muddled American strategy. Saikal is an emeritus professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian history at Australian National University, as well as the brother of Mahmoud Saikal, Afghanistan’s representative to the United Nations between 2015 and 2019. How to Lose a War draws on sources including his brother and Karl Eikenberry, the US army general and ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011. Readers may be skeptical of this influence, but Saikal’s central argument is a persuasive one: that the Americans’ twin messianic obsessions, promoting democracy and “destroying” terror, condemned the American enterprise from the start.
The Americans were so cocky, Saikal writes, that they initially waged war on the cheap, insisting on a “light footprint” approach. “By 2002, the Bush administration had spent $4.5 billion in Afghanistan,” Rasmussen notes. “Less than 10 percent went to recovery or even to building the new Afghan forces.” Money eventually flooded into the country in other ways, to private contractors or warlords turned magnates. “The money that did reach Afghans,” Rasmussen writes, “created an economic system based less on fair competition and merit than on corruption, nepotism, and the strong grip of old-time power brokers.” The Americans set Afghanistan up to be a nation of lawless grift, even as they shifted focus and military resources to the invasion of Iraq.
By the middle of the 2010s, under President Barack Obama, the “Afghan war” had reached its squalid stage. In Kabul warlords and businessmen lived in glitzy mansions, Shakira played on the TVs at the gyms, and journalists and aid workers got drunk in the gardens of various upscale restaurants. In the countryside, the Taliban mounted its comeback, and a reluctant Obama sent 30,000 new troops as part of General Stanley McChrystal’s counterterrorism surge. These were the years of night raids, bombed weddings, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and soldiers peeing on Afghan corpses. In one incident, some soldiers at Bagram carelessly threw Qurans onto a pyre of trash, setting off riots. In another, the army sniper Robert Bales, who had done three tours in Iraq and been injured twice, got drunk on whiskey and Diet Coke, watched the revenge movie Man on Fire, and then went out and killed sixteen Afghan civilians. By the late 2010s foreigners traveled by helicopters because the roads were too dangerous. But there was a Cabaret feeling to it all—as the countryside became more dangerous, Kabul became more cosmopolitan.
Government corruption was by now endemic. Karzai’s own family members began to seem like bandits pulling off a heist (in fact his brother was involved in a bank heist). Both Rasmussen and Saikal criticize the Americans for insisting on a centralized system of government in a country of divided provinces and local leaders; the Americans could only imagine a government in their own image. They continued to pump more money into the country to sustain the erratic Karzai and then the ineffectual Ashraf Ghani, as well as a still-flailing Afghan military and police force. The Taliban, flourishing, bombed hotels and universities in Kabul. Then two new antagonists arrived: the Islamic State and Donald Trump.
In 2018 President Ghani, recognizing the Taliban as a “legitimate political stakeholder in Afghanistan,” invited them to peace talks. The Taliban rejected this offer, deciding instead to respond to overtures from the Trump administration. Representatives from the two agreed to meet in Doha alone, without the elected Afghan government. “The Americans had brought the war to Afghanistan draped in ornate language about democracy, nation-building, and human rights,” Rasmussen writes.
Now, in order to exit the war, they prioritized outreach to the Taliban over the autonomy of the Afghan government, which had been democratically elected—albeit in elections plagued by fraud—according to a constitution the United States had helped write.
The deal was made in February 2020, and the withdrawal deadline set for May 2021. Between the deal and May 2020—amid the pandemic—the Taliban went on the offensive, unleashing some 4,500 attacks.
It was President Joe Biden who “scrapped Trump’s original withdrawal date” and moved it to September 11, 2021, the twentieth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Rasmussen writes memorably that “the Americans were ready to hand [the Afghans] over to the Taliban according to a timetable that seemed, most of all, designed to serve American sentimentalism and public relations purposes.” In July of that year the Americans turned off the electricity at Bagram and slipped out of the country without warning. Yet the Americans kept promising the Afghan people, people like Parasto and Zahra and Fahim, that the Taliban would not storm Kabul, and everyone kept taking the Americans at their word, which makes Twenty Years’ final scenes even more terrifying. After all the Americans’ mistakes, these Afghans still believed in the lives they were living.
The problem with immersion journalism is its implication that it can tell the whole story, that the writers can fully know their characters if they do enough reporting, spend enough time. As a journalist myself, I am skeptical that anyone can fully access another’s experience. But I am even more skeptical that anyone can fully understand the realities of occupation or the “war on terror” if they haven’t themselves been on the receiving end of it. The facts may be the same, but the knowledge comes from a different place. That may have always been true, but I wonder if it’s truer now, with the emergence of new drone and booby-trap weaponry, and with the increasing extremity of wars between ruthless DIY terror groups and unhinged nuclear powers. Maybe only a specific population can fully convey what this era of hyperatrocity is like: the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Syrians, the Palestinians.
Rasmussen, to his credit, recognizes his limitations. By the end of Twenty Years he acknowledges the abyss between his imagination and the experiences of the people he writes about. As Kabul falls, he leaves us at the rim of the chasm, mid-terror, with no release or closure. I found this passage so painful I almost hated Rasmussen as much as I admired him for it. There is the businessman Fahim watching his fellow Afghans clinging to the wheels of departing airplanes, one falling from the sky. There is Omari, now on the battle sidelines, bored and useless (“At the end of the day, I’m nothing”), and Parasto, forced to leave her country (“All I am is ashes”). And there is Zahra, in heels on a Kabul street, who learned of the Taliban’s arrival and “took her shoes off and ran.”
Agreat shame of the withdrawal was the large number of Afghans associated with the occupation whom the Americans left behind. Many of them went to the chaotic Kabul airport every day trying to get on some random airplane, some of which had been sent by private equity investors or Hillary Clinton or foreign correspondents frantically pooling their resources to save their fixers, translators, drivers, and loved ones. “Two years after the fall of Kabul,” Rasmussen writes, “roughly 150,000 Afghans who failed to get evacuated were stuck in Kabul awaiting a decision on their SIV [Special Immigrant Visa] application.” Some died. In the six months after the fall, he writes, “at least five hundred former government officials and members of the Afghan security forces were killed or forcibly disappeared.” Hundreds of civilians were killed in the first year.
All of the statistics are startling. According to the Watson Institute at Brown University, the war in Afghanistan killed at least 240,000 people, a great majority of them Afghan and many of them civilians. Of that count, roughly 2,300 US service members were killed, as well as over five thousand allied soldiers and private contractors. Countless more civilians and combatants on all sides have been sentenced to lifelong injury and trauma. The US spent $145 billion to rebuild Afghanistan, more than they spent on the Marshall Plan after World War II (even adjusting for inflation), and a separate $837 billion for the military effort. When they left, they abandoned $7.2 billion worth of military equipment, weapons, drones, ammunition, jet fighters, and helicopters. After pumping all that money into the Afghan economy, one of the first things the Americans did on their way out was maintain sanctions on the Taliban and freeze their currency. Afghanistan “sunk into the biggest humanitarian crisis in its recorded history,” Saikal writes, and 95 to 98 percent of the country suffered from “record levels of hunger.”
As expected, the Taliban have reimposed what Saikal calls the “wholesale Islamization of the country according to its own particular Taliban-centric interpretation and application of Islam, which has no parallel in any other Muslim country.” Girls are banned from school after sixth grade. Women again need to be accompanied everywhere by a male relative. You can no longer play live music at your wedding. Kabul is no longer a “cosmopolitan” place.
In the countryside, however, “a more common mood was relief, tinged with profound loss.” The killing and “disproportionate American punishments,” like razing hamlets for dubious reasons, sent many people into the arms of the Taliban. Rasmussen writes poignantly of a pomegranate farm where, “for the first time since 2005, farmers could now water their fields at night,” which was important because it saved them water. It is in such details of basic survival that wars are lost, though the Americans likely never knew about the pomegranate farmers. Saikal recalls former secretary of defense Robert Gates writing in his 2014 autobiography, “We had learned virtually nothing about the place.”
Being privy to Rasmussen’s Afghan lives feels like a belated obligation, as does learning their perceptions of their occupiers. Parasto found bin Laden’s justification for killing Americans—that the Americans had been killing people for decades—morally abhorrent. But she also believed that Americans went to war on similarly errant grounds. She knew that Madeleine Albright once said the sanctions-induced deaths of half a million Iraqi children had been “worth it” to contain Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. She knew Barack Obama had argued in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech that war could be “not only necessary but morally justified,” and that he ordered a surge of troops into her country and launched a drone campaign that killed at least nine hundred civilians across the Middle East. Parasto drew the conclusion that, “like al-Qaeda, America justified the killing of civilians—even if unintentional—in pursuit of a bigger cause.”
Saikal, the Afghan academic, believes that bigger cause is American supremacy. He calls it a “doctrine of power” that “as the mightiest state on earth, the US should exert its economic and military power to rebuff its adversaries and export American democracy” to the world. The “subterranean geopolitical objective…was to target America’s main adversaries,” like Saddam Hussein. But the war in Iraq, for example, wasn’t only about Saddam, just as dropping the nuclear bomb wasn’t only about Japan. Invading Iraq was meant to turn it into a friendly ally that could then counter Iran, and to strengthen the US position, Saikal argues, “as the only global power, with the idea that the twenty-first century would be dominated by America, not any other power, particularly China.”
But those wars did embolden America’s adversaries—not only the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State, but also Iran, Russia, and China. This thoroughly failed outcome may be why Rasmussen searches for a more abstract explanation for American decisions. “Modern American warfare has generally been waged not against states, but against ethereal dark forces and beliefs: for ‘freedom’ against ‘evil,’ light against darkness,” Rasmussen writes, which makes Americans sound less Christian than mentally ill: the Americans as killer mystics, deranged tarot card readers. Humanizing Afghans wouldn’t make a dent in a worldview that hardly seems to be about people at all.
The third anniversary of the Afghan withdrawal passed in August 2024 with little notice. It was obscured by the joyful Democratic convention, at which candidate Kamala Harris extolled her support for America as the world’s “most lethal fighting force,” making her opponent, Donald Trump, look almost like a peacenik. At the anniversary ceremony, President Biden commemorated the deaths of thirteen American soldiers who died during the withdrawal (more than 170 Afghans also died), a tragedy that had kicked off the long decline in his approval ratings. “From the deserts of Helmand to the mountains of Kunduz, and everywhere in between,” Biden said, “these women and men worked alongside our Afghan partners to protect our nation.” Until the end of his presidential term, while engaged in two new catastrophic wars in Gaza and Ukraine, Biden repeated that same mantra, that the goal of the war in Afghanistan had been to prevent another September 11. After reading Rasmussen’s book, it was startling to be told this bewildering war had anything to do with American safety. It is also illuminating to remember that our leaders imagine the price of American safety to be the ruination of so many other people’s lives.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban celebrated the anniversary with parades. Ordinary Afghans said they were simply happy that there is no more war, The New York Times reported. But the young fighters, ones similar to Omari, were restless in their “American-made combat boots,” looking for a place to go. “We are all ready to continue our jihad in Palestine!” one says in the article. “No, it’s Pakistan’s turn,” says another.
This Issue
March 13, 2025
Suzy Hansen is the author of Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World. (March 2025)
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
Democracy and society