From one of the greatest foreign correspondents of our time, whose essential and profound on the ground reporting from Afghanistan for Jon Lee Anderson first reported from Afghanistan in the late 1980’s, covering the US-backed mujahedin’s insurrection against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. Within days of the 9/11 attacks, he was back on the ground as an early eyewitness to the new war launched by the US against the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies. His reportage from the first year of the war won a number of awards, and was published in book form as Jon Lee Anderson’s chronicling of the Afghan war for <The New Yorker< earned him comparisons to Michael Herr and Ryzard Kapuscinski. Just as <The Lion’s Grave< offered a highly original, intimate glimpse of the war in its still-hopeful first year, <To Lose a War< provides today’s readers with an unparalleled narrative history of the entire arc of the American misadventure in Afghanistan....

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Jon Lee Anderson is an author and a staff writer for The New Yorker. As a longtime observer of political violence and revolutionary movements, he has reported from many war zones over the years, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Angola, Somalia, Mali, and Liberia. He has reported frequently from Latin America and profiled political leaders such as Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Nicolás Maduro. Anderson also wrote a celebrated biography of the late Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara and, in the course of his research, discovered the long-concealed whereabouts of Guevara’s secretly buried body in Bolivia.

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**Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker

“A book that is as deeply humane and profoundly rendered as any I’ve read about Afghanistan, or any other war.” —Elliot Ackerman, New York Times Book Review

From one of the great foreign correspondents of our time, author of some of the most essential reporting from Afghanistan from before 9/11 to the return of the Taliban to power in 2021, the first full accounting of that entire era, combining previously published dispatches and new reporting into a single epic tapestry**

Jon Lee Anderson first reported from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, covering the US-backed mujahideen’s insurrection against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. Within days of the 9/11 attacks, he was again on the ground as an early eyewitness to the new war launched by the US against the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies. His reportage from the first year of the war won a number of awards and was published in book form as The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan. At the time, the American military had prevailed on the battlefield, and the newfound peace seemed to offer a precious space for Afghan society to restore itself and to forge a democratic future. But all was not well: Osama bin Laden was still in hiding, the Taliban were stealthily reorganizing for a comeback, and the United States was about to turn its attention to Iraq.

To Lose a War collects Anderson’s writing from Afghanistan over a near-quarter-century span. Containing the stories from The Lion’s Grave and all of those he published since, as well as important writing appearing here for the first time, the book offers a chronological account of a monumental tragedy as it unfolds. The colossal waste, missed signals, and wishful thinking that characterized the twenty-year arc of the US-led war in Afghanistan have consecrated it as one of the greatest foreign policy failures of the modern era, and a bellwether of a larger American imperial decline.

Leseprobe
1

A Lion's Death

I met Wali Massoud a little over ten years ago, at a friend's house in Wimbledon. He was in his mid-twenties, a slight, amiable man with black hair and a mustache. Wali was the youngest son of an ethnic Tajik officer in the Afghan Army and had come to Britain to study international relations. He had a famous older brother, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, who led a band of mujahideen that fought off seven major offensives by Soviet forces in the great mountain valley of Panjshir, in northern Afghanistan, during the 1980s. In 1992, three years after the Soviets withdrew from the country, Massoud's forces-the Jamiat-i-Islami (Society of Islam), a moderately conservative group composed mostly of ethnic Tajiks and led by the Islamic scholar Burhanuddin Rabbani-defeated the brutish regime the Soviets had left in power. Ahmad Shah Massoud became the defense minister and, later, vice president of the new Islamic State of Afghanistan.

In 1996, when the Taliban militia gained control of Kabul, the capital city, and most of the rest of the country, Massoud and Rabbani returned to the mountains in the north. With limited backing from Iran, Russia, and India, they fought off the Taliban and managed to hold on to somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of the country. Massoud led a motley coalition of tribal-based guerrilla forces that are usually referred to as the Northern Alliance but are officially called the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan.

Wali Massoud stayed in London. He got married, had two daughters, and earned an MA in diplomacy. He is now the chargé d'affaires at the Afghan embassy to the Court of St. James's. The Northern Alliance controls Afghanistan's UN seat and all of its forty-odd embassies, except for the one in Pakistan, which is run by the Taliban. The Taliban is officially recognized only by Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and Osama bin Laden's homeland, Saudi Arabia.

The London embassy is a cream-colored early Victorian building across the street from Hyde Park in Knightsbridge. I met Wali Massoud there at eleven a.m. on Friday, September 14, 2001, while Londoners were standing for three minutes of silence in memory of the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center. Wali, who is just as thin and amiable as he was a decade ago, wore a gray pin-striped double-breasted suit and held a cell phone, which rang again and again, and which Wali answered each time, with an apology to me. The previous Sunday, his brother had been attacked at his headquarters while giving an interview to two Arabs carrying Belgian passports. They were posing as television journalists and carrying a bomb. When it went off, it killed one of the "journalists" and one of Massoud's men and wounded Massoud and several other people. The second attacker tried to flee but was killed.

The suicide bombers had come into Northern Alliance territory from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, across the front lines, which was an unusual breach of security and has thus far not been explained. "They arranged this with someone at headquarters," a Northern Alliance official in London told me. "We are investigating." He said that the men are believed to have been either Moroccan or Algerian, and that they traveled from London to Pakistan before reaching Afghanistan. They are suspected of having links to an extremist group, the Islamic Observation Centre, in London.

Initial press reports said that Massoud had died in the attack, but all week Wali had been telling me that his brother was recovering. He was about to leave for Afghanistan, he said, to be with him. Wali was concerned about the stability of the coalition. Massoud was an extraordinarily gifted military tactician and was revered by his people. "The opposition can continue to function," Wali said, "but not the same as before." Then the phone rang again, and this time, as he listened, Wali hunched forward in his chair, holding his knees tightly together. He repeated the Farsi word bale-"yes"-and his voice became barely audible. He seemed about to weep.

Later that evening, the BBC confirmed Massoud's death…