To Lose a War

“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 greatest foreign correspondents of our time, whose essential and profound on the ground reporting from Afghanistan for The New Yorker from before 9/11 to the return of the Taliban to power in 2021 has definitively shaped our understanding of the country and its fate, comes the complete accounting of that era, combining previously published dispatches and new reporting into a narrative of great impact and lasting value.

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 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 make the epochal blunder of turning its attention to Iraq.

To Lose a War collects all of 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 in real time. 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 modern times, and a bellwether of a larger American imperial decline.