Jon Lee Anderson is “not done with Afghanistan”, despite having reported on it for more than 40 years, through invasions, occupations, the rise and fall of the Taliban and two great power retreats.
“I always want to go back,” said the New Yorker staff writer. “It gets into your skin. Afghanistan is an incredible place, an incredible society. It’s always like time travel to me, and I knew people there that are larger than life. They stay with you … I may return shortly.”
Now 68, Anderson reported from Afghanistan in the 1980s, as Soviet forces lost a 10-year war, and returned in the 2000s, after 9/11 prompted the US to invade. In 2002, Anderson published The Lion’s Grave, a well-received book on al-Qaida’s assassination of the mujahideen leader Ahmad Shah Massoud two days before the attacks on New York and Washington, and how the US ousted the Taliban.
In the foreword to his new book, Anderson writes of that time: “The mission of the US and its coalition allies appeared to have been a qualified success. The Taliban had vanished into the hills, as had al-Qaida, and a pliant new pro-western regime had been installed.”
The new book contains reporting on the 20-year US occupation, its chaotic end, and the Taliban’s return. So its title is telling: To Lose a War.
One standout chapter comes from 2010. US control had deteriorated. Given no choice, Anderson embedded with a cavalry squadron in Maiwand, in the south. The resulting report, The Day of the Superwadi, is bookended by the deaths of young Americans in IED explosions – an unsparing portrait of military might mired in lethal futility. At the time, Anderson refused to let it be published.
He was “severely disappointed to see that what had happened in Iraq, which I had witnessed firsthand [the subject of his 2004 book, The Fall of Baghdad] had happened in Afghanistan: the suicide blast walls were up, Kabul itself was behind this strange geometry of walls, westerners were cut off from the Afghans”.
Anderson “really disliked” embedding. He felt “incredibly alienated, displaced. It was exactly in the same area I’d reported from back in the late 80s, and yet I was even displaced from that. I left Afghanistan feeling really nonplussed and telling my editor I didn’t think I had a story. And he said: ‘No, come on. You can write it.’ And I did, and I still had this just, dead feeling. I don’t know if it’s the only story in the New Yorker’s history, or one of very few, where an author has asked the editors to kill it, but I did and they honored that. And I said: ‘I feel I have to go back, because this story doesn’t feel right.’ And I did go back.”
In 2011, Anderson embedded again but with Afghan soldiers, too, on the Pakistan border. The result was another powerful essay, Force and Futility.
“I was able to define better what I was seeing,” Anderson said. “Clearly, I was always a foreigner, an outsider, but I had that experience of being with Afghans.”
More than a decade later, putting together To Lose a War, Anderson finally saw the value of the piece he had killed. He “realized it had an integrity. It helps fill in the blanks. Ultimately, if I have a critical observation, it’s that the United States … I mean all of the west, but really it was always US-led … they never really engaged with Afghanistan. That was what I was feeling. I knew it to be just a terrible thing. [The US effort] was doomed because of that.”
Anderson provides compelling portraits of American soldiers in extremis. Prey to the shifting realities of Afghanistan, Lt Cols Bryan Denny and Stephen Lusky are driven, idealistic and lost.
“They were honorable men,” Anderson said. “At the point I was seeing them in the war, the chance to win had passed. They never came out and said, ‘This is doomed.’ They couldn’t: they had young, young boys they were trying to keep alive, and they were doing the best they could. But I had this really strong sense that they knew.
“This was their job. It was an honorable thing. And what was interesting, and I guess among some soldiers you do find this, was this sense of idealism. We tend to objectify them: guns and uniforms and so on. But actually the US military includes a hell of a lot of idealists, many more than you tend to meet in your life. They try to believe in what they’re doing, because they’re dealing with life and death every day. So I try to acknowledge that but also get to the human story.”
Maiwand, where Lt Col Denny served, was home to a physical reminder of Afghanistan’s bloody history. About 10 miles (17km) from the US base stood “a very large, oddly shaped dirt mound … ris[ing] inexplicably up from the flatland”. In 2011, it housed the Afghan national police. It was built thousands of years before, by Alexander the Great.
The Americans stayed for 20. Combat operations ended in 2014, under Barack Obama, but the last troops left in 2021, Joe Biden overseeing a withdrawal initiated by Donald Trump. The result was bloody chaos: 13 Americans and at least 170 Afghans killed by a suicide bomber, the Taliban surging back to power, civilians scrambling to get out.
Anderson helped Afghans escape. He also went back to report, “with the central question that we all had, which was: ‘Is this the old Taliban or the new Taliban?’ We didn’t really know.
“In the first missives out of there, we saw our colleagues interviewing guys dressed in the usual Kandahar shalwar kameez [traditional tunic and trousers], and also another group of Taliban dressed up in American special forces uniforms,” he continued. “And we saw that they no longer were prohibited to deal with the graven image, because they had smartphones. So there was this kind of hope that they were different.
“And so most of my foray involved trying to get in front of Taliban officials, whoever I could, and guys in the field, and ascertain where their heads were at and whether they were, in fact, the new warm and fuzzy or the old astringent and cruel Taliban.
“I came away, especially from the leadership, with apprehension. I didn’t feel that they dealt with me honestly … whether it was the guy in Bamiyan or the foreign minister designate or the information minister in Kabul. And so that remains unresolved.”
Anderson seems more certain about the fate of Afghan women.
“Pretty much every woman I met who was able to talk with me on their own asked me for help to get out of the country,” Anderson said. “Not just women. Pretty much everyone I met who was not with the Taliban asked me, whether it was a civil servant, an assistant in the ministries, stewardesses on an airplane.
“I met this group of women I talked to at length, and I followed up with some of them, and they knew what was coming. I don’t say it in the book, but I remained in touch with one. She managed to get her family out. First in Mexico, now in the States. I don’t know if they’re deportable [by Trump] or not.
“One woman said: ‘I know what’s coming. I know what they’re going to do.’ And she was right. It’s even worse than what one would have expected four years ago. Women have been formally prevented from speaking outside their homes, which are like fortresses. They can’t travel without a male companion from their family. I don’t even know what they’re doing about maternity wards in hospitals now.”
Anderson sees few signs for optimism.
“There are factions within the Taliban,” he said of the perennial struggle for power. “It’s not over. Will this come to blows? It could.”
Among warring parties is an Islamic State offshoot Anderson called “Frankenstein’s Isis, Isis Khorasan, which is just a more extreme version of the Taliban.
“Afghanistan has never gone to a new stage without spilling blood,” he continued. “There’s a few countries like that. This conceit we have in the west, that you can only get to the next threshold of history through peace negotiations or some kind of civic compact … it doesn’t happen in the old world. It doesn’t happen in this place. The new stages are always reached through bloodshed.
“And I don’t know how you break that dynamic, but this group in power now has not broken it, nor will they break it. They’re seeking it with new injustices that will need to be redeemed or avenged. And that’s just the way it is.
“And once again, the west turns away, because Afghanistan is a place of shame and failure. But it’s still there. Just like it was for the Soviets, just like it was for us, and so on back through time.”
