To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban by Jon Lee Anderson ISBN 9780593493090, 0593493095 instant download

To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban by Jon Lee Anderson ISBN 9780593493090, 0593493095 instant download

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 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.

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