Afghans may wonder why foreigners repeatedly invade their country before, invariably, scrambling for the exit. In 1842, the massacre of a retreating British army that had conquered the country four years earlier should have prevented Britain from trying – and failing – twice more, in 1878 and 1919. Next came the Soviet Union. Its triumphant conquest of 1979 ended ten years later in humiliation. The “exceptionalism” of the US proved less than exceptional in 2021, when its armed forces, having lingered for a record two decades, departed in such a hurry that they left thousands of their local collaborators behind. Despite the expenditure of $1 trillion and the loss of 2,311 American and an estimated 95,000 Afghan lives, America’s long-term impact was as negligible as Britain’s and Russia’s. Soon, it will be China’s turn. If Xi Jinping goes for it, my money is on the Afghans.
Jon Lee Anderson, whose excellent New Yorker frontline dispatches are collected in To Lose a War, sympathizes with the Afghans’ predicament. They owe their woes not only to foreigners, but to homegrown warriors:
“In a forty-five-year period, they have lived through a decades-long Russian military occupation followed by a police state dictatorship followed by a bloody civil war followed by a six-year Taliban tyranny followed by twenty years of a western-leaning quasi-democracy, only to revert to Taliban control.”
On Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 2001, a month into the American invasion, Anderson watched B-52 bombers clear the way for the Northern Alliance’s mujahidin fighters to advance on Taliban outposts in the Panjshir Valley, one bomb sending “a giant brown-grey cloud of dust and dirt cascading down the mountainside and eventually covering it like an avalanche”. The aerial onslaught killed hundreds of Taliban fighters and forced survivors to surrender.
As Taliban combatants surrendered to the mujahidin, Anderson observed:
“The mujahideen are an unruly, noisy rabble much of the time, but the Taliban fighters appear poised, watchful, and reserved … The mujahideen appear to be in awe of them, and with good reason. Until the United States began making airstrikes, the mujahideen were consistently defeated by the Taliban on the battlefield.”
The Northern Alliance’s objective was Kabul, which it had ruled recklessly for four years until the Taliban ejected it in 1996. Driving south from the Panjshir at night, Anderson caught his first glimpse of the capital: “There was light everywhere. Glowing squares…
To Lose a War
The fall and rise of the Taliban
400pp. Fitzcarraldo. Paperback, £14.99 (US: Penguin. $30).
Jon Lee Anderson
The Finest Hotel in Kabul
A people’s history of Afghanistan
448pp. Hutchinson Heinemann. £25.
Lyse Doucet
Read the full reviews in the TLS here.