TO LOSE A WAR

The noted journalist gathers his New Yorker pieces on America’s misadventure in Afghanistan.

American soldiers put boots on the ground in Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, their mission to smash al-Qaida and hunt down Osama bin Laden, the architect of the attack on the U.S. Two decades later, Afghanistan’s “pliant…pro-Western regime” collapsed, replaced by the Taliban. Basing his accounts on numerous sojourns in the country over that two-decade stretch of the American war, Anderson is particularly good with the small, revealing details of daily life, such as the interaction of the citizens of Kabul with the Taliban: “For the most part, they seemed to ignore each other, as if they came from different worlds but were forced to coexist.” Early in the war, he notes, the one man who knew where bin Laden might be hiding was assassinated. That would be a common theme, as tribal leaders across the nation were targeted by rivals; even so, Anderson observes, the government of Hamid Karzai, “built on uneasy alliances, accommodated a range of aggressive warlords and corrupt officials.” Much of Afghanistan is “preindustrial,” governed by the rhythms and mores of rural life in small towns and villages where, the author writes memorably, “lambs are tethered next to men with long knives who slaughter them and hang the carcasses from hooks, hacking them into a steadily diminishing mess of blood and meat and bone and fat by day’s end.” One of the many flaws in American strategy there, it seems, was to assume that the country was more modern and ready for democracy than it was. Indeed, he remarks at the end of the book, “there is now no place on earth that is more oppressive for women than Afghanistan.”

Essential for understanding the futility of America’s longest war.