To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker

“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 great foreign correspondents of our time, author of some of the most essential reporting from Afghanistan from before 9/11 to the return of the Taliban to power in 2021, the first full accounting of that entire era, combining previously published dispatches and new reporting into a single epic tapestry

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 well: Osama bin Laden was still in hiding, the Taliban were stealthily reorganizing for a comeback, and the United States was about to turn its attention to Iraq.

To Lose a War collects 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. 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 the modern era, and a bellwether of a larger American imperial decline.

Jon Lee Anderson is an author and a staff writer for The New Yorker. As a longtime observer of political violence and revolutionary movements, he has reported from many war zones over the years, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Angola, Somalia, Mali, and Liberia. He has reported frequently from Latin America and profiled political leaders such as Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Nicolás Maduro. Anderson also wrote a celebrated biography of the late Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara and, in the course of his research, discovered the long-concealed whereabouts of Guevara’s secretly buried body in Bolivia.