Who Remembers Afghanistan?

The Taliban rose to power in Afghanistan in the 1990s. It achieved international notoriety for hosting al Qaeda through the September 11, 2001, attacks. These zealous Islamists were toppled from power by U.S. forces and our Afghan allies shortly after those attacks. But the group fought back for two decades. Its tenacity paid dividends. The United States withdrew in ignominious defeat in 2021. Jon Lee Anderson documented much of this, covering the rise, fall, and rise of the Taliban for the New Yorker. His new book is a patchwork of republished essays he penned during this tumultuous period. His travels took him to the dustiest corners of Afghanistan. He traversed the poppy fields that fueled Afghanistan's opium export. He sat with hardened fanatics who could barely disguise their disdain for him or the country of his origin. He interviewed key stakeholders in Kabul. And he embedded with U.S. forces in dangerous places like the notorious Khost-Gardez Highway. As a student of the jihadist movement who never found occasion to visit Afghanistan, I distinctly recall reading Anderson's work with no small amount of awe and admiration. Anderson risked life and limb to cover the war that, at the time, felt like a hugely consequential test for the U.S.-led world order.

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