78 MARCH-APRIL 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL this breadth of interactions was important to understanding the country’s dynamic and the challenge of forging a national spirit in a place Anderson describes as “more of a battleground of history than a nation.” With unsentimental but spirited and penetrating reporting and analysis, To Lose a War makes a major contribution to our understanding of the war and what went wrong. Anderson told me it is his hope that the book shows “how the war was lost, over time, through a combination of wishful thinking, distractions [such as] Iraq, mixed motives and aspirations on the part of the successive U.S. governments that oversaw the war.” He laments that this loss occurred “in spite of the legitimate police action that took us there in the first place and also, tragically, in spite of the courageous sacrifices of thousands of Americans and their allies who served there—and countless Afghans as well.” Anderson hopes that there are lessons to be learned and that his work will help cement those lessons for future policymakers and strategists. Was It Inevitable? One question that must be asked is: Could things have turned out differently? Anderson lets the reporting speak for itself without explicitly answering this. He observes at one point that the challenge of “building a nation out of warring interests has for the most part proven overwhelming.” In a report from southeastern Afghanistan, he refers to an area of “tribal intrigue, anti-American sentiment, and quickly shifting loyalties.” And he writes that as early as 2012 the outside forces had outlived their welcome and were seen as toxic. I do take some issue with this last assessment. While it may have been true in the south and southeast, in the nine northern provinces I covered as consul general during 2012–2013, it was not. There, governors still welcomed our assistance, and citizens were distraught when provincial reconstruction teams began to close down and NATO forces departed. Still, embedded in Anderson’s reporting are hints of what might have gone differently even as he is clear about the trade-offs that would have been required. He reports, for instance, on how, after being shunted aside in 2001, the Taliban remained in the shadows, waiting to regroup—something I experienced and reported on from the Loya Jirga in 2002, but was put in the “too hard” box by officials in Washington. Anderson accurately comments on the resistance Afghans have to outside intervention. And he explains how this bumped up against the need for foreign mentorship given the weakness of the new government’s institutions, which he BOOKS What Went Wrong in Afghanistan? To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban Jon Lee Anderson, Penguin Press, 2025, $30.00/hardcover, e-book available, 356 pages. Reviewed by Keith Mines What sets Jon Lee Anderson apart as a chronicler of the U.S. experience in Afghanistan is the length and breadth of his reporting on the country. To Lose a War spans the fall of the Taliban in the winter of 2001 through their comeback in 2022, while drawing on earlier trips to the country during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Raised abroad as the son of a USAID official, Anderson is a staff writer for The New Yorker and has been a journalist and war correspondent for decades, reporting from Afghanistan, Iraq, Latin America, Africa, and throughout the Middle East. In recent reporting he gave a unique close-up look at gangs in Haiti. Previous books include The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan (2002), The Fall of Baghdad (2004), and Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (2010). No other book that I’m aware of covers the entirety of the U.S. experience in Afghanistan as comprehensively as To Lose a War. It is in many ways a painful story to tell. Anderson engages with Afghans and Americans at all levels—from the grunts in outposts to the generals in Kabul, from common Afghan citizens to Hamid Karzai in the palace, from local shuras to high-level meetings. He also covers all regions of the country. Given the huge disparity in how Afghans perceived their national project, This is a heavy read, especially for those who served in Afghanistan.
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