When the war turned into an occupation and nation-building experiment, and then a resurgence of the Taliban, I knew that I didn’t understand the whole story. In the aftermath of the US’s abrupt exodus from Afghanistan, I was completely perplexed by how fruitless it had all been, with the Taliban back in power, and seemingly stronger than before.

Anand Gopal’s book traces the years before the American invasion, starting with the monarchy and Communist revolution in the 1970s, which prompted Russia’s occupation. From the late 80s and early 90s, Gopal begins following the involvement of various actors in the militias that formed in response to the Russian occupation, leading to the bloody civil war of the mid-1990s. The Taliban had gained control of large portions of the country by the outset of the American invasion, a sudden and confounding incursion, from the perspective of many of the locals interviewed, that was largely welcomed.

Gopal’s accounts of the lives of several Afghan people before and during the American war there is a fantastic narrative. It is also a devastating and infuriating demonstration of the downfall of American policy in the country.

The American policy, as told by several local actors and recounted by Gopal, had been to fight “terrorism” wherever it could be found. This led to local strongmen accusing their rivals of being enemies of the American mission, while American military leaders seemed completely clueless of the tribal rivalries and affiliations that had existed long before their invasion.

It is not difficult to see how the rise of strongmen across Afghanistan, funded by US taxpayers, created a self-perpetuating war machine that favored disunity and brutal politics, even as Afghanistan’s first democratic government tried to establish control.

Even though it was published in 2015, Gopal’s account also makes it easier to understand how the government could collapse so completely and utterly to the Taliban in 2021.

There were parts of this book that made me curse aloud at the sheer ignorance and brutality of it all. This book is not about choosing sides, except perhaps the sides of the civilians trying to survive the war. Gopal speaks to the cruelty of the first and subsequent Taliban regimes, but he also presents the reader with the callousness of American operations, many of which inadvertently targeted civilian homes or facilities (such as schools) that had no connections with the enemies the Americans were hunting.

This was not an easy read, but a necessary one for anyone who wants to understand what it might have been like to try to live through this war. It is tragic, infuriating, and shameful, and it makes me doubt what the American military and intelligence establishment has learned from this war, if anything.

I feel like the figures in this book have more stories that need to be heard, but I fear how they have fared in the intervening years.

Steve D