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.
But reading these essays now evokes a disquieting sense of pointless nostalgia. In today’s dizzying Trump-fueled news cycle, the war in Afghanistan somehow feels like ancient history. Indeed, most Americans can barely remember the significance of this war, let alone the reasons for fighting it. As Anderson concludes bluntly, “most Americans have already forgotten.” Sadly, that is why Anderson’s essays seem like a collection of Betamax videotapes in the era of streaming content on Netflix and Hulu.
It’s not just the passing of time, however, that has colored the way we view the war against the Taliban and its allies in Afghanistan. That war, which claimed the lives of 2,459 Americans and cost $2.3 trillion in taxpayer dollars, is today disavowed by both the American left and the American right as an utter waste of blood and treasure. The same can be said of the war in Iraq and the war on terror. All three conflicts are held out by the neo-isolationists in Washington as prime examples of “irresponsible statecraft.” Even the so-called internationalists look back on these wars with an overwhelming sense of cringe.
This rejection of nearly two full decades of seemingly feckless American foreign policy is not difficult to understand. The effort to end the scourge of violent jihadism in the Middle East was an abject failure. It was like trying to squeegee the deck of a sailboat during a squall. As a self-described proponent of the Bush doctrine during that era, even I find it hard to ignore that aspiring for total victory over a potent ideology powered by religion and nationalism may have been too lofty—even unachievable.
But the lessons learned from the wars of the early 21st century are not so easily dismissed. One must not walk away from this fraught moment in American history with the sense that ideological battles with jihadists are a thing of the past.
The Israelis are now engaged in a pitched battle with the Hamas terrorist group in the Gaza Strip. Few recall that Hamas trained alongside al Qaeda and the Taliban in Sudan in the 1990s. The ideology of the Palestinian terrorist group is inextricably tied to the Muslim Brotherhood doctrine, which inspired the Taliban and al Qaeda, too.
The jihadists in Gaza are attempting to grind down the will of the Israelis, just as the Taliban did to the United States. Many of the same allied countries that vowed to defeat the Taliban have banded together to pressure the Israelis to end their fight against their zealous enemy. Despite this pressure, the Israelis have vowed to fight on. Admittedly, they have little choice. Hamas sits directly on their southern flank. In retrospect, the fact that the Taliban were not positioned squarely on America’s borders made the U.S. decision to withdraw that much easier.
Interestingly, Hamas and the Taliban share something else in common: simultaneous patronage and negotiations facilitated by the emirate of Qatar.
The Qataris famously helped to broker the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. This came after years of Qatari support for the Taliban, including the hosting of a Taliban “embassy” in Doha, which engaged in talks with the United States for years about a possible withdrawal. The Qataris, among the world’s foremost state sponsors of jihadist terror movements, seemed to understand that the United States simply wanted a way out. With time and effort, they ultimately provided one.
Today, the Qataris are heavily involved in the negotiations for a Gaza ceasefire. They somehow have found a way to play this role even after they provided an estimated $30 million per month to the Gaza-based terror group while also hosting a headquarters for Hamas’s top figures—where many still reside. The sooner Qatar is removed from the equation in Gaza, the better chances Israel will have to defeat its jihadist enemies.
Meanwhile, with and without Qatari support, jihadism is quietly surging elsewhere around the globe. A purportedly reformed al Qaeda figure now runs the new government in Syria. Both al Qaeda and the Islamic State have found their footing in sub-Saharan Africa. Sunni extremism lurks across the whole of Europe. Anderson notes that ISIS-K (Islamic State-Khorasan) operates in Afghanistan, as does the Haqqani network.
Optimists today might suggest that America’s war on terrorism forced Islamists to look inward and to adjust their goals. Anderson engaged with one such figure, the governor of Herat, who “suggested that the Afghans, too, were pursuing a ‘softer’ Sharia [Islamic law].” Is that even possible?
The Taliban show few signs of moderation. Their internal repression has reverted to the mean. Yet, their appetite to provoke the United States or other countries in the West appears to have diminished. Whether that choice is tactical or strategic remains to be seen.
To Lose A War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban
by Jon Lee Anderson
Penguin Press, 400 pp., $30
Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the United States Department of the Treasury, is executive director at the nonpartisan think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on X @JSchanzer.
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