Dispatches from Afghanistan

In one of the final scenes of Mike Nichols's 2007 movie Charlie Wilson's War, Representative Charlie Wilson of Texas, played by Tom Hanks, pleads with his colleagues to approve reconstruction money for Afghanistan.

- ELLIOT ACKERMAN

The country's mujahedeen, backed by the CIA, had by this point defeated the Soviets after a long and bloody war over the course of the 1980s.

American policymakers were ready to move on and Wilson, begging for one one-thousandth of the sum the US government had recently appropriated to fight its secret war, says: "This is what we always do. We always go in with our ideals and we change the world and then we leave. We always leave. But that ball though, it keeps on bouncing."

Jon Lee Anderson's To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban follows the bouncing ball. One of this country's pre-eminent war correspondents, Mr. Anderson covered Afghanistan for more than two decades as a reporter for The New Yorker; this collection of his dispatches, all but one published in the magazine, spans that time, beginning in 2001, shortly after the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the US-affiliated Northern Alliance, and ending in late 2021, with a grim portrait of Afghanistan's myriad challenges—from crippling drought and economic collapse to political feuds—in the wake of the US withdrawal.

In his preface, Mr. Anderson characterises Afghanistan as "more of a battleground of history" than "a nation."

The early chapters deal with the rise of American power in Afghanistan in the aughts, as well as the Taliban's precipitate fall in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.