Twenty Years
Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
One of the Washington Post's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024
An Economist Best Book of the Year | An Air Mail editor's pick
"Rasmussen combines social history with rigorous reporting . . . His ability to delve into [his characters'] lives lends his book the feeling of a novel . . . Trenchant . . . Superlative." —Martha Anne Toll, The Washington Post
"Devastating . . . Impressive . . . Haunting." —Suzy Hansen, The New York Review of Books
An intimate history of the Afghan war—and the young Afghans whose dreams it enabled and dashed.
No country was more deeply affected by 9/11 than Afghanistan: an entire generation grew up amid the upheaval that began that day. Young Afghans knew the promise of freedom, democracy, and safety, fought with each other over its meaning—and then witnessed its collapse. In Twenty Years, the Wall Street Journal correspondent Sune Engel Rasmussen draws on more than a decade of reporting from the country to tell Afghanistan’s story from a new angle. Through the eyes of newly empowered women, skilled entrepreneurs, driven insurgents, and abandoned Western allies, we see the United States and its partners bring new freedoms and wealth, only to preside over the corruption, war-lordism, and social division that led to the Taliban’s return to power.
Rasmussen relates this history via two main characters: Zahra, who returns from abroad with high hopes for her liberated county, where she must fight to escape a brutal marriage and rebuild her life; and Omari, who joins the Taliban to protect the honor of his village and country and winds up wrestling with doubt and the trauma of war after achieving victory. We also meet Parasto, who risks her life running clandestine girls’ schools under the new Taliban regime, and Fahim, a rags-to-riches tycoon who is forced to flee. With intimate access to these and other characters, Rasmussen offers deep insight into a country betrayed by the West and Taliban alike.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The upheaval of the American occupation of Afghanistan is seen through the eyes of young people who endured, embraced, or fought it in this penetrating debut. Wall Street Journal reporter Rasmussen follows the contrasting stories of several Afghans who came of age after the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban regime. They include Fahim, an entrepreneur who got rich supplying the U.S. and Afghan militaries; Omari, a village lad radicalized by the sometimes brutal tactics of American soldiers into joining the Taliban insurgency; and Parasto, an ambitious young woman who got a college education and a position in the government, and then started a network of clandestine schools for girls after the Taliban reconquered the country in 2021. Rasmussen's complex, nuanced panorama of the period shows the real opportunities and freedoms opened up by the American presence in Afghanistan; the book's climax, with the Taliban taking over Kabul, strikes a note of chilling horror as a dour Islamic theocracy clamps down and women are fired from their jobs, consigned to burqas, and confined to their homes. But Rasmussen also conveys the dark side of the occupation: a pervasive corruption and insecurity that the Taliban credibly promised to eliminate and an American military keenly resented as a source of chaos and terror. It's one of the best evocations yet of Afghanistan's tragedy.
