STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: Jon Lee Anderson is 68 and has seen a lot of the world, which is his job as a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker magazine.
JON LEE ANDERSON: For me, the world is an adventure. I'm amazed by, you know, the tapestry of humankind in all of its variations. I feel like a kid, thrilled and delighted, when I get the chance to go somewhere I've never been.
INSKEEP: Readers find Anderson in some of the most hazardous places on Earth. And for decades, that has included Afghanistan.
ANDERSON: Here's a country that, you know, I've known since I was a young man.
INSKEEP: He visited in the 1980s, as rebels were driving an occupying force of the Soviet Union out of the country. Later, Afghanistan fell into civil war. The Taliban took over and hosted Osama bin Laden. Anderson returned just after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, which is when I met him there - an American in a war zone, walking around in an Afghan hat called a pakol and seeming entirely comfortable in his surroundings. Anderson covered a 20-year American occupation and its disastrous end. He's collected his writings in a new book called "To Lose A War: The Fall And Rise Of The Taliban." It includes his visit in late 2021, soon after the last Americans had evacuated.
ANDERSON: After 20 years of Western international presence there, I found myself back in the capital city of this country, virtually the only foreigner. I mean, there were probably a handful of others, but I didn't see them. And the authorities on the street were the Taliban - the people who'd been in the hills all these years, fighting that international coalition and the modern ways of life that it had brought about and tried to instill in the capital. It was bewildering because they looked like Taliban. They were Taliban. They really didn't know the modern world. And yet they had access, like kids and young people and people everywhere, to smartphones. And they were the new authorities. And the people of Kabul, by and large, had tried to forestall punishment by the Taliban by, say, painting over faces if they had them on ads on their shop windows. Or the girls now who hadn't been wearing burkas...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
ANDERSON: ...Still weren't wearing burkas, but they had put on veils. They were trying to be a little more conservative, just in case. And there was a kind of sidelong glances. There was no really overt repression yet, but you had a sense that the shoe was going to drop at any minute.
INSKEEP: Instead, it's been this step-by-step process. Girls were banned from lower grades, then banned from high schools. And a little time passed, and then they were kept out of universities. It's step by step.
ANDERSON: That's right. And in one of the last edicts, one of the most mind-numbing of all, which is that they're - they were - they had already been banned, as you know, from leaving their homes, many of which are like fortresses - right? - unless they were accompanied by a male relative. And now they were banned from speaking out loud. They cannot speak.
INSKEEP: What is life like for people, male or female, who in some way cooperated with the U.S.-led government and then did not make it out of Afghanistan in 2021?
ANDERSON: It's become increasingly more difficult. So one of the world's poorest countries - with, I think, half the population in need of food assistance - is now in a situation where it's not only been cut off from all international credits, President Trump has cut off humanitarian assistance. It's not in a good place at all.
INSKEEP: I try to think of what remains of the decades-old U.S. presence in Afghanistan. And listening to you, I hear some of the things are military uniforms, vehicles, weapons and smartphones.
ANDERSON: Yeah.
INSKEEP: Is there anything else that remains?
ANDERSON: The memory of what was, briefly. I have to say, I never expected to find myself thinking this, much less saying it. But the Soviets, the Russians - when they were there, they killed a lot of Afghans, many more than the 20 years of the American and NATO presence did. At least 2 million, they say. In my travels through the countryside of Afghanistan back in those days, I didn't see an intact house. Bombs were everywhere, exploded or unexploded. It was a devastated country. And yet Kabul itself under the Soviets flourished. And they actually did social housing construction, and they educated tens of thousands of Afghans. The Americans didn't build anything. They built their own bases. They brought the free market.
So Kabul today looks very different to how it looked in 2001. There's all these gaudy wedding palaces. There was the narco mansions of the drug lords - who were, frankly speaking, allowed to flourish in the first part of the involvement there because they sided with the West in fighting the Taliban - and plenty of cars. But there's not really a group of buildings, housing, hospitals or much else in the way of infrastructure - modern infrastructure - that people can point to and say the Americans did that. It's quite sad, I think.
INSKEEP: Are you saying the Soviets, as awful as they were for Afghanistan, left a more lasting impression than the Americans did?
ANDERSON: I would say the jury's out, but they left behind an educated class of people and infrastructure that we did not leave. I mean, extraordinary expenditures, but it kind of went back to our own businesses and to the contractors. And all of these bases were almost - I sometimes felt that I was visiting a - kind of, like, a Battleship America that was floating just above the Afghan ground, but never quite touching it.
INSKEEP: When you travel to some of the radically different places that you travel, you report one day from Venezuela, say, and another day from Afghanistan and another day from Chechnya or any number of other places. Are there themes that emerge about war, about conflict, about government or about human nature?
ANDERSON: What I see as a symmetry around the world in all these places that you mentioned is that at any time, in any place and in every culture, if there is a group of people with - let's call it a nation state or a society that feels itself to be, rightly or wrongly, discriminated against, ostracized, marginalized, repressed, and they have no recourse legally through civic expression to redeem themselves or feel freer. They will eventually resort to violence. To me, that is a maxim of humankind.
INSKEEP: The latest book by Jon Lee Anderson is "To Lose A War: The Fall And Rise Of The Taliban." Thanks so much.
ANDERSON: Thank you. Thanks a lot for having me.
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