Afghans may wonder why foreigners repeatedly invade their country before, invariably, scrambling for the exit. In 1842, the massacre of a retreating British army that had conquered the country four years earlier should have prevented Britain from trying – and failing – twice more, in 1878 and 1919. Next came the Soviet Union. Its triumphant conquest of 1979 ended ten years later in humiliation. The “exceptionalism” of the US proved less than exceptional in 2021, when its armed forces, having lingered for a record two decades, departed in such a hurry that they left thousands of their local collaborators behind. Despite the expenditure of $1 trillion and the loss of 2,311 American and an estimated 95,000 Afghan lives, America’s long-term impact was as negligible as Britain’s and Russia’s. Soon, it will be China’s turn. If Xi Jinping goes for it, my money is on the Afghans.

Jon Lee Anderson, whose excellent New Yorker frontline dispatches are collected in To Lose a War, sympathizes with the Afghans’ predicament. They owe their woes not only to foreigners, but to homegrown warriors:

“In a forty-five-year period, they have lived through a decades-long Russian military occupation followed by a police state dictatorship followed by a bloody civil war followed by a six-year Taliban tyranny followed by twenty years of a western-leaning quasi-democracy, only to revert to Taliban control.”

Benito Mussolini might have been speaking about the Afghans when he said of his countrymen, “It’s not impossible to govern Italians, it’s useless”. British, Russian and American efforts to impose effective rule over Afghanistan’s plains have brought only devastation to both governors and governed. Yet the Americans, despite a formal end to combat operations, persist in the Sisyphean struggle to bring their version of stability to the country.

Joshua Partlow, who covered the American war in Afghanistan for the Washington Post, has produced a book that is a cut above the usual journalistic fare of “I watched in horror as …”. The author is as sensitive to Afghan culture and history as he is to the difficulties faced by bewildered fellow Americans who have been thrust into a society they do not understand. This well-written investigation navigates the poisonous relationship between the United States and its ostensible client family, the Karzais, with sympathy for both.