Twenty Years

July 1, 2024
A reporter's intensive interviews with a diverse generation of Afghans over the last 20 years. Rasmussen, a London-based journalist who covers Afghanistan, Iran, and European security affairs for the Wall Street Journal, offers poignant explorations of Afghan lives over two tumultuous decades. Since the fall of the first Taliban regime in 2001 after the U.S. invasion and occupation, there was a massive attempt at rebuilding the decimated country, bringing modernization efforts that began to include girls and women successfully into the education system. Many Afghans that had fled the first Taliban regime, such as Zahra's and Saif's families, migrating to Iran, returned by the early 2000s and attempted to rebuild their lives. Zahra was married off as a young teen and physically abused by her opium-addicted husband. Eventually, she was able to extricate herself from an oppressive tribal system and find education and employment. With her two children, she just managed to escape Kabul when the Americans evacuated in August 2021. Alex, a gay man who had spent his early years in Peshawar--where his family had moved to escape the Taliban--hoped to open the first gay bar in Kabul but had to abandon his dreams when the political situation grew more repressive by the 2010s. During that time, Omari became a Taliban soldier and witnessed an emergent Islamic State group before joining the triumphant Taliban entering the capital city in 2021. Parasto earned a university education and secured a good job with the Afghan government; after the fall of Kabul, she helped open schools for girls before she, too, was hounded into exile. Throughout, Rasmussen is a diligent, humane guide to the chaotic lives of ordinary citizens finding their way among the violence of extremism and war. Sharp, memorable portraits of the myriad struggles of young people from Afghanistan.

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Starred review from September 23, 2024
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.