Twenty Years: Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation

By Sune Engel Rasmussen

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024

Sune Engel Rasmussen, who’s written about Afghanistan for the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian, centers his quietly moving new book Twenty Years on the human cost of America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan and the precipitate US withdrawal in 2021. He’s an expert on the subject in all its complexities, which lends strength to his opening contention that the US occupation of Afghanistan was a net positive. “For the majority of Afghans, twenty years of foreign occupation provided more opportunities in life: jobs, education, income, a measure of rights,” he writes, while also noting that this was hardly true for everybody.. “Afghans today have more experience with democratic participation and state services and better living standards than they did before 2001, and that has created expectations that future rulers will have to reckon with.”

Rasmussen’s inspired device in dramatizing “war’s astonishing transformative effect” is to give it a human cast. His two main characters are a strong-willed woman named Zahra, who “led a personal war against the conservative norms of her society, a war every bit as brutal as an armed struggle,” and a man named Omari, who joined the Taliban at age fourteen and who, along with his friends, “fought a battle for national self-determination, draped in religious cloaks.” 

There are plenty of other characters. Rasmussen is very good at writing them and clearly knows it, since he fills his pages with memorable people like Rahmatullah Amiri, whose wild beard could often make people think he was Taliban even though he was very much Westernized and could often be found “sitting in the sun dressed in the baggy garb of a villager, hunched over his laptop, doughnut and cappuccino in hand.” Fahim Hashimy, who watched the routed Taliban withdraw from his city in 2001, notice immediately how much more free the people felt immediately. “Within a day, people started dressing differently. Men wore jeans,” readers are told. “Many women flung off their burqas and wore headscarves instead. Fahim even saw some women who walked around without a hijab.” 

“If you topple a regime with military force, and promote an ideology on the back of an armed invasion, you implicitly ask the people who follow you to become soldiers, whether they realize it or not,” Rasmussen writes, which naturally sets up the tragedy of 2021, when suddenly that military force, and maybe the bulk of the ideology, were gone. “Once the protection of the US military evaporated, Afghans who had put their faith in the Western promises found themselves on the front line, alone.” 

By the time that withdrawal happens, before the inevitable return of the Taliban (and the disappearance of all those free-breathing women), readers will be totally invested in the stories of all the characters they’ve come to know, particularly Zahra, the book’s real star. 

Most of the people in Rasmussen’s book have never really known a world without that astonishing transformative effect and the forces, good and bad, it unleashed. Twenty Years grippingly reminds readers of the human lives involved.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News