Sune Engel Rasmussen combines social history with rigorous reporting in “Twenty Years: Hope, War and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation.” Rasmussen, a native of Denmark who is based in London, comes well prepared to his task. A staff correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, he has reported on Afghanistan since 2014. Before joining the Journal in 2018, he lived in Kabul and reported for the Guardian.
“Twenty Years” covers the span from the beginning of the American offensive in Afghanistan following Sept. 11, 2001, to the country’s hasty exit in 2021, providing rich context along the way. The prologue thrusts readers into the war zone with an explosion in Kabul in 2016, “a deep, nauseating whoomp that rattled the windows and sent the street dogs into a barking fury.”
Rasmussen showcases Afghanistan through a handful of diverse individuals, “ordinary” people trying to make the most of their lives and support their country. The subjects of Rasmussen’s profiles are differentiated by cultural and religious practices, as well as by class, gender and sexual orientation. His ability to delve into their lives lends his book the feeling of a novel. The tension between rural and city life is ever-present, with Kabul seen as a den of iniquity by more conservative Afghans living in the countryside. There is also drama around the West’s unsuccessful efforts to eradicate Afghanistan’s main source of income – poppies, from which opium and heroin are derived.
Two characters who stand out are Zahra and Omari. Rasmussen introduces Omari, who is from a Pashtun village two hours west of Kabul, and at the same time provides a thumbnail history of American involvement with the mujahideen (Omari’s father was among the guerrilla fighters), from 1979 through the successive American presidents who armed and funded them to fight a common enemy, the Russians. American aid went to extremist groups, sidelining more moderate groups. There were many impacts of this, one of which was to strengthen Pakistan as a haven for extremists, while weakening America’s ties with India. As is too often the case in recent American history, our money and arms supported groups that in time came to cause massive destruction, including against Americans.
Omari grew up deeply religious and family-oriented, emulating his father’s desire to serve. He joined the Taliban as a boy and stayed with the group into adulthood. Rasmussen explores the many facets of the Taliban through the lens of Omari’s experience. Personally conservative, Omari is a thinking person who is uncomfortable with the most violent aspects of the Taliban. His story helps explain why an Afghan might have originally supported the Taliban, and why he believes it will bring order to a war-torn country. The reality, of course, is darker.
Zahra arrived with her family in Afghanistan in 2004, at age 19, as part of a wave of former refugees returning home from Iran, where her parents fled in 1984 to escape the Russians. During the 1980s and 1990s, “as many as six million Afghans lived as refugees abroad, most of them in neighboring Iran and Pakistan,” Rasmussen writes. These waves of emigration/immigration tell an important story of displacement and may be unfamiliar to American readers.
Another through line is the increasing and then diminishing rights of women in Afghanistan. The American invasion brought temporary hope and an intensive effort to educate girls and women and expand their rights. The virulent backlash against women in Afghanistan overlays the backlash against American occupation. Many women in this book are brave and subversive, risking their lives to educate their daughters.
Zahra is from a family of Hazaras, a Muslim minority. Her family chose a husband for her when she was 13, and she married six months later. She imagined a happy life, but her husband started beating her immediately, and became dependent on her financially because of his alcoholism. With young children and a family taboo against divorce, she was left to her own devices. Her courage to make a life for herself is breathtaking, but not before she spent years within the oppressive yoke of her marriage. She became a feminist leader and was forced to make a harrowing escape as the Americans fled Afghanistan.
There are other characters who receive less time in Rasmussen’s spotlight. One of them is Narges Rokhshani, a member of her provincial council and a prominent human rights defender. She too was raised in Iran and returned to Afghanistan as a young adult. “The constitution and Islam give women the right to work, but it’s a right that exists only on paper,” she said. She delayed marrying until 2018 so she could have a career, then died in childbirth a year later in an understaffed hospital.
Readers of “Twenty Years” have the perspective of being in Afghanistan looking out, which provides a clearer view of the pros and (mostly) cons of the West’s often violent and grossly under-informed attempts to shape the country in its own image. America is a prominent player in this story, but so are Britain and other U.S. allies.
The rapid American withdrawal left behind broken promises and an infrastructure with no means to support it. “It was the worst feeling,” one former government minister told Rasmussen. “To lose your respect, to lose your status, to lose a society, and to lose all your assets.”
Rasmussen believes Afghanistan should not have been so vulnerable. “The United States spent $145 billion over twenty years to rebuild the country, more than it spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, adjusted for inflation. That was on top of the $837 billion in American military spending in Afghanistan since 2001,” he writes. “The United States spent $2 billion to improve Afghan farming over two decades, but agricultural input barely increased during that period.” Poverty rates rose between 2008 and 2021, and quality of life plunged.
The characters speak for themselves in “Twenty Years,” their lives filling out and putting an intimate face on Afghanistan’s fraught history. Rasmussen’s subtle drumbeat of criticism about U.S. policy is more obbligato than the driving force of the book.
In the end, he zeroes in on the Afghan refugees around the world, making the point that they can never truly adapt to their new countries. One of the main characters, Parasto, said as she fled to Paris, “I feel like I have been burned. All I am is ashes.” She felt her country, Rasmussen writes, receding “into a rhyme of history, subjugated once again by forces that robbed its people of their dignity.”
“Twenty Years” contains trenchant lessons, even as its author uses his superlative reporting skills to stay in the background.
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