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Making Sense of Afghanistan

Veteran foreign correspondent Megan Stack curates a list of essential reads—classic combat reporting, evocative oral histories, and on-the-ground portraits from the past 25 years—that help put the chaotic end of America’s longest war in perspective.

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America’s longest war is coming to an abrupt and ignoble end amid scenes of chaos at the Kabul airport, as American citizens, foreign nationals, and Afghan allies scramble to leave Afghanistan after the capital fell to the Taliban. After 20 years of fighting, how did it come to this?

To help make sense of the moment, journalist Megan Stack, who first went to Afghanistan in 2001 as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, has curated a collection of must-read features, profiles, and oral histories tracing the violence, corruption, and disillusionment that accompanied the long conflict and nation-building effort. Stack’s 2011 book, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War, is an eloquent and moving memoir of her reporting from war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Israel, and Lebanon.

“I wanted to show the Afghan war from multiple perspectives,” Stack says. “I don’t think anybody will like or agree with all of these pieces, but I wanted each one of them to be authentic—and unlike the others. Taken as a group, I wanted people to feel like they were moving through the experience of the war, from the early days to the present—to get a sense of how the conflict passed through different eras, and how the thinking around it changed as time wore on.”

Megan K. Stack

Megan K. Stack is an author and journalist. As a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, she covered the post-September 11 wars starting with the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan; her book about those years, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar, was a finalist for the National Book Award. With her colleagues in the Baghdad bureau, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for pieces that documented the outbreak of sectarian civil war. Her most recent book, Women’s Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home, examines domestic labor in a globalized economy. She has lived and worked in Buenos Aires, Jerusalem, Cairo, Moscow, Beijing, New Delhi and Singapore.