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.”