Afghan characters form opposite 'tapestry' of new book

Sune Engel Rasmussen discovered starkly different worldviews during his decade reporting in Afghanistan: a young woman escaping an abusive marriage with the help of Western organizations and a Taliban fighter so dedicated to expelling the American military he joined a suicide-bomber academy. They formed opposite ends of a rich “tapestry” of characters in Twenty Years: Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation, Rasmussen said during a National Press Club Headliners book event on Oct. 10.

One central goal of the book, Rasmussen said, was to illustrate the diversity and nuance of a misunderstood country — as a way to explain why the American invasion and nation-building exercise ultimately failed.

The Americans for years “promised the Afghan people that if you side with us, you will be victorious and you will be safe,” said Rasmussen, a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. The chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 instead allowed the Taliban to retake power and left the country in ruin. “That was a promise they couldn’t keep,” he said.

Zahra, a woman who escaped her violent marriage and rebuilt her life with her children with help from an Western non-governmental organization, represents "the other extreme: benefiting from foreign intervention," Rasmussen said. “It’s very easy to criticize the intervention and there’s a lot to criticize—but it also fundamentally changed lives” for the better.

The Afghan people have confronted other betrayals, stressed Rasmussen. The Taliban lied to Western governments when it pledged to support civil liberties and women’s rights. The Western-backed Afghan government that retreated within hours of American withdrawal was deeply corrupt and ineffectual.

But key mistakes by the U.S. doomed its mission from the start, Rasmussen said.

For one, the well-intentioned effort to spread democracy and human rights in Afghanistan left little space for the Taliban and its sympathizers to repent and participate in society.

“If every time you make progress on a rights-based agenda is seen as a defeat for the Taliban, then you continue to have fighting,” Rasmussen said.

Afghan supporters of the U.S. efforts — civil servants and bureaucrats, teachers and doctors — were seen as aligned with an imperialist force, Rasmussen said. 

“If you promote that agenda on the back of an armed invasion, then you turn the people who follow you into soldiers, whether they realize it or not,” Rasmussen said.

Rasmussen’s reporting included hours-long conversations with Omari, the Taliban fighter, in deserted places and always under the threat of government surveillance. 

The two initially met in a province west of Kabul, their safety guaranteed by mutual friends who introduced them. Omari grew up on his father’s stories of triumph against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and saw the Americans as yet another imperialist power. 

Omari asked Rasmussen why Americans, if they were trying to help Afghanistan, were burning Qurans and urinating on Taliban corpses. 

Later on, Rasmussen said, Afghans like Omari saw the U.S. as hypocrites by allying themselves with vicious Afghan warlords and corrupt provincial strongmen “who were every bit as fundamentalist and violent as a Taliban. They just happened to be on the other side.”

With the Taliban back in power today, the country is largely back where it was in the 1990s, he said. Rasmussen wants Western readers to see Afghans for who they are and what motivates them — and maybe they can avoid mistakes of the past.

“Afghans are great storytellers,” he said.