We talked live this afternoon with veteran journalist and New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson, who has been covering Afghanistan since the late 1980s. Anderson has a new book out this week, To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban, and we spoke with him about how and why the War on Terror went so wrong, what’s happened in Afghanistan since the American withdrawal, and how diplomacy might work in a truly multipolar world.
Anderson talked to us about:
How the people of Afghanistan experienced the Soviet and U.S. occupations, and what they hope for now
Why a boom-and-bust cycle of short-term thinking on foreign policy and a refusal to engage with local politics and culture doomed the American mission in Afghanistan from the start
What the emerging international order could look like — and why a transactional U.S. no longer holds the diplomatic cards
You won’t want to miss any of this one. Just click on the video player above to watch the entire conversation.
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Join us for more Live conversation this week!
Tomorrow, Thursday, August 14, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk with messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio.
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