Jon Lee Anderson is an author and a staff writer for The New Yorker. As a longtime observer of political violence and revolutionary movements, he has reported from many war zones over the years, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Angola, Somalia, Mali, and Liberia. He has reported frequently from Latin America and profiled political leaders such as Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Nicolás Maduro. Anderson also wrote a celebrated biography of the late Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara and, in the course of his research, discovered the long-concealed whereabouts of Guevara's secretly buried body in Bolivia.

"More than any American journalist of the war in Afghanistan, Jon Lee Anderson knew where to find the story: in the lives of Afghans navigating between an American occupier and a repressive Taliban. With his characteristic courage, curiosity, humanity, and unflinching eye for official hypocrisy and the revealing detail, Anderson paints a riveting picture of what went wrong over the two decades after 9/11. To Lose a War is an epochal and essential record of what happened in Afghanistan, a timeless warning about imperial overreach, and a poignant tribute to the resilience of Afghans who lived through it all."
--Ben Rhodes, New York Times bestselling author of After the Fall and The World as It Is

"Jon Lee Anderson is one of the finest foreign correspondents we have. I have long been admirer of his work. In Afghanistan, he was always ahead of the pack in ferreting out the essential stories--vivid, poignant, memorable and so often heartbreaking. This collection of his best work there traces America's many tragic missteps with trenchant observations and portraits urgent and personal."
--Martin Smith, producer and correspondent for PBS Frontline's "America and the Taliban"

"Jon Lee Anderson is an extraordinary, clear-sighted analyst. His prose is beautiful. His empathy, his patience, his wit, and understanding exceptional. There are few better guides to the new geopolitics and the incongruous, elusive, demanding realities on the ground."
--Rory Stewart, #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Politics on the Edge

"Anderson's pieces are a triumph of high-wire journalism--often taking him into hair-raising action--that also offer a capacious, resonant panorama of Afghan society. The result is a captivating account of a military march of folly that ably dissects its many tragic delusions." --Publishers Weekly

"Essential for understanding the futility of America's longest war." --Kirkus (starred review)

Publisher: Penguin Books

Pub date: 2026-08-11

Length: 400 pages