No Good Men Among the Living
SynopsisPlot
In a breathtaking chronicle, acclaimed journalist Anand Gopal traces the lives of three Afghans caught in America's war on terror. He follows a Taliban commander, who rises from scrawny teenager to leading insurgent; a U.S.-backed warlord, who uses the American military to gain wealth and power; and a village housewife trapped between the two sides, who discovers the devastating cost of neutrality. Through their dramatic stories emerges a stunning tale of how the United States had triumph in sight in Afghanistan―and then brought the Taliban back from the dead.
Story
About this book
Anand Gopal, a journalist who reported extensively from Afghanistan, structures this work around three people whose lives were reshaped by the American-led war that began in 2001. One is a Taliban commander who grew from a young recruit into a prominent insurgent figure. Another is a warlord who aligned with U.S. forces and used that alliance to accumulate influence and wealth. The third is a village housewife caught between the two sides, facing the cost of trying to stay neutral.
A central argument is that top Taliban figures were prepared to surrender and abandon political activity within months of the 2001 invasion, leaving the movement effectively dissolved. American forces, guided in part by unreliable intelligence from local power brokers with their own interests, kept pressing operations against men who had already tried to submit to the new Afghan government. That cycle of misjudgment, Gopal argues, helped revive the insurgency.
The book draws on ground-level reporting and personal accounts rather than policy analysis from a distance. Each of the three subjects offers a different angle on how decisions made far from Afghan villages shaped daily life within them.
