To Lose A War: Afghanistan 5 Years On

Jon Lee Anderson, General Lord Richard Dannatt and Fatima Zaki are coming to The Auditorium at The Forum on Monday 19 October for a discussion on the withdrawal from Afghanistan and what's happened since. It's been five years since the West pulled out, and the conversation opens there: the collapse of the Afghan government and security forces, built and supported by the West, which folded within days of the withdrawal and reversed much of what had been promised since 2001, particularly to Afghan women and girls.

It's a heavy starting point, and the evening works by bringing three very different perspectives to it. Jon Lee Anderson is a staff writer at The New Yorker and one of the most experienced foreign correspondents working today; he's been reporting from Afghanistan since the late 1980s, and his latest book, To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban, draws on nearly twenty-five years of that reporting. General Lord Richard Dannatt brings the military side, having served as Chief of the General Staff, the professional head of the British Army, from 2006 to 2009. And Fatima Zaki is an Afghan gender specialist and a postgraduate student at the University of East Anglia, so she brings the perspective of someone working on women's rights and gender from within the Afghan context.

Between them, they'll be looking at the decisions and misjudgements that shaped the war, the withdrawal and its consequences. With Anderson's decades of reporting, Dannatt's experience at the highest levels of British military leadership and Zaki's focus on gender, the discussion covers the conflict from the ground up, the top down and from the perspective of those left behind. Louise Hulland moderates the conversation.

It runs from 7:00pm to 8:30pm at The Auditorium, inside The Forum on Millennium Plain, NR2 1TF.