It is difficult to overstate the chaos of August 2021 for many of those in Afghanistan, particularly those that lived in Kabul and had worked closely with the international community there. In a matter of days, an insurgency threw out a government the international community had spent 20 years and tens of billions of dollars supporting. A government that had stated that it stood for women’s rights, education, and a litany of other ideals, was replaced by one that did not allow girls to attend secondary school. A university that was built by the American government at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars was now being used to house members of the militias supporting the Haqqani network, a criminal, tribal band that had support the return of the Taliban and carried out many of their most brutal attacks over the past two decades. In the place of President Ashraf Ghani, a former professor at John Hopkins was Mullah Mohammad Hasan, who had been educated in Islamic seminaries and led Taliban recruitment.

Afghans, Americans, and much of the rest of the world, watched for two weeks in August, as crowds rushed the airport, bodies fell from planes, a suicide bomber killed civilians and soldiers, and a baby was handed to a Marine over a barbed wire wall. The agony of lives so clearly destroyed, as people tried to flee their homeland with little to nothing, felt like images that we see in the wake of natural disasters. And yet, this was not a natural disaster. It was completely avoidable.

Part memoir and part history, The Last Days of the Afghan Republic tells the story of that chaos through the experiences of a doctor, a student, a translator, and a researcher. One of these Afghans made it out before the evacuation, one was a part of the evacuation, one managed to escape the country in the months after the evacuation, and one was left behind. The characters in the book are all figures who benefited from the international presence over the past two decades –– young men and women who had bought into the promise of the international intervention, that if they studied, worked hard, and believed in democracy and human rights, Afghanistan could become a new country.

Their lives also tell the story of Afghanistan over the past thirty years. They recount, from the ground up, the political decisions on the American side that led to the “forever war,” the way that Afghan political partners squandered opportunities by focusing on enriching themselves, and the ways in which the U.S. presence unevenly reshaped Afghan society.