Before and after the towers: Afghanistan’s forty-year crisis

Introduction to the Special Issue ‘Lessons From Afghanistan’ This Special Issue aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the deeper reasons for the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan going back to the Soviet invasion of December 1979 through to the final western withdrawal in August 2021. Multidisciplinary in approach and drawing upon analysts from a variety of different academic disciplines, it explains why the Taliban finally triumphed, what this means for Afghan society, how competing actors in the international system have reacted to the Taliban takeover, whether the West’s withdrawal represented a major or only a temporary setback for NATO and the United States, and why for the foreseeable future there is unlikely to be any amelioration of the situation in Afghanistan itself.