Lyse Doucet and Sune Engel Rasmussen

Two veteran journalists with first-hand experience of Afghanistan offer a deep insight into a country betrayed by the West and Taliban alike, and assess the ongoing impact of its turbulent politics on its allies.

The BBC’s chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet first visited Kabul’s Inter-Continental Hotel – opened in 1969 and a symbol of the country’s hope for modernisation – in the late 1980s. Returning to the hotel multiple times in the decades since, she uses it and its workers as a lens into the country’s modern history in her book The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History.

Wall Street Journal correspondent Sune Engel Rasmussen offers another perspective in Twenty Years: Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation, drawing on over a decade of reporting to tell how 9/11 shaped – and shattered – the lives of young Afghans.