Preface -- A note on title changes -- A lion's death -- The warlord -- In the court of the pretender -- The surrender -- City of dreams -- Holy and other warriors -- Mullah Omar's favorite songs -- The assassins -- The man in the palace -- The Americans' opium war -- Day of the superwadi -- Force and futility -- Annals of assassination -- An American way of killing (March 11, 2012) -- The ballad of Mullah Omar (July 30, 2015) -- The latest fall of Kunduz (October 6, 2015) -- The return of the Taliban (August 13, 2021) -- The end of the American empire? (September 1, 2021) -- After the fall -- Afterword

"From one of the greatest foreign correspondents of our time, whose on-the-ground reporting from Afghanistan has shaped our understanding of the country and its fate, comes the complete accounting of the era from before 9/11 to the return of the Taliban to power in 2021"--