Maine Insights Newsmagazine

August 15, 2026

On the fifth anniversary of Afghanistan falling to the Taliban a new book, The Bleeding Nation: Superpowers, Ethnic Politics, and Afghanistan’s Collapse, has debuted that tackles hard questions as to why, how and what happened.

On August 15, 2021, Colonel Naweed Kawusi stood in Kabul as the Islamic Republic collapsed in a matter of hours after an unseen buildup of years. The Bleeding Nation is his experience with that collapse, and with the decades of foreign interference, ethnic division, and institutional betrayal that made it possible.

Drawing on his firsthand experience as a former director of police support for the Afghan National Police and decades inside Afghanistan’s security and governance institutions, Kawusi traces the deeper roots of a national tragedy that the world largely watched unfold from a distance and never understood. This is not a story of a single failure in August 2021. It is the story of a nation repeatedly shaped, divided, and destabilized by outside powers, from Cold War proxy conflicts to post-9/11 nation-building, and by the ethnic fractures those powers exploited along the way.

The Bleeding Nation tells the story of how Afghanistan’s future cannot be rebuilt by the same hands that broke it, and that any real reconstruction must begin with Afghans reclaiming ownership of their own narrative, institutions, and future.

Meticulously researched and grounded in firsthand experience in some of the key moments of Afghanistan’s recent history, this is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the reality of what led to the fall of Kabul, the failure of the Afghanistan project, and how Afghans now, decades later, seem to be going back instead of forward. It’s critical to understand the source of the bleeding before the wound can heal.