Anja weighed heavily on my shoulder. I tried to look at her but I couldn’t move. I looked down. all i could see was what looked like a log where my left arm was. I could barely whisper, “Please help us.” Our driver drove us to a small local hospital in Khost, siren on. I tried to stay calm, thinking over and over, “Don’t be afraid. Don’t die scared. Just breathe.” At the hospital, Dr. Abdul Majid Mangal said that I would have to be operated on and tried to reassure me. His words are forever etched in my heart: “Please know that your life is as important to me as it is to you.” Much later, as I recovered in New York during a procedure that would eventually require 18 operations, an Afghan friend called from Kabul. He wanted to apologize for the shooting on behalf of all Afghans. I said the shooter did not represent a nation, a people. My mind went back to Dr. Mangal – to me, he was the one who represented Afghanistan and Afghans. I have covered Afghanistan for the AP for the past 35 years, during an extraordinary series of events and regime changes that shook the world. Through it all, the kindness and resilience of ordinary Afghans have shone through – which is also what has made it so painful to watch the slow erosion of their hope. I have always been amazed at how Afghans have stubbornly remained hopeful against all odds, greeting each of the many new regimes with optimism. But by 2018, a Gallup poll showed that the percentage of people in Afghanistan with hope for the future was the lowest on record. It wasn’t meant to be.

I arrived in Afghanistan in 1986, in the middle of the Cold War. It seems like a lifetime ago. Is. Then, the enemy that attacked Afghanistan was the communist former Soviet Union, which was called an atheist by the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan. The defenders were the US-backed religious mujahideen, defined as those who engage in holy war, whom Reagan championed as freedom fighters. Reagan even welcomed some mujahideen leaders to the White House. Among his guests was Jalaluddin Haqqani, father of the current leader of the Haqqani network, who in today’s world is a declared terrorist. At that time, the message of God against communism was strong. The University of Nebraska even created an anti-communist curriculum to teach English to the millions of Afghan refugees living in camps in neighboring Pakistan. The university made the alphabet simple: J was for Jihad or holy war against the communists. K was for Kalashnikov weapons used in jihad and I was for Infidel, which described the communists themselves. There was even a math program. The questions went something like this: If there were 10 communists and you killed five, how many would you have left? When I covered the mujahideen, I spent a lot of time and effort to be stronger, to walk more, to climb harder and harder. At one point, I ran with them from a dirty mud hut and hid under a nearby clump of trees. Minutes later, Russian helicopters flew low, slashing the trees and destroying the hut. The Russians left 1989 without a win. In 1992, the mujahideen took power. Ordinary Afghans fervently hoped that the mujahideen’s victory would mean the end of the war. They also to some extent welcomed a religious ideology that was more in line with their largely conservative country than with communism. But it wasn’t long before the mujahideen turned their guns on each other. The fighting was fierce, with the mujahideen pounding the capital, Kabul, from the hills. Three times the AP lost its equipment to thieving warlords, only to have it returned after negotiations with the top warlord. One day I counted up to 200 incoming and outgoing missiles in a matter of minutes. The bloodletting of mujahideen government ministers and warlords killed over 50,000 people. I saw a 5-year-old girl who was killed by a rocket as she was leaving her house. Children lost their limbs in traps set by the mujahideen as they left the neighborhoods. I stayed on the front lines with a woman and her two young children in the Macroyan housing complex during the heaviest rocket fire. Her husband, a former employee of the communist government, had escaped and lived by making and selling bread every day with her children. She opened her home to me even though she had so little. All night we stayed in the one room without windows. She asked me if I would take her son to Pakistan the next day, but finally she couldn’t bear to see him go. Only months after my visit, they were killed by warlords who wanted their apartment.

Despite the chaos of the time, Afghans still had hope. In the waning days of militant mujahideen rule, I attended a wedding in Kabul where both the wedding party and the guests were ragged and completely glamorous. When asked how she managed to look so good with so little in the relentless rocket barrage, one young woman emphatically replied, “We’re not dead yet!” The wedding was delayed twice because of missiles. The Taliban had by then emerged. They were former mujahideen and often Islamic clerics who had returned to their villages and religious schools after 1992. They gathered in response to the merciless killing and theft of their former comrades-in-arms. In mid-1996, the Taliban were on Kabul’s doorstep, with their promise of burqas for women and beards for men. However, the Afghans welcomed them. They hoped the Taliban would at least bring peace. When asked about the Taliban’s repressive restrictions, a woman who had worked for an international charity said: “If I know there is peace and my child will be alive, I will wear the burqa.” Peace has indeed come to Afghanistan, at least in a way. Afghans could leave their doors unlocked without fear of being robbed. The country was disarmed and travel anywhere in Afghanistan at any time of the day or night was safe. But the Afghans soon began to see their peace as a prison. Taliban rule was repressive. Public punishments such as the cutting off of hands and rules banning girls from school and women from working brought global sanctions and isolation. Afghans became poorer. The leader of the Taliban at the time was the reclusive Mullah Mohammad Omar, who was rumored to have removed his own eye after being wounded in battle against invading Soviet soldiers. As international sanctions crippled Afghanistan, Omar grew closer to al-Qaeda, until the terrorist group eventually became the Taliban’s sole source of income. By 2001, al-Qaeda’s influence was complete. Despite Omar’s pledge to protect them, the ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan were destroyed, on the orders of Osama Bin Laden himself. Then came the seismic shock of 9/11. Many Afghans mourned American deaths so far away. Few even knew who bin Laden was. But the country was now clearly a target in the eyes of the United States. Amir Shah, a longtime AP correspondent, summed up what most Afghans were thinking at the time: “America is going to set Afghanistan on fire.” And it happened. After 9/11, the Taliban threw all foreigners out of Afghanistan, including me. The US-led coalition offensive began on October 7, 2001. By October 23, I was back in Kabul, the only Western journalist to witness the final weeks of Taliban rule. Powerful US B-52 bombers pounded the hills and even landed in the city. On November 12 of that year, a 2,000-pound bomb landed on a house near the AP office. He threw me across the room and blew out the window and door frames. Glass shattered and splattered everywhere. By sunrise the next day, the Taliban had left Kabul.

The next batch of Afghan rulers marched into the city, led by the powerful military force of the US-led coalition. The mujahideen are back. The US and the UN returned them to power, even though some of them had brought bin Laden from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996, promising him a safe haven. The hope of the Afghans went through the roof, because they believed that the powerful US would help them keep the mujahideen under control. With more than 40 countries participating in their homeland, they believed that peace and prosperity this time was surely theirs. Foreigners were welcome everywhere. Some Afghans worried about the mujahideen returning, remembering the corruption and fighting the last time they were in power. But America’s representative at the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, told me that the mujahideen had been warned not to return to their old ways. However, worrying signs began to emerge. Revenge killings began and the US-led coalition sometimes participated without knowing the details. The mujahideen would falsely identify enemies—even those who had worked with the U.S. in the past—as al-Qaeda or the Taliban. One such mistake occurred in early December 2001, when a convoy was on its way to meet the new President Hamid Karzai. The US-led coalition bombed it because they were told the convoy was carrying Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. They turned out to be elders of the tribe. Secret prisons appeared. Hundreds of Afghan men disappeared. Families became desperate. Resentment grew especially among the ethnic Pashtuns, who were the backbone of the Taliban. A former member of the Taliban proudly displayed his new Afghan identity and wanted to start a water project in his village. But corrupt government officials blackmailed him for his money and he returned to the Taliban. A deputy police chief in the southern Zabul province told me of 2,000 young Pashtuns, some ex-Taliban, who wanted to join the new government’s Afghan National Army. But they were taunted about their nationality, and eventually all but four went to the mountains and joined the Taliban. Meanwhile, corruption seemed to…