A few months after American bombs began falling on Afghanistan in October 2001, a British filmmaker arrived in the Bamiyan valley to record what two decades of conflict had done to one small corner of the country. Among the rubble of the giant stone Buddhas the Taliban had dynamited that spring, living in a cave hollowed into the cliffs behind them, he found a grinning, irrepressible eight-year-old boy. The boy's name was Mir Hussain, and the camera that turned on him that day would keep turning, on and off, for the next twenty years. His life, almost by accident, has become one of the most intimate records we have of a quarter-century of Afghan war. The war that framed Mir's entire life began on 7 October 2001, when the United States, weeks after the attacks of 11 September, launched its invasion to topple the Taliban. The regime fell within weeks, and it was into that uncertain aftermath that the documentary-maker Phil Grabsky travelled, alone, to central Afghanistan. Mir and his family were Hazaras, among the poorest and most persecuted people in the country, and they were squatting in the caves beside the ruined Buddhas, statues that had stood for some fifteen centuries until the Taliban blew them apart in March 2001. Out of a year spent with the family, Grabsky made his acclaimed 2004 film, 'The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan', and at its centre was Mir, a child full of mischief and enormous dreams, who announced that he might one day become a teacher, or even president. The story was too compelling to leave there, and Grabsky went back again and again. His second film, 'The Boy Mir: Ten Years in Afghanistan', released in 2011, followed the boy from the age of eight all the way to eighteen, as his family left Bamiyan and resettled in a remote village in the north. The grand childhood ambitions quietly contracted into something far harder, the daily business of staying alive. The teenage Mir tilled fields, gathered firewood and climbed down into a dangerous coal mine to earn what he could. The country around him was, for a while, a little more peaceful, yet real improvement came painfully slowly, and the camera mostly sat back and watched an ordinary family endure. Grabsky returned a third time, now with the Afghan journalist Shoaib Sharifi, for 'My Childhood, My Country: 20 Years in Afghanistan', released in 2021. By then Mir was a grown man in his twenties, married, a father, and no longer in the caves at all. He moved his family to Kabul in search of work, and in one of the project's most striking turns, the filmmakers helped him train as a cameraman, a craft he had been drawn to since boyhood. The subject became the storyteller, filming his own life and his own country. The resulting documentary won a BAFTA, and one critic described it, aptly, as Afghanistan's answer to the film Boyhood, a single human being filmed as he actually grew up. What gives Mir's story its terrible symmetry is the way his private milestones line up with the public catastrophe. He entered the films as a child living in the shadow of the Taliban, who had just destroyed the monuments beside his home. Twenty years later, as he reached settled adulthood, the third film's arc closed with the Taliban sweeping back into power in August 2021, as the last American and allied forces withdrew. A boy whose earliest years were shaped by Taliban rule became a father just as that rule returned. Invasion, occupation, a fragile and uneven hope, and then collapse and withdrawal, the whole exhausting sequence of the war is written, step by step, across one unremarkable and utterly remarkable life. It is easy to lose a war inside its numbers, the troop deployments, the billions spent, the casualty figures that blur into abstraction. Mir's story resists all of that, because it insists on staying human. We watch a specific boy with a specific laugh grow heavier with labour, fall in love, become a parent, and carry his family through a country that kept breaking around him. The dreams of becoming a teacher or a president were never realised, and yet he came through with his humour and his dignity intact, which in the circumstances is its own kind of triumph. This week marks twenty-five years since those first American strikes, and the war they began has long since been declared over, the last foreign troops gone, the superpower departed. Mir Hussain is still there. The boy who once clambered over the broken Buddhas is now a grown man with children of his own, and the child who once dreamed of standing in front of a classroom or a nation ended up, instead, standing behind a camera. The sweeping histories of the Afghan war will be told through presidents and generals and the cold tallies of the dead. Mir's is the other kind of history, the sort that measures a conflict not in ground won or lost but in a single life lived all the way through it, from a cave in Bamiyan to whatever comes next, with the cameras, against every expectation, still