Recommended Reads from AAN Writers: The poetry of peace, magical realism in Logar, class in Nuristan, Sufis

Annika Schmeding, Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan, Stanford University Press, 2024

Islam is everywhere in Afghanistan, in almost every facet of society, but despite this, it is underrepresented in the English-language academic literature. Annika Schmeding’s newly published book Sufi Civilities – based partly on her PhD dissertation work – is one of the few lengthy monographs fully dedicated to analysing a facet of Islam in Afghan society. As this is anthropology, the case study is not on the practice of the majority or the whole, but of a narrower group, urban Sunni Sufis.

There is a lot a reader can choose to focus on in this book. Someone with a background in international development may have their attention caught by the story at the beginning where a Sufi gathering is jokingly referred to by a local as the “real civil society,” while a reader like myself with a political science background will start scanning immediately for references to the political power and influence of Sufis – or lack thereof. An item of interest for scholars, students and adherents of Islam will be Schmeding’s analysis of Sufism’s relationship with those imams and ulama (Islamic scholars) who are outside Sufi circles – or even hostile to Sufism, and her clear description of the role within Sufism of leadership and leadership selection.

Readers less interested in the topics above, considering them mundane or exhausting (just more ‘politics and war’), may enjoy Schmeding’s lengthy analysis of the role of dreams and dream interpretation among Afghanistan’s Sufis, or her extensive discussion of the more common theme of gender in society and the surprisingly prominent role played by women in Sufi communities. Poetry is another topic that appears regularly throughout the book.

Overall, the adaptation of the Sufis of Afghanistan to the massive changes brought about by war, migration, ideological competition and the accompanying social upheavals is the main focus of Schmeding’s book. Adherents of various Sufi communities have both resisted and cooperated with and joined various state and insurgent forces over the last 40 years, what she terms as “alignment” versus “resistance”. Schmeding adds to these choices the third choice of “strategic distance” to describe Sufis seeking “distance from the source of power and the potential for violence,” with distance being both physical (relocating somewhere else in the country or abroad) and political/social (avoiding relationships with government officials or armed opposition groups).

Within the extreme upheavals of the last several decades, Schmeding convincingly argues for the Sufis’ “remarkable dexterity in their ability to adapt” as they choose between various strategic positions under changing conditions. Schmeding’s field research ended before the Taleban’s 2021 return to power. In her conclusion and epilogue, she discusses the urban Sufi communities’ adaptation to once again living under Taleban rule after a 20-year break. Past history suggests, she says, that Sufism will survive once again.

This book sits firmly with the sub-field of the anthropology of Islam. For those coming from the fields of history, political science and perhaps sociology, who want to comb the text for useful analysis, they can easily find a clear and focused discussion of the role of religion during times of war and social upheaval, with both individuals and institutions as units of analysis. Those readers who are rightfully wary of academic literature and its intentional and unintentional confusing and obtuse writing style, you can be assured that Schmeding’s writing is clear and easily understood. Her focus on people makes for engaging story-telling throughout the text. Sufi Civilities will remain for decades a mandatory (English-language) text for understating the role of Islam in Afghanistan.

Reviewed by Christian Bleuer

Ulrik Høj Johnsen, Schuyler Jones, Torkil Funder and Taj Khan Kalash (eds), Toward the Horizon: Lennart Edelberg and the Danish Hindukush Research, Moesgaard Museum, 2021

Moesgaard Museum, just south of the Danish university city of Aarhus, is a striking example of modern northern European (‘Skandinavian’) architecture. Built into the slope of a hill, its large glass windows look down on early 19^th century Moesgaard Manor. Built as a poorhouse, today it is the home of the Aarhus university’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology.

What’s more important to us is in the museum’s storage: a large Nuristan collection, that began to be compiled during the 1947-50 Third Danish Expedition to Central Asia, the first one going to Afghanistan. (The two earlier ones went to Mongolia.)^[1] That expedition took place roughly fifty years after the area had been forcibly incorporated into Afghanistan by Abdul Rahman, the ‘Iron Amir’ (r1880-1901), in the winter of 1895/96. After that, Kabul changed the area’s name from Kafiristan (land of the heathen) to Nuristan (land of light), referring to the people having become Muslim.^[2]

The 1947-50 expedition was led by ethnologist Henning Haslund-Christensen, who tragically died from illness in Kabul in September that year and is buried there. Its four other core members were: historian of religions Halfdan Siiger (1911-99), who later worked on the (not yet converted to Islam) ‘Kalash Kafir of Chitral’ across the Durand Line; zoologist Knut Paludan (1908-88), whose main work is Birds on Afghanistan, Copenhagen 1959, today a rare book; the film photographer Peter Rasmussen, who later produced the documentary ‘Kafiristan – the land of Heathens’; and Lennart Edelberg (1915-81), a schoolteacher who taught in Denmark’s oldest town, Ribe, and was a botanist-turned-ethnologist. One of their Afghan collaborators, Ahmad Ali Motamedi, later became the director of Kabul’s National Museum.

It was for the ethnologist Edelberg that, in 2021, Moesgaard Museum dedicated a set of articles brought together in the book, Toward the Horizon: Lennart Edelberg and the Danish Hindukush research. The collection is based on papers presented at a seminar held in 2016 by Moesgaard Museum, in cooperation with Aarhus University, in the tradition of earlier International Hindukush Cultural Conferences organised, among others, by Edelberg, in Denmark and Pakistan.^[3]

Toward the Horizon is a richly illustrated tome that contains articles on new research on Nuristan (each with rich bibliographies) and posthumous tributes to Lennart Edelberg and his scientific career. Edelberg visited Nuristan four times, the last time in 1970. By then, he had become a paragon of Danish Afghanistan-shenasi (experts).^[4]

While most contributors to this book are Western, there is also a Nuristani originating from Afghanistan, Kakhail Nuristani, and a Kalash from Pakistan, Taj Khan Kalash, who is also one of its editors.

In his article, Kakhail Nuristani related how a 2012 New York Times article by author Adam Klein helped re-establish contact between Nuristan and the Danish research community that had been lost during the most recent Afghan wars. Kakhail had met Klein at a workshop for Afghan writers in the United States and told him the story of his grandfather, ‘Wakil’ Abdullah (he became a member of parliament). Abdullah had hosted Edelberg during a Danish expedition in the 1960s and was even visited at home by Denmark’s king, Frederik IX, and the then crown princess, Margrethe, during a state visit to Afghanistan. (A Danish prince had also participated in Edelberg’s 1953/54 expedition.)

According to Kakhail, his grandfather’s knowledge had “greatly informed” Edelberg’s 1984 book on Nuristani architecture, Nuristani Buildings (published by Jysk Arkæologisk Selskab, Moesgaard). In return, Abdullah was invited to Denmark where he opened the Nuristan collection after it was moved from the capital Copenhagen to Moesgaard, which opened as a museum in 1970. During his stay, he was knighted by Denmark’s royal family.

The custodian of Moesgaard’s Nuristan collection and one of the editors of Toward the Horizon, Ulrik Høj Johnsen, came across Klein’s article and reached out to Kakhail. Nuristani-Danish contacts were revived.

There is plenty of interesting detail in this volume, but one paragraph was particularly intriguing and provoked ideas for fresh research. Co-editor Schuyler Jones’ contribution mentions the bāri, a caste of artisans in Nuristan (p180). (I use the phonetical transcription here to indicate the pronunciation, ie that the ‘a’ is a long one.) Jones – a United States-born, retired professor of anthropology at Oxford University with ten fields trips to Nuristan to his pedigree – writes of the bari and their relationship with the landowning atrožan:^[5]

The social standing of the bari in Nuristani society is at odds with the contribution they make to the very people who hold them in such low esteem. The largest social and political group in Nuristani society is that of the land-owning and livestock-herding atrožan. The bari occupy a separate class, and the main rules they must follow are: they may not marry outside their class, they may not own livestock [and mostly not land and grazing rights], and they may not eat with atrožan. There are other restrictive rules, of course. And yet, the bari make all the houses and other buildings, they make all the furniture, they make the shoes, the blacksmiths among them make the tools, they do the [famous Nuristani] carving, and do the weaving. [They also make all the weapons the Nuristani warriors and hunters use and all the wooden bowls and clay pots and jars for their households.] In short, the bari produce all the material culture that is so characteristic of Nuristan…

The bari, whom the atrožan do not even address by name, just “bari,” live in separate, lower parts of the Nuristani villages that even have separate names.^[6] They represent roughly ten per cent of Nuristani society and although not all Nuristan’s villages have them, most have one or a few families. Those who don’t, can ‘borrow’ or even ‘buy’ them.

This is unfortunately more or less all that you learn about the bari in Toward the Horizon  – and actually also in Edelberg and Jones’ standard work, simply entitled Nuristan, published in Graz, Austria in 1979 – apart from one more important thing: the reason why Wakil Abdullah was able to help Edelberg with his book on Nuristan architecture was – he was a bari himself (p106). This is why he knew everything about building in Nuristan.

For more information on the bari, you have to go back to other, partly much earlier literature.^[7] Yet even there, there are only smatterings. One problem is that most literature on Nuristan only touches on this particular group and related aspects of class or caste in passing. Edelberg’s impressive bibliography, which is attached to Toward the Horizon, does not include any publications that have ‘bari’ (or something like ‘class structure’) in its title.

Another problem is that literature on Nuristan has concentrated and still concentrates mainly on its pre-Islamic culture. Even the book reviewed here leaves it unclear how the bari-atrožan relationship developed after the local people’s mass conversion to Islam. The fact that the paragraph about the bari quoted above is written in the present tense obscures this problem. It also omits to speak out that the bari were, as Austrian Nuristan expert Max Klimburg put it in a 2004 article, “socially stigmatized,” namely as “formerly enslaved” and then living “in a form of bondage.” This is the gravest shortcoming in Toward the Horizon.

To our rescue, Klimberg writes:

In theory, Islam liberated the bari, but their social position is still largely the same as before and intermarriage with any ‘genuine’ Nuristani is still all but impossible. … At present, the bari’s main problem is under-employment, as they face competition from outside craftsmen, called in to build houses in a new style.

The fact that the builder Abdullah became his area’s representative in the Afghan parliament under Zaher Shah (r1933-73), as Wakil Abdullah Khan, speaks for possible upward social mobility for former bari after Islamisation.

Apart from this, Taj Khan Kalash, in his article for Toward the Horizon, also looks at Muslim-Kalash interaction over the past century and in today’s Pakistan. This makes his contribution one of the most valuable.

In that sense, one important merit of Toward the Horizon is that it prompts two research questions. Firstly, how has Islam shaped, and is still shaping Nuristan and Nuristanis? ^[8] Secondly, did Islamisation, now complete, with only a few pre-Islamic artefacts kept in the community lead to greater equality between the former atrožan and the bari?^[9] As a first step, it would be good if a researcher compiled what has already been published about Kafir/Nuristani class society in the existing literature, scattered as it is in its margins, to make it possible to move on from there. Does the fact that Wakil Abdullah made it, as a bari, to member of parliament show there could be more social mobility among the Nuristani than when they were all still ‘kafir’?

Moesgaard’s Nuristan collection, unfortunately, is no longer on permanent display. But Toward the Horizon provides insights into it, and for researchers, it should be possible to access this volume.

The book is available at the Museum’s shop or online via Unipress.

Reviewed by Thomas Ruttig

Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2014

Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living is a standout work of investigative reporting and storytelling that grips you from its opening pages and immerses readers in the tragic realities of America’s war in Afghanistan. Through the interwoven lives of three Afghans – a Taleban commander, a US-backed warlord and an Afghan woman – it provides a rare, deeply humanising perspective on the failures of the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan.

Gopal traces the complex trajectories of his protagonists in vivid detail. Akbar Gul, a former Taleban commander, renounces violence and attempts to integrate into civilian life by opening a small business but is thwarted by corruption and police brutality that, eventually push him back to the Taleban. Jan Muhammed, warlord and close ally of Hamed Karzai, exploits American support to crush rivals, amass wealth, and terrorise civilians. Heela, a housewife, endures the horrors of war and personal tragedy yet rises to a position in the Afghan Senate, embodying resilience amidst chaos.

The book excels in showing how these personal stories illustrate broader failures. Gopal examines the unintended consequences of American actions, including civilians killed and injured, indiscriminate raids and support for corrupt warlords, all of which alienated many Afghans. The war also created a system where local leaders manipulated US forces for personal gain, fabricating enemies to get the US to target their rivals. By selectively targeting the Taleban while ignoring other factions’ crimes, the US deepened feelings of injustice and hindered efforts at reconciliation and peace-making.

Gopal’s ability to illuminate the nuances of Afghanistan’s shifting alliances is particularly striking. In a country where today’s ally can be tomorrow’s enemy, the rigid binaries imposed by the US were not only ineffective but also counterproductive.

The book’s title, drawn from a Pashtun proverb – “There are no good men among the living, and no bad ones among the dead” – captures the moral ambiguity that pervaded the war. No group, Afghan or foreign, emerged untainted. The US, ostensibly there to fight terrorism, found itself entangled in a war where clear distinctions between good and bad, ally and enemy, were impossible.

Gopal’s account forces readers to confront the harsh realities of war, leaving them questioning not just the war’s execution but its very purpose. This is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how Afghanistan’s history, shaped by both external and internal forces, led to turmoil.

While no single volume can fully encapsulate Afghanistan’s intricate history and its implications for the present, No Good Men Among the Living provides a critical and thought-provoking examination of how and why things went so tragically wrong. It prompts readers to wonder: Could Afghanistan have taken a more hopeful path if the US had better understood the country’s intricate socio-political fabric?

Ultimately, the book also compels reflection on the true meaning of victory in war. It challenges the conventional notions of triumph – planting flags, securing territory, or building institutions. It suggests that the war was not about democracy, jihad, freedom, or honour, but about resisting externally imposed categories and designs. Survival itself becomes the most enduring form of resistance. Gopal’s storytelling forces readers to ask: In a conflict so riddled with miscalculations and shifting allegiances, can anyone truly claim to have won?

Reviewed by Gulhan Durzai

Martine van Bijlert, Peace, Peace they say, Rainfed Press, 2024

We don’t often get the opportunity to recommend a book by one of our own, so it’s a special pleasure to highlight Martine van Bijlert’s collection of poems. Written over three years, from 2022 to 2024, during her participation in a peace poetry postcard exchange,^[10] Peace, peace they say, is a profound journey of personal reflection and artistic expression, shaped by the echoes of war and highlighting the complexities of living in our time.

Each poem is as a window into van Bijlert’s thoughts as she grapples with the fragile interplay between peace and war, the longing for hope amid chaos and the unshakable resilience of the human spirit. In this way, she challenges the reader to bear witness not only to her own struggles but also to examine their own lives and consider the roles they have played – and continue to play – in shaping the world we live in. This collection is far more than mere personal reflections, it is a powerful commentary that is at once timely and timeless and is essential reading for all those who seek connection and understanding in a fractured world.

“I knew better how to talk about peace, before I worked in peace building,” she writes in the foreword, striking a chord with those who have borne witness to the chaos of conflict and the indelible scars it leaves behind on both the geography and the human spirit, and the price exacted by the quest for that precious thing we call peace:

In poem after poem, she reminds the reader of what it means to strive for peace only to find another war, of the resilience required to endure, and the emotional imprint that persists long after “the silence after the shooting stops,” long after “politicians come rushing in,” long after the drums of a new conflict that’s been smouldering in the shadows start beating again:

Through her poetry, she invites the reader to reflect on the meaning of peace: “We can’t call peace what isn’t peace, but we also can’t disparage what is or what could be. … We should speak of it, even if we can’t find the words. Because we need to hear from people who no longer know what to say.” In the end, the poems are overwhelming and comforting in equal measure because van Bijlert gives words to what many of us have witnessed, finding a language to articulate our collective longing for peace.

Reviewed by Roxanna Shapour

Jamil Jan Kochai, 99 Nights in Logar, Penguin, 2019 and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, Penguin, 2022

Afghan-American author Jamil Jan Kochai is acknowledged as one of the younger literary voices of the diaspora. Following his first novel, published to acclaim in 2019, 99 Nights in Logar, Kochai published a collection of short stories in 2022, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories. The two works differ in format and scope, but the common threads running between them are multiple – and this review will look at both.

99 Nights tells the story of American-Afghan children visiting their relatives in Logar province in 2005. Even before Kochai makes a direct reference to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – having the book as one of the kids’ summer reads – the tone of the narration and the narrator’s point of view cut a powerful and striking similarity to Mark Twain’s two masterpieces. The abundance of aunts and uncles in Kochai’s novel reinforces this, replicating a leitmotiv from the Mississippian Tom Sawyer-Huckleberry Finn universe.

That being said, the context in which the stories unwind are far apart. Twain’s tales were set in mid-19^th century America, a time of wanderlust. The Afghanistan of the early 2000s is a place where just crossing out of the garden gates into the outside world represents a major breach of the rules, a source of danger and trauma for the protagonists – the Afghan-American narrator and three of his Afghan teenager cousins (though one is actually uncle to the others), on a hunt to bring back the house dog.

Anybody slightly familiar with the realities of out-of-home interactions in rural Afghanistan, with fellow humans and the landscape, cannot but recall how navigating the world just beyond one’s safety zone, whether home, street, or, at most, village, appeared at first inexplicably daunting. This before realising, out of experiences lived or related, the reasons for that: invisible dangers or red-lines connected to family rivalries, competition for resources, and social constraints, even before the risks of common criminality or political violence. During their quest to find the dog, the protagonists go through a series of extraordinary events, happening to or merely related to them. These are described in a peculiar mixture of the fantastic and the realistic, reflecting the different types of awe and exaltation felt by the diverse group of Afghan and Afghan-American boys, at their first adventure in the open.

After a cohesive and captivating start, the narrative does wander off, in the end, far more than the teenager runaways do. In the second half, the structure of the novel, as per the title, references A Thousand and One Nights. To the voice of the main protagonist, the quasi-autobiographical Afghan-American boy, Marwand, framed tales are added, interspersed within the overall storyline. These are told by different narrators and with a number of recurring characters met by the protagonist, who are sometimes heavily stylised figures bearing a symbolical value. For readers not accustomed to such narrative meandering, typical of magic realism from South Asia (think of some of Salman Rushdie’s work), the plot may seem to lose focus towards the end.

In the plot, there is a symbolic reference to the recent history of Afghanistan and the country’s relations with America. Budabash, the house guard dog, had suffered at the hands of the young American narrator during a previous visit to Afghanistan, made in the 1990s. Returning from America, wiser and guilt-ridden, the narrator hastens to greet Budabash with the brightest of intentions, hoping to reconcile and forge a friendship. But a decade on, the dog has turned into a monstruous wolf and bites the now grown-up boy – a wound that stays open and becomes infected. The missed encounter between the boy and the dog can be understood as symbolic of that between America and Afghanistan, together with the acts of retaliation that follow it – and that culminate in the dog running away and amok, and the narrator’s vain research for him. The metaphor can be extended as well to the complex relationship between the author and his ancestral abode (Budabash means ‘dwelling’ in Farsi).

Despite the book’s title, which sounds like it is intended to draw a Western audience in, hinting that the book aims at a broader public, the text includes a high number of Pashto and Dari words, with nothing but the context to help a non-Afghan reader understand them. Moreover, at the end, Kochai choses to have the narrator/author’s father relate events from the anti-Soviet jihad in a Pashto-only chapter, with no translation provided. This is a key episode, the fateful night when his father’s younger brother was brutally killed by the Russians and the family decided to flee to Pakistan, an event of recurring importance throughout the novel and others of Kuchai’s works. This raises a question of who Kochai’s targeted readership is. Should Afghan authors, who necessarily are now mostly in the diaspora, concentrate foremost on the Afghans outside the country as their readership who know both English and Dari and Pashto? The question is probably answered by Kochai’s second work, the collection of short stories titled The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories.

Unlike the novel, the short story format allows Kochai to explore a wider range of settings and tones, addressing in the process a broader audience of American readers who may or may not have previous knowledge of Afghanistan. Some stories actually achieve the remarkable result of shedding light on contemporary American society through the prism of the Afghan diaspora, a relatively small immigrant community, by using familial and intimate settings.

In the story that lends its title to the collection, an Afghan-American family comes under FBI surveillance. The FBI officer is himself the narrator. Through his eye, omniscient, yet run-of-the-mill, and ultimately unable to limit his role to that of an observer – quite the narrator’s position, though seldom acknowledged by authors – the people being surveilled shine out in all their humanity. This proves a perfect story-telling mechanism, ensuring no pauses or gaps in the narration’s rhythm. As readers, we see their characters develop as we eavesdrop on their casual chatter and daily routine. One takeaway here could be that the only way America is interested in observing and narrating the experiences of the Afghan community – and other Muslims in the US – is, because of its fears of radicalisation, by surveillance and attempts at control. This bitter consideration is only mitigated by the FBI officer’s realisation that, beyond security paranoia, “there is so much more to learn” about the intricacies of the Afghan family’s daily lives.

Despite Kochai’s eclectic choice of themes and settings, many stories bear proof of a profound unity in his work of so far. His own more or less fictionalised family members are easily recognisable in Hajji Hotak’s house and they and the characters from his novel also return in the short stories. The recurrent familial spirit of the martyred uncle haunts the pages of the short stories as well, as an inescapable presence in the family’s universe, no matter what continent they find themselves on – or in what dimension. The initial story, ‘Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’, sees the protagonist dive into a popular action video game, whose newest instalment is set in the Afghan war, only to end up trying to sew back together his family’s torn past by, in the game, saving his uncle’s life.

Kochai’s returning over and over again to his own family’s history proves everything but repetitive. On the contrary, it creates a familiar universe which slowly makes it possible even for readers alien to any Afghan experience to grasp its underlying knots and fault lines. It is as if the author had decided to work his material, that which matters most to him, in order to get to know it more thoroughly, by looking at it and writing about it. This he does by treating it from a multitude of points of view. From the eyes full of magic of a young American-Afghan kid catapulted into mud-walled villages in the midst of nowhere, to the wrier glances of that same boy, grown-up and at home in California, from the attentive scrutiny of a FBI officer, to a formal resume, which lists the existential phases of the pater familias through jihad, exile and immigrant work in the US. This multitude of voices also deprives the reader of the comfort of knowing who is telling the true story and where the truth might lie.

Short stories seem the best format for Kochai to convey to readers his fascinating, deeply personal, yet poignant vision of Afghanistan and America. The very novel, 99 Nights in Logar, originated from a short story and – against the backdrop of the many masters in American literature who favoured this form of storytelling – one cannot but hope that Jamil Jan Kochai will write more. And if you missed his novel back in 2019, this author’s recommendation is to first get acquainted with Kochai’s universe through his second work, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak.

Reviewed by Fabrizio Foschini

Saad Mohseni with Jenna Krajeski, Radio Free Afghanistan: A Twenty-year Odyssey for an Independent Voice in Kabul, HarperCollins, 2024

Saad Mohseni’s memoirs of his and his siblings’ journey in establishing independent radio and later TV channels is an interesting read within the modern history of independent media in Afghanistan. His book is a reminder of some key political events between 2001 and 2023, such as the presidential elections, that also, simultaneously, offers an intimate account of the role of the national media mogul in these events

Mohseni’s family left Kabul in 1978 following the coup de état, when Saad’s father was posted to Tokyo. He was then 12 years old, the eldest of four siblings – his two brothers Zaid and Jahid and his sister Wajma. Later, the family emigrated to Australia after his father resigned his post on the eve of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They settled in Australia, but nostalgia for the homeland was so powerful that the family kept looking for chances to work in or about Afghanistan. During the 1990s, Mohseni went to Uzbekistan on the Afghan border to look for business opportunities and started a newsletter – his very first and only experience of being a journalist.

After the fall of the first Islamic Emirate in 2001, the Mohseni brothers arrived in Kabul to find businesses to invest in. They were pursuing an idea for almond exporting until Afghanistan’s culture minister, who was also a friend of their father’s, planted an idea for a radio station. Arman FM was established with a small grant from USAID in April 2003 and from it, over the years, the Moby Media empire grew to include several TV and radio stations, not only in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, India, the Middle East and east Africa, and a pan-regional Persian-language station, Lemar.

The book is a dynamic read that takes us into inner workings of Afghan society: Mohseni tells us about the importance of “a family connection” – family and friends’ relations – in starting and running a business. A careful sequencing of chapters maintains the book’s pace, as it jumps from nostalgic reminiscing about the early 2000s to events that happened as recently as 2023, that is Mohseni’s recounting of how TOLO TV covered the first presidential elections in 2004 just a few days after the station was launched, to a chapter on how it has been navigating the growing number of restrictions imposed on the media by the Islamic Emirate in 2023. Although Mohseni has not returned to Afghanistan since August 2021, he says he regularly participates online in the editorial meetings of his TV station.

Mohseni’s criticism of how the United States and the West in general left Afghanistan in August 2021 – sometimes interwoven with sardonic undertones – is memorable. For example, he writes:

I found myself, bewildered at an embassy reception or think tank meet and greet, comforting Western politicians as they confessed to feelings of guilt over the way the international community left so suddenly, abandoning Afghans. “It’s not your fault,” I’d tell them, as though they were a child and Afghanistan a glass of spilled milk. I’d started to feel like an aging actor at a Hollywood party, once attractive and now making a case for my own relevance.

Two chapters – one about his mother and the other about his sister – are a delicate attempt to speak about the position of Afghan women in society. He writes:

… my mother’s relationship to Afghanistan is different from mine. She was in her thirties when the country that she had grown up in changed so abruptly and then changed so many times more that it must have felt like living through a series of earthquakes. She is a woman in a country that by conservative tradition or through government decree has so often tried to control women’s lives and silence their voices. After she spends time with the women at Moby, she returns to Melbourne or Dubai a little depressed. “They say that the country and the government must think they are completely worthless,” she says. “And what can I tell them? They are right.”

Overall, this was a nice and entertaining read about Afghanistan – a welcome change from the norm.

Reviewed by Jelena Bjelica 

Hassan Abbas, The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left, Yale University Press, 2023

The Return of the Taliban by well-known Pakistani-American author, Hassan Abbas, looks in turn at specific topics to do with the post-2021 regime in Kabul, including its composition and structure, religious ideology, international relations and the challenges it faces.

For me, the chapter on the Islamic Emirate’s international relations was particularly interesting. Hassan Abbas explores its relations with Pakistan, China, Iran, Qatar, Russia and India. Regarding the Emirate’s Taleban’s relations with China, he quotes the acting Deputy Prime Minister of the IEA, Mawlawi Abdul Salaam Hanafi, saying:

Afghanistan can play a great role in creating important corridors. We want to be connected to China through our Badakhshan province. . . . The geostrategic position of Afghanistan could lead the country to play a positive role in linking neighbouring countries in the region and beyond.

The author delves into the Taleban’s relations with Russia. He describes how the Soviet Union’s failed invasion of Afghanistan drastically changed Moscow’s relationship towards Afghanistan. He describes how Russia initially extended its support to the United States in combat operations against the Taleban in the early years of the US intervention. He also describes the Afghanistan Contact Group (ACG) in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in 2005 to support Kabul’s fight against drugs and crime.

Abbas describes the pivoting of Russia’s calculations and approach after 2015 and how the Kremlin and the Taleban came together to cooperate because they both wanted to fight ISKP and its expanding presence in Central Asia. Russia opened up active channels of communication with the Taleban in a number of international forums, based on their mutual anti-US sentiment – a fresh start appeared to be established.

Additionally, Abbas writes, the SCO was crucial in “facilitating a conversation between the Afghan government and the Taliban, specifically during the withdrawal of NATO troops in 2016 [sic].^[11] Russia invited the Taleban to several rounds of peace talks in Moscow, which helped, says Abbas, officials to understand the core interest of the Taleban. This was an insight into how Russia played a key role in helping the Taleban to better articulate their position, spread their narrative of the war and improve how they were perceived globally. Although the world has not recognised the Taleban government yet, certain countries do want to have relations with the IEA. This indicates the development of Taleban regional diplomacy.

According to Abbas, it is Pakistan that influences the Taleban more than any other country. He mentions former chief ISI General Faiz Hameed travelling to Kabul soon after the Taleban retook power and playing a key role in forming the first Emirate cabinet. Abbas says Hameed also resolved quarrels and helped the Emirate put aside their internal divisions. He quotes a Pakistani general saying he told the Taleban to give the former Chief Executive of the Republic, Dr Abdullah Abdullah and former President Hamid Karzai some symbolic position just to show the world that their government was an inclusive one, although the Taleban had their own ideas.

In another part of the book, Abbas mentions the Tehrik-e Taleban Pakistan (TTP), sister organisation to the Afghan Taleban. He says that a year after the return of Taleban to power in Afghanistan, Pakistan witnessed a more than 50 per cent increase in ‘terrorist activities’. Pakistan tried to negotiate with the TTP through the Afghan Taleban, but to little avail. According to Abbas, the Taleban have helped Pakistan only half-heartedly in pursing the TTP because both groups enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship for a long time. This, he said, has resulted in creating tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I highly recommend this book because, along with delving deep into the Emirate’s international relations, it provides the reader with an in-depth analysis of the events leading to the Taleban’s takeover as the US was withdrawing from Afghanistan. It gives the reader a more detailed and nuanced picture of the Taleban than one gets from media reporting.

Reviewed by Rohullah Sorush

Edited by Kate Clark