Afghanistan: a reading list

Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By Steve Coll. Penguin Press; 784 pages; $35

In “Ghost Wars”, which won the Pulitzer prize for general non-fiction in 2005, Mr Coll examined how the CIA’s manoeuvres against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s inadvertently led to the rise of Osama bin Laden (he helped fund the American-allied mujahideen before establishing al-Qaeda in 1988). “Directorate S”, Mr Coll’s follow-up, looks at American efforts in the wake of the September 11th attacks to vanquish al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and the murky role of Pakistan’s intelligence services. Mr Coll describes his masterful tome as “a humbling case study in the limits of American power”.

An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict, 1978-2012. By Mike Martin. Oxford University Press; 389 pages; $30. Hurst; £25

A former British Army officer combines his military experience with reams of interviews to produce a modern history of Helmand province, in southern Afghanistan. Outsiders have failed to grasp the “highly local, personal and non-ideological nature of internal conflict” in the region, Mr Martin argues, and it has often undermined the West’s peacekeeping and nation-building aims.

Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground. By Jonathan Steele. Counterpoint; 437 pages; $26. Portobello; £25

“Ghosts of Afghanistan” is a good title for this fine modern history by Mr Steele, a British journalist. This is not just because of the many people who have died in its wars, but because “the spectres of past mistakes” complicated decision-making by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a multinational peacekeeping mission.

Mr Steele finds uncanny echoes between the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and the ISAF’s intervention. Francesc Vendrell, a diplomat formerly with the UN and the EU, predicted a gloomy scenario: “Having failed dismally to make the Afghan people our allies, we will inevitably abandon them to a combination of Taliban in the south and the warlords in the north, and (having somehow redefined success) we will go home convinced that it is the Afghan people who have failed us.”

The Great Game. By Peter Hopkirk. Kodansha; 596 pages; $18

In the 19th century India was the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown, and Russia coveted it. Afghanistan, it thought, was the window through which the jewel might be pilfered. And so Central Asia became the battleground for a “great game”, played out between daring young officers from both sides, as well as local khans. Hopkirk’s classic history of that time is awash with tales of extraordinary derring-do—a reminder that Afghanistan’s strategic importance to the great powers is nothing new.

The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley. By Wesley Morgan. Random House; 672 pages; $35

Mr Morgan argues that American military activity in the Pech valley, in eastern Afghanistan, is a fitting microcosm for the campaign in Afghanistan as a whole. The book chronicles the difficult terrain, the parade of different units, the lack of accountability among top brass and the Americans’ failure to learn from tactical missteps.

No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes. By Anand Gopal. Metropolitan Books; 320 pages; $27

Mr Gopal tells the story of the Afghan conflict through the lives of three of the country’s denizens—a Taliban commander, a warlord and a housewife—from the start of America’s war on terror, through the end of the Taliban regime to the militants’ resurgence. It illustrates the perverse ways in which the American occupation failed.

The Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42. By William Dalrymple. Knopf; 560 pages; $30. Bloomsbury; 608 pages; £24.99

Mr Dalrymple, a British historian, recounts Britain’s misadventures in Afghanistan in the 19th century in this masterful history. He makes a nearly two-century-old conflict seem disturbingly fresh, showing how the war was undone by the unsustainable cost of occupation, waning political and public interest, and the need to divert resources. Few lessons have been learned from past mistakes. Mr Dalrymple’s book is a timely reminder of the way that wars can begin with promise but end in disgrace.

The Taliban at War: 2001-2018. By Antonio Giustozzi. Oxford University Press; 380 pages; $65. Hurst; 384 pages; £50

Mr Giustozzi has spent more than 20 years studying the Taliban; for this book he conducted hundreds of interviews with insurgents of different stripes to cover the period between 2002, when fighters began to reorganise, and 2015, when they temporarily seized control of Kunduz, a city in northern Afghanistan.

A Thousand Splendid Suns. By Khaled Hosseini. Penguin; 384 pages; $28. Bloomsbury; 432 pages; £16.99

“A Thousand Splendid Suns” is a sweeping Afghan saga that, like “The Kite Runner”, Mr Hosseini’s previous book, reveals his talent and his love for his homeland. The multi-generational story unfolds over 45 years but revolves around the lives of two women, Mariam and Laila, who are married to the same abusive man. It is Mr Hosseini's insight into the lives of ordinary Afghan women that gives this novel its strength. He describes a cruel patriarchy: the forced marriages; the restrictions on women's freedom of movement; the banning of women from education and work; the closure of women's hospitals; the day-to-day harassment, humiliation and beatings.

The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014. By Carlotta Gall. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 329 pages; $28

Few observers are better placed than Ms Gall to judge what has gone so badly wrong in Pakistan and Afghanistan since 2001: she spent more than a decade reporting for the New York Times in both countries. In “The Wrong Enemy” Ms Gall argues that since the Islamist movement is “rotting at the core”, the Taliban alone could have been crushed or accommodated long ago. It survived because it serves as a front for the far stronger Pakistani army, in particular the “S Directorate” of its spy network, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Ms Gall might have balanced what she learned from Afghan intelligence sources with other views, but “The Wrong Enemy” asks many of the right questions.