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Sources and Resources for Contextualizing Afghanistan
Contextualizing Afghanistan Workshop
3 and 24 October 2008
Harvard University
Note:
This is an annotated list of books and films on Afghanistan from the libraries of the
Outreach Program at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Outreach
Center at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. All of the listed
resources can be checked out from the libraries free of charge.
Books
The Storyteller’s Daughter
Saira Shah
This is a memoir of a young woman shaped by two disparate worlds. Saira Shah is the
English-born daughter of an Afghan aristocrat, inspired by his dazzling stories to
rediscover the now lost life their forebears presided over for nine hundred years within
sight of the minarets and lush gardens of Kabul and the snow-topped mountains of the
Hindu Kush. Part sophisticated, sensitive Western liberal, part fearless, passionate
Afghan, falling in love with her ancestral myth – chasing Afghanistan – Shah becomes, at
twenty-one a correspondent at the front of the war between the Soviets and the Afghan
resistance. Discovering her extended family, discovering a world of intense family ritual,
of community, of male primacy, or arranged marriages, and finding at last the now war-
ravaged family seat, she discovers as well what she wants and what she reject of her
extraordinary heritage.
Shadow of the Silk Road
Colin Thubron
Out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan
and the plains of Iran and into Kurdish Turkey, Colin Thubron covers some seven
thousand miles in eight months. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and
camel, he travels from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic progenitor of the
Chinese people, to the ancient port of Antioch – in perhaps the most difficult and
ambitious journey he has undertaken in forty years of travel. The Silk Road is a huge
network of arteries splitting and converging across the breadth of Asia. To travel it is to
trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also ideas, religions and inventions.
But alongside this rich and astonishing past, Shadow of the Silk Road is also about Asia
today: a continent of upheaval. The book encounters countries in many forms. It is about
changes in China, transformed since the Cultural Revolution. It is about false
nationalism, and the world’s discontented margins, where the true boundaries are not
political borders but the frontiers of nations, ethnicities, languages and religions.
My Khyber Marriage: The Best-Selling 1920 Account of Life among the Pathan
Tribesmen
Morag Murray Abdullah
This book is a memoir of a Scottish woman’s marriage to a Pathan nation’s chief’s son
and her life with the Pathans in the Khyber Pass area. In 1916 Morag was leading a
conventional life while the First World War was raging. Then she met Syed Abdullah.
The handsome student was attending university in Scotland, but his roots were far away.
Abdullah’s father was a chief of the Pathan nation and governed lands around the fabled
Khyber Pass. Regardless of cultural and religious differences (she was Protestant – he a
Muslim) the two young people fell in love and were married. Morag followed her new
husband out to the North West Frontier Province of India and lived there for two decades.
The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan
Artyom Borovik
With The Hidden War Artyom Borovik provided the world its first glimpse inside the
Soviet military machine, capturing the soldiers’ terror, helplessness, and despair at
waging war in a foreign land against an unseen enemy for unclear purposes. When first
published his groundbreaking revelations exposed the weaknesses beneath the Soviet
Union’s aura of military might creating an enormous controversy both in Russia and
around the world.
Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Robert D. Kaplan
Robert D. Kaplan braved the dangers of war-ravaged Afghanistan in the 1980s, living
among the mujahidin whose unwavering devotion to Islam fueled their mission to oust
the formidable Soviet invaders. Kaplan learned how the thwarted Soviet invasion gave
rise to the Taliban and the defining international conflagration of the twenty-first century.
Kaplan returns a decade later and brings to life a lawless frontier.
Afghanistan: Mullah, Marx, and Mujahid
Ralph H. Magnus and Eden Naby
Either completely ignored in world affairs or lying at the center of confrontation,
Afghanistan has ricocheted between these two extremes for over two centuries. First, it
was the focal point of colonial rivalry between Russia and Britain in the nineteenth
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century. Most recently, it became the world’s central stage in the battle against global
terrorism. Nevertheless, Afghanistan itself remains region of seemingly insoluble turmoil
and constant crisis. In this introductory volume, Ralph Magnus and Eden Naby detail
Afghanistan’s physical situation, human environment, and modern history, as well as the
rise and fall of competing internal forces, including the Taliban. The authors offer
analytical insight into Afghanistan’s political position within the restructured Central
Asia region, the ethnic relationships that complicate its political history, and the potential
for stability.
An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan
Jason Elliot
Part travelogue, part historical evocation, part personal quest, and part reflection on the
joys and perils of passage, An Unexpected Light is the account of Jason Elliot’s journey
through Afghanistan, a country considered off-limits to travelers for twenty years. He
travels by foot and on horseback, and hitches rides on trucks that eventually lead him into
the snowbound mountains of the North toward Uzbekistan, the former battlefields of the
Soviet army’s “hidden war.” Here the forbidden beauty of the Afghan landscape kindles
a moving recollection of the author’s life ten years earlier, when, no more than a boy, he
fought with the anti-Soviet mujaheddin resistance during the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan. Weaving different Afghan times and visits with revealing insights on
matters ranging from antipersonnel mines to Sufism, Jason Elliot has created a narrative
mosaic of prose that captures the powerful allure of a seldom-glimpsed world.
The Sewing Circles of Heart: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan
Christina Lamb
A gold-inscribed invitation to a wedding in a foreign land led Christina Lamb at the age
of twenty-one to leave suburban England for Peshawar on the frontier of the Afghan war.
She remained in Afghanistan and for two years she tracked the final stages of the
mujaheddin victory over the Soviets and reported for Britain’s Sunday Telegraph
Newspaper. She became friends with Abdul Haq and Hamid Karzai, the new president of
Afghanistan. Lamb returned to Afghanistan after the attacks on the World Trade Center
to find out what had become of the people and places that had marked her life as a young
graduate. She was now seeing the land anew, through the eyes of a mother and an
experienced foreign correspondent. Lamb’s journey brought her in touch with the people
no one else had written about: The abandoned victims of almost a quarter century of war.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
A Thousand Splendid Suns is a story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan’s last
thirty years – from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban
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rebuilding – that puts the violence, fear, hope and faith of this country in intimate, human
terms. It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic
sweep of war, where personal lives – the struggle to survive, raise a family, find
happiness – are inextricable from the history playing out around them. The story follows
the lives of two women sharing a family and husband in the war torn Kabul. There is
some discussion about gender issues in contemporary Afghanistan.
Afghanistan
Louis Dupree
Afghanistan, written in 1973, looks at Afghanistan as it was before the Soviet invasion. It
contains two epilogues; one written in 1978 and the other in 1980 right before the Soviet
invasion. Afghanistan traces the development of this country from tribal and politically
unstable towards a system of representative government consistent with its cultural and
historical patterns. The book traces the socio-economic, cultural and political
development of this rugged country and can serve as an indicator of things to come in this
unsettled land. Apart from the narrative the author presents all this material to us through
charts, maps and illustrations. It also contains appendices on music and calendars used in
Afghanistan.
The Story of My Life: An Afghan Girl on the Other Side of the Sky
Farah Ahmedi
Farah Ahmedi is born into the world just as the war between the mujahideen and the
Soviets reaches its peak in Afghanistan. Bombs are falling all over her country, and her
native Kabul is swelling with hundreds of thousands of people looking for homes and
jobs. The sounds of gunfire and fighter planes are as normal to Farah as the sounds of
traffic or children playing are to schoolgirl in America. When Farah steps on a land mine
on her way to school, her world becomes much smaller than the dreams and hopes in her
heart. She begins to learn – slowly- that ordinary people, often strangers, have immense
power to save lives and restore hope. The Story of My Life: An Afghan Girl on the Other
Side of the Sky recounts an epic journey. It interweaves a childhood in Afghanistan,
where the classrooms are naked chambers with only chalkboards on the walls and are
filled with more students than seats (and no books), with an American adolescence,
where teenagers struggle to decide whether to try out for school plays, whom to take to
homecoming dance, and where to go to college. In Kabul, they cancel school because of
rockets and bombing; in Chicago, Farah might have a snow day. In Kabul, a schoolgirl
wears a black dress and a white headscarf; in America, girls need the right jeans and
trendy tops.
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Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics
Martin Ewans
Reaching back to earliest times, Martin Ewans examines the historical evolution of one of
today’s most dangerous breeding grounds of global terrorism. After a succession of early
dynasties and the emergence of an Afghan empire during the eighteenth century, the
nineteenth and early twentieth century saw a fierce power struggle between Russia and
Britain for supremacy in Afghanistan that was ended by the nation’s proclamation of
independence in 1919. A communist coup in the lat 1970s overthrew the established
regime and led the invasion of Soviet troops in 1979. Roughly a decade later, the Soviet
Union withdrew, condemning Afghanistan to a civil war that tore apart the nation’s last
remnants of religious, ethnic, and political unity. It was into this climate that the Taliban
was born. Today, war-torn and economically destitute, Afghanistan faces unique
challenges as it looks toward an uncertain future. Martin Ewans weighs the lessons of
history to provide a look at Afghanistan’s prospects and the international resonances of
the nation’s immense task of total political and economic reconstruction.
Taliban: Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia
Ahmed Rashid
Rashid offers a first-hand account of Taliban leaders since their emergence to power in
1994 based on his experiences as a journalist covering the civil war in the country for
twenty years. He explains how the growth of Taliban power has already created severe
instability in Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and five Central Asian republics. He describes the
Taliban’s role as major player in a new “Great Game” – competition among Western
countries and companies to build oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia to Western and
Asian markets. The author also discusses the controversial changes in American attitudes
toward the Taliban – from early support to recent bombings of Osama Bin Laden’s hide-
away and other Taliban protected terrorist bases – and how they have influenced the
stability of the region.
The Lost Heart of Asia
Colin Thubron
The Lost Heart of Asia is Colin Thubron’s book on the countries of Central Asia that
emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union. This remote and fascinating region
contains the magical cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, and terrain as diverse as the
Kazakh steppes, the Karakum desert and the Pamir Mountains. Central Asia is an
enormous land, bigger than Western Europe, secret, turned in on itself, heart of the great
Mongol empire of Tamerlane, site of the legendary Silk Road and scene of Stalin’s
cruelest deportations. Colin Thubron traveled by train, bus, car and foot throughout its
five republics, and this is the story of his encounters with their people, landscape and
past.
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Afghanistan’s Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban
Larry P. Goodson
Going beyond the stereotypes of Kalashnikov-wielding Afghan mujahideen and black-
turbaned fundamentalists, Larry Goodson combines Taliban interviews and field research
with concise analysis to explain what has been happening in Afghanistan in the last
twenty years, and why the future of Afghanistan matters. Illuminating Afghanistan’s
myriad cleavages along ethnic, religious, social, and geographical fault lines, Goodson
examines the devastating course of the Afghan war. He charts its utter destruction of the
country, from the deaths of more than two million Afghans and the dispersal of some six
million others as refugees to the complete collapse of Afghanistan’s economy, which
today has been replaced by mono-agriculture in opium poppies and heroin production..
The Fragmentation of Afghanistan
Barnett R. Rubin
Drawing on two decades of research, Barnett R. Rubin, an expert on Afghanistan,
provides an account of the nature of the old regime, the rise and fall of the People’s
Democratic Party of Afghanistan and the troubled mujahidin resistance. He relates all
these phenomena to international actors, showing how the interaction of US policy and
Pakistani and Saudi Arabian interests has helped to create the challenges of today. Rubin
puts into context the continuing turmoil in Afghanistan and offers readers a coherent
historical explanation for the country’s social and political fragmentation.
Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland
Sana Haroon
Frontier of Faith examines the history of Islam, especially that of local mullahs, in the
North-West Frontier, a largely autonomous zone straddling the boundary of Pakistan and
Afghanistan, from the late nineteenth century to the present. The Tribal Areas was
established as a strategic buffer zone for British India, but the impact of colonial rules
was minimal. The autonomy that resulted emphasized the role and importance of the
local mullahs, who jealously protected the powers they accrued themselves. After the
partition of India in 1947, the Tribal Areas maintained its status as an autonomous region
in both the Afghan and Pakistani imaginations and cartographic descriptions. The
mullahs contributed to armed mobilizations over the next half century, in return for which
nationalist actors protected their vested interest in regional autonomy.
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Films
In This World: http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/282031/In-This-World/trailer
Kandahar: http://www.avatarfilms.com/releases/kandahar.html
The Kite Runner: http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount_vantage/thekiterunner/
Charlie Wilson’s War: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6vaupt42Bg
Osama: http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=trailer&id=298752
In This World - movie
2004, directed by Michael Winterbottom (part of the Sundance Series).
The film is R rated for strong language in parts, which I did not understand. In
This World is about the Silk Road in contemporary times. Instead of silk as a
commodity of exchange and trade, human beings are the cargo. Seeking a better
life than in the refugee camps of northern Pakistan, two Afghan refugee boys
(Enayat and Jamal) are offered the opportunity to be smuggled into the UK in the
hope of securing a better life. The film follows the two boys through Iran,
Pakistan, Turkey, Italy, France and the UK. While it feels in some parts like a
In This World documentary In This World is a full feature length production designed to
resemble documentary footage. Some scenes to consider: Scene 1: Context and
reason for being smuggled – until 5:00; Scene 3: Leaving family, possibly forever
-- love, affection and a better life; Scene 7: Foreigners in Iran -- changes in
landscapes; Scene 12: Being children in the mountains of Turkey; Scene 15: Near
“success” working in Italy.
Charlie Wilson’s War – movie
2007, directed by Mike Nichols.
This film is rated R for language, sexuality and nudity. In the early 1980s,
Charlie Wilson is a womanizing US congressional representative from Texas
and is a member of two foreign policy and covert-operations committees.
Prodded by a major conservative supporter, Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts),
Wilson learns about the Afghan-Soviet War. With the help of CIA agent, Gust
Charlie Wilson’s War
Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Wilson uses his political efforts to
supply the Afghan mujahideen with weapons and support. He learns that
while military victory can resolve some of Afghanistan’s problems, there are
other consequences and prices that are ignored. Some scenes to consider:
1:18 Praying with the Stinger missile; 1:20 The hero Charlie Wilson; 17:22
The do it my way CIA agent; 24:41 Military weapons as the way to freedom;
28:54 Soviet military and the use of helicopters; 29:48 Charlie Wilson
unaware of local customs and procedures with religious Muslims; 35:00
Afghan refugee situation changes Charlie’s mind; 41:00 US Embassy
Islamabad needs to hide the militarization of Afghanistan; 1:09:25 Afghans
fighting US enemies (Cold War); 1:17:05 The unthinking Islamic mob;
1:31:08 Loss of US support after Soviet withdrawal.
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Kandahar - movie
200 2001, directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Iranian, numerous film credits).
Kandahar is in Persian and English and was filmed in Iran, but set in
Afghanistan. There is no rating for the film. Kandahar’s main character is Nafas
an Afghani - Canadian who is returning to Kandahar during the Taliban period
of the late ‘90’s to see her sister who has threatened to kill herself. The film
uses the burka, a covering for women that reveals no physical appearance, as a
continuing thread throughout the film to discuss issues of religion, gender,
sexuality, power and love. Director Makhmalbaf uses shapes in bright colors
more than individuals to represent realities that are outside of the ability of
Kandahar
individuals to contravene. The film utilizes a quasi-documentary style to
encourage realism, while never straying from being a feature film. Images are
used in Kandahar to represent longing, loss and hope. Some scenes to
consider: Scene 2: Preparing to enter Afghanistan -- twin themes of burka and
war; Scene 4: Religious text memorization -- religion as dogma; Scene 6: Visit
to the doctor -- covering and uncovering; Scene 9: Real and imagined legs -- the
impact of war.
Osama – movie
2003, directed by Siddiq Barmak.
The film is rated PG-13. Osama is a story about the plight of women in
Afghanistan during the Taliban regime. A 12-year-old Afghan girl and her
mother lose their jobs when the Taliban closes the hospital where they work
when the Taliban took over Afghanistan. The Taliban have also forbidden
women to leave their houses without a male "legal companion." With her
husband and brother dead, killed in battle, there is no one left to support the
Osama family. With nowhere left to turn, the mother disguises her daughter as a boy.
Now called 'Osama,' the girl embarks on a terrifying and confusing journey as
she tries to keep the Taliban from finding out her true identity. Inspired by a
true story, Osama is the first entirely Afghan film shot since the fall of the
Taliban. Some scenes to consider: 2:30 Women protesting living conditions;
7:35 Poverty; 18:00 Osama the girl boy is born; 29:05 Osama at the mosque
- man’s world; 40:15 Training to be a Talib; 53:20 Wedding scene and
Taliban suppression; 1:02 Osama is caught and forced into women’s prison;
1:08 Documentary film maker is killed and Osama is spared by marrying an
older Talib; 1:09 Questioning the Taliban interpretation of the Qur’an for their
own ends; 1:18:30 Old Talib asks Osama to pick a padlock for her room
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The Kite Runner - movie
2008, directed by Marc Forster.
This movie is rated PG-13 for some strong thematic materials including the
rape of a child, violence and brief strong language. The Kite Runner story
revolves around two boys growing up during the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan. Amir is a well-to-do Afghan boy from the dominant Pushtun
ethnic group, and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant Ali, from the
historically downtrodden Hazara minority. The boys spend their days in a
The Kite Runner peaceful Kabul, kite fighting, roaming the streets and being boys. Their
innocence is The Kite Runner by a horrible incident with the neighborhood
shattered one day
bully and shortly after by the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The
ravages of war, and refugee and diaspora life, are detailed. By a series of
curious turns Amir is brought back to Afghanistan on a personal mission.
Some scenes to consider: 2:20 Evocative opening (what is trying to be said
here?); 7:58 Afghanistan as modern; 14:30 Ethnic fragmentation; 39:20
Western party of the elite; 48:30 Entree of the Soviet soldiers; 1:10:28
Wedding in exile; 1:37 Cultural interpretation of Sharia; 1:51:30 Amir Jan
returning to faith.
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