No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes

This is one the best works of narrative non-fiction that I've come across in recent memory. Anand Gopal spent several years living in Afghanistan and has come back with this incredible book narrating the Afghan War through the lives of three people actually living through it.<br /><br />He follows the lives of Akbar Gul (a Taliban commander), Jan Muhammad Khan (a U.S-allied militia leader) and Heela Achekzai (a civilian woman), charting the course of their lives before, during and after the American invasion. Other narratives also weave in an out, including those of U.S. soldiers and others who have fought in recent years. What comes across is how amorphous and fluid the distinctions between friend and foe are - one can be an enemy or a friend on paper but the reality day to day is much more complicated. Morality is not all lined up on any one side, and instead of flighty concepts such as ideology the thing that most everyone is focused on rather is survival in a tumultuous and insecure land.<br /><br />Through this narrative exposition the broader narrative of how the U.S. lost the war is told. A few months after the first bombs starting falling the Taliban had effectively ceased to exist. Its leadership had fled or was seeking to lay down arms and join the new order, and the rank and file had put down their weapons and returned to their villages to farm as they had in times before. But American alliances with brutal, rapacious local warlords - as well as an American insistence that there had to be an enemy there for them to fight - brought the movement back from the dead by brutalizing local populations and inadvertently enlisting credulous American forces in wiping out tribal rivals spuriously identified as Taliban members.<br /><br />After the first couple of months, there had been no real war to continue with and if America had proceeded more wisely it could've built on the situation from there, leading to a far better for Afghanistan and for themselves. Indeed the war in Afghanistan actually could've been a good thing, and with a wiser, more rational approach it indeed may have been. Instead defeat was effectively snatched from the jaws of victory. Had America and the new Afghan government instituted some kind truth and reconciliation (something for which former Talibs were clamouring) the war could've ended in short order. No one wanted to go launch a futile war against the new order, by the start of 2002 there was essentially no one wanting to launch a war to put back in place the Taliban government.<br /><br />But instead of seeking consensus to build an inclusive new Afghan government, the U.S. put back in power the same warlords who had raped and pillaged the country in the early 90s - this time with American military backing. They unleashed a predatory police force on the population (particularly in the rural Pashtun countryside) and wiped out any rivals to their corrupt new order, labeling them "Taliban" regardless of who they were. As such, they indeed gave birth to a resurgent Taliban movement just as their brutality had done once before a decade earlier - a movement which is now gaining in strength throughout much of the country.<br /><br />America for its part was able to bring incredible killing power to Afghanistan, but did not possess any deep knowledge of the country, its history or its people. As such, that incredible lethal force was often and regularly brought down on the wrong people - often those who were actually seeking friendship and alliances with them in the aftermath of Taliban rule. Given its disastrous recent history of "nation-building" this book stands as a strong exposition as to why such endeavors are undesirable. Not because American power is by definition malevolent, but because the people planning to institute such grandiose projects simply lack the knowledge and foresight about these places to do such things effectively. America might, 13 years later, finally be learning something about Afghanistan and how better to administer that country, but the nature of its political process means engagement longer than such a time are simply impossible. They're leaving now, having stayed just long enough to realize how much harm has been done due to all the things they didn't know when they first airdropped in.<br /><br />But in many ways this tragic story is told almost incidentally. The way the book is written is so personal, evocative and powerful that it really stands as unique literary achievement in its own right. The lives of the Afghans are portrayed in moving and inevitably humanizing detail, and it offers a picture of the war and Afghan society which is usually wholly absent from ordinary news reporting. At times the book contains an absolutely heart-stopping intensity; it was a page turner which I was not able to put down. As such, I really recommend this book unreservedly to anyone - its one of the most memorable non-fiction books I've come across in recent memory, and can be appreciated by all whether they are interested in Afghanistan or just the human condition itself. Was so deeply impressed that I can guarantee I'll be reading everything Gopal (a gifted, and seemingly pretty young journalist) writes from this point onwards.

Finally we have a journalistic nonfiction big and detailed enough to show the humanity behind the war in Afghanistan. I knew it could be done, had been done in fact, beginning with Rory Stewart’s chronicle of his walk though Afghanistan in 2002 just as the Taliban government fell. That book, <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/95643.The_Places_in_Between" title="The Places in Between by Rory Stewart" rel="noopener">The Places in Between</a>, stands as the clearest, most in-depth view of the people and places with whom America has been involved for a decade. This book by Anand Gopal goes in that class. I am eternally grateful to both men for finally exposing for us the beating heart of Afghanistan. <br /><br />Gopal’s exceptional journalism didn’t take hold of me at first. At first I was cringing at what I know to be true: that our military, acting on orders from above, landed in Afghanistan like creatures from outer space. They were good people, all, but their mission was undoable. They had <i>no idea</i> what was going on, who to trust, and how best to fulfil their mission, i.e., to kill or capture Osama bin Laden. The people shifted. The mission shifted. Our soldiers struggled, and we got reports of raids gone wrong. No wonder. Gopal tells us now how any American mission could never have worked in an Afghanistan as torn and bloodied as it was in 2001. <br /><br />This is the absolutely indispensable companion book to other books recounting American involvement in Afghanistan. The confusion on the ground was experienced by <i>everyone</i>, not just soldiers: no one knew whom to trust, who to follow, who to support. If you ever wondered <i>who</i>, in fact, is in Guantanamo, you have to read Gopal’s chapter “Black Holes.” By the time you have finished this chapter, you must see the absurdity and madness in the fog of war. “You survived one way and one way only: through the ruthless exploitation of everyone around you.” Men under fire act just like men after all.<blockquote>"Dr. Hafizullah, Zurmat’s first governor, had ended up in Guantanamo because he’d crossed Police Chief Mujahed. Mujahed would up in Guantanamo because he’d crossed the Americans. Security chief Naim found himself in Guantanamo because of an old rivalry with Mullah Qassim. Qassim eluded capture, but an unfortunate soul with the same name ended up in Guantanamo in his place. And a subsequent feud left Samoud Khan, another pro-American commander, in Bagram prison, while the boy his men had sexually abused was shipped to Guantanamo. No one in this group had been a member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda."</blockquote><br />The most affecting portrait Gopal shares is that of Heela, the Kabul University-educated wife of a UN worker in a farming village in Uruzgan. Her story illustrates the confusion and prejudice suffered by provincial residents through the period of the first election in 2004. A changing series of governors, and officials, each murdered by the one before left in place one of the most ill-tempered and combative. <blockquote><i>“this whole land is filled with thieves and liars…”--Hajji Zaman.</i> It takes one to know one.</blockquote><br />Gopal gives us in-depth views from a Taliban leader, warlords, militiamen, fathers, husbands, wives, collaborators, militants, prisoners, and tribal leaders. These people we understand. Gopal allows us to see their motivations, their striving, their joys, their defeats. The dangers involved in the reporting is only mentioned in passing, but in a country where seismic shifts in alliances is everyday, it is a gift to have a journalist curious and capable enough to have done this work. <br />

This book gives us an extraordinary inside view of the life of Afghanis - from the time of the Russian occupation, the Taliban takeover in the 1990s, and more so of the American occupation that began in late 2001.<br /><br />This can make for rather grim reading. Afghanistan has been brutalized by both outside forces, internal warlords and religious fanatics for decades. As one book I read on Afghanistan succinctly stated the country is a “shatter zone”.<br /><br />The author gives us the life details of three individuals. One is a warlord who sided with Hamid Karzai and the Americans, another is a Taliban fighter who at the outset of the American invasion hid and fled his country, and the other a woman who had a university education in Kabul and was forced, along with her husband and children, to flee to the rural hinterland when the Taliban moved into Kabul. She then wore a burqa and seldom left the confines of her home – there was no electricity and very little access to the outside world. I found her life with its many restrictions more than maddening and upsetting. The degree of gender segregation and repression is appalling. One can hardly imagine what the majority of women, most of whom are uneducated, experience. Most women (and men) have very little education and are illiterate. The country is unimaginably poor with little in the way of infrastructure.<br /><br />Page 108 my book<br /><br /><i>Kandahar airfield became one of the world’s busiest airports, [it] it would grow into a key hub in Washington’s global war on terror, housing top secret black-ops, command rooms and large wire-mesh cages for these suspects.</i><br /><br />The author explicitly recounts to us, with many examples, what went wrong with the U.S. and NATO occupation.<br /><br />Page 109<br /><br /><i>They [Afghan warlords in good favour with American forces] would create enemies where there were none, exploiting the perverse incentive mechanism that the Americans – without even realizing it – had put in place; [a] warlords enemies became America’s enemies, his battles its battles. His personal feuds and jealousies were repackaged as “counterterrorism”, his business interests as Washington’s.</i><br /><br />In other words, by and large, the Americans were duped into fighting the wars of Afghanistan’s many competing adversaries.<br /><br />Page 110<br /><br /><i>“He’d give us intel” explained [a special forces soldier] “and then we’d let him do whatever he wanted.”</i><br /><br />With the huge influx of American aid and dollars this just created a vast mafia state replete with guns, drugs, high tech weapons – and religious indoctrination. With warlords and tribal affiliations competing for money and eliminating rival members in various villages it is no wonder that many Afghans came to loath and hate their occupiers. Corruption was rampant.<br /><br />Page 221 Melek Hazrat some of whose family members and fellow villagers were killed by American special forces<br /><br /><i>“When you go back to America, give Obama a massage. You say you’ll give us roads and schools? I don’t give a shit about your roads and schools! I want safety for my family.”</i><br /><br />All this led to a Taliban revival – with even more savagery.<br /><br />There are two issues that disturbed me about the writing of this book. It is eloquently written – but I felt the author took liberties with events where he was not present – with reproduced conversations, descriptions of landscapes and villages from months or years prior. I felt he ventured too much into story-telling. I am not saying what he is recounting is false – but I found myself asking, while reading, how would he have known that?<br /><br />The second aspect that irritated me was his short analysis of the mujahedeen war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. He recounts this as if the CIA and the U.S. were the sole support of the Afghanis fighting the Soviet occupation. This is false. Funds and weapons from America were funnelled into Afghanistan by Pakistan’s ISI (the equivalent of the CIA). The ISI has been active in Afghanistan since the onset of the Soviet invasion. Not mentioned by the author are the huge monetary donations (matching those of the United States) of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. They also sent men and weapons to help the Afghan mujahedeen. Saudi Arabia also funded madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan teaching a fundamentalist view of Islam. It is sheer nonsense, when the author says that the CIA was involved in this. The Saudi’s were happy to export their thousands of fundamentalists to Afghanistan to fight jihad.<br /><br />Nevertheless, I felt this book gave a profound examination of what occurred to the Afghan people during this long occupation. This is not written from a U.S. perspective; it is a micro-view inside a tragic war-torn country.

The title is borrowed from an Afghan proverb: “There are no good men among the living and no bad men among the dead.”<br /><br />Journalist Anand Gopal spent several years, navigating the ruins of a war-torn Afghanistan, in search of answers that remained elusive to his touch. Instead, he faced even greater questions and dilemmas, which transformed his preconceived notions of war and blurred the line between good and bad.<br /><br />Gopal primarily attempted to study the war through the lives of three people: a vicious, widely-feared Taliban commander, Mullah Cable; a powerful local leader of the US-backed Afghan government, Jan Muhammad Khan; and a housewife, Heela Achekzai.<br /><br />Mullah Cable, who knows little about Middle Eastern politics or theology – to the surprise of the author, was the leader of a fierce Taliban unit. During his raids, he carried a whip or a cable, the evidence of which was imprinted on the backs of his many victims, earning him the ominous name of Mullah Cable. Beneath the mask of his brutality, however, lie family tragedies inflicted on him, from a young boy, by the Afghan Northern Alliance rebels, following the 1992 outbreak of civil war.<br /><br />Jan Muhammad Khan, who previously governed Uruzgan province in Southern Afghanistan and was a dear friend of Hamid Karzai, rotted away in prison, awaiting his execution during the Taliban rule. The torture and the humiliation, which was regularly visited upon him during those days, would later shape his actions in a newly-Taliban-free country and instill in him an unquenchable thirst for revenge.<br /><br />Heela Achekzai, one of the few educated women from Kabul, goes through tremendous shifts in her daily life over the course of only a few years, paralleling the instability of her own country as well as the resilience of her people.<br /><br />This exquisite journalistic piece tries to meaningfully explore the question of how the US invasion of Afghanistan was destined to fail from the very beginning and the stage was set for Taliban to resurface after a quick, near-total collapse. <br /><br />In a land where no one ever truly acquired the taste of nationhood, where more than forty ethnicities are divided in different political blocs, where mountains hide devastating secrets and foreign troops make for regular, unwanted guests, and where nearly every adult man and woman carry a scar of his own, the fates of Mullah Cable, Jan Muhammad and Heela are unfortunately intertwined, and the war is the only certainty they can afford to hold on to.

If you treat your friends like you treat your enemies, your friends will become your enemies.<br /><br />This is a lesson that the US has had to learn at great cost several times over. <br /><br />This is one of several points made in Gopal’s book that chronicles the struggles of a Taliban Commander, a pro US “warlord”, and a housewife in wartime Afghanistan. Gopal portrays the day to day savagery and chaos that existed during the civil war years of the 1990’s, as well as after the US invasion. The tales are tragic, but not without hope.<br /><br />Gopal focuses largely on events in Urozgan province. According to Gopal; in the aftermath of the invasion, the US had a vast selection of allies to choose from including members of the former regime. However, once US forces settled on certain strongmen, they repeatedly fell for false intelligence that painted pro-US Afghans as Al Qaeda or Taliban, resulting in their detention or deaths at the hands of US forces. In one case, US special operations forces struck two rival (yet pro-US) groups of officials on a single night. Some Afghans were being held in Guantanamo Bay, in part, for their ties to pro-US groups and warlords such as Ismail Khan and Ahmed Shah Massoud (who was killed by Al-Qaeda just before 9/11). The survivors of these attacks could either risk further attacks (lying low was not an option) or flee.<br /><br />Caught between a predatory national government on one hand, and US forces that seemed strike at their own supporters on the other, with no access to government or NGO resources (which are filtered through the strongmen), many Afghans either joined the Taliban or simply played both sides in order survive.<br /><br />Gopal’s work is an excellent example of why is so important for us to intimately understand the people we engage with, including our adversaries.

Time to read some real stuff.<br /><br /><i> <blockquote>This is a book about categories that people create and then come to believe in—with a force of conviction so strong that sometimes it becomes literally a matter of life and death. </blockquote> </i>

My final project in film school was a feature film screenplay. We started it at the beginning of our first term, and worked on it until the end of our studies. Mine was called "Kabul" - a 130 page epic Drama about two young Afghan boys growing up in Kabul, Afghanistan. One becomes a Taliban fighter, and the other joins the Afghan Army, and they meet up later in life to try and reconcile their situations. <br /><br />A feeling bubbled up from my gut as I read Anand Gopal's great book, "No Good Men Among the Living". Something akin to shame or embarrassment, as I thought back to that script, and how inauthentic it was (I had to google what language people spoke in Afghanistan before starting).<br /><br />But it was authentic, in a way. Authentic in the sense that if you were writing a movie about Eskimo's, you might have an Igloo or two. But it wasn't authentic in the ways that mattered. My characters didn't talk about the history of their country, or take on nuanced opinions or thoughts, because I didn't have that history or know those thoughts. Gopal's book now provides them. <br /><br />For instance, Gopal recounts the story of a Helmand Province man who went to the only Movie Theater in town to see a Hindi romance movie so many times he memorized it. When the Mujahadeen shut down the theater in 1992, effectively banning movies forever, he would recount the movie to anyone who would listen. Now that's a story. One can just picture some young whippersnappers walking past an old man, thinking he's completely crazy telling them about how they used to show a Bollywood romance movie in what is now a bombed out building.<br /><br />Or how about when an Afghan woman risked death to organize a sewing class, which was forbidden under Taliban rule? The imagery that Gopal creates is something from a Hollywood movie, with sewing machines stashed away in corners from prying eyes like a weapons cache. Let's see Clint Eastwood make that movie. <br /><br />Those little stories create a bigger picture of this conflict - a picture I had been missing when I was writing my movie. Gopal's strategy to look at this conflict from both sides and understand the real motives that are at play is one that has been missing from the literature of this conflict.<br /><br />And there are a lot of motives to consider. The Russian's decade long occupation of Afghanistan was a significant turning point for Afghan life. After the United States and Russia withdrew their troops in 1989, and funding in 1992, the Mujahadeen filled the leadership vacuum that was left, and instituted some extremely harsh laws and policy's. The Taliban rose to combat the Mujahadeen sometime in 1996, and eventually instituted their own draconian laws that created it's own problem. <br /><br />Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr was injured three times in the Civil War, including a very serious gunshot wound to the chest during the battle of Ball's Bluff in Virginia. His father, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., had published articles in support of the Union cause, but his son's injuries had made him reconsider not just his beliefs about the war, but his belief about beliefs. <br /><br />"Certitude leads to Violence" was the lesson Holmes Sr. took from the Civil War, as he realized both the Union and Confederacy both thought they had god on their side, and were certain their cause was the right one. We know how history unfolded, but the consequences were so devastating that for Holmes - it was hard to say it was worth it. <br /><br />This must be how both sides felt, I thought, as I read this wonderful book. We have been engaged in a battle of certitudes. We are certain their way of life is evil, and they are certain about ours. But with so much lost on both sides, it's hard call anything a victory anymore. <br />

For the last dozen years or more U.S. consumers of the news have been force fed the American version, or “our side” of what has been happening in Afghanistan since the first American troops landed there at the end of 2001. Now, with Anand Gopal’s book, NO GOOD MEN AMONG THE LIVING, we are given a look at this long so-called ‘war against terror’ through Afghan eyes. Gopal, a respected American journalist who has also done stories from Egypt, Syria and other mid-East hot spots, made several trips into Afghanistan over the past five years, conducting numerous interviews with various warlords, tribal chieftains, Taliban leaders, and ordinary citizens, all in an attempt to understand - what? Well, I suppose trying to figure out what in the hell was going on in this country torn apart by wars for over thirty years now - ten years of occupation and war with the Soviet military, then a bloody civil war, followed by a harsh Taliban rule, and now, the American war against the Taliban and the elusive Al Quaeda.<br /> <br />Gopal has obviously done his homework, researching these wars in depth, but more than that, he has spent hundreds of hours on the ground in Afghanistan just talking with the people there, including three in particular, a warlord, a Taliban commander, and a woman, Heela, widowed by the war and left to fend for herself and her children in a region where women have no rights or standing. <br /> <br />Perhaps the most shocking revelation comes early on in the book, when we learn that this whole war might not have happened at all if the U.S. had simply accepted Afghanistan’s offer to bring Osama bin Laden to justice themselves. But no, the U.S. demanded his extradition for a U.S. trial and there was no middle ground. And then, Gopal, tells us, the Taliban leaders all attempted to surrender within the first few months of the American invasion, but that didn’t work either, so most of them simply disappeared back into their home regions or decamped across the border into Pakistan. And so the U.S. forces were left without a visible enemy.<br /> <br />“How do you fight a war without an adversary? Enter Gul Agha Sherzai - and men like him around the country. Eager to survive and prosper, he and his commanders followed the logic of the American presence to its obvious conclusion. They would create enemies where there were none ... Sherzai’s enemies became America’s enemies, his battles its battles. His personal feuds and jealousies were repackaged as ‘counterterrorism,’ his business interests as Washington’s.”<br /> <br />And in the power vacuum that had formed after years of war, the feuds and jealousies between tribal leaders, warlords and would-be government leaders and politicians were not in short supply. George W. Bush might have offhandedly explained that we were ‘spreadin’ freedom, spreadin’ democracy’ in Afghanistan, but in fact we were the interlopers in an ancient and savage feudal society where revenge is a fact of life - a place where backstabbing, betrayals and sometimes outright bloody butchery had become common. Mullah Manan, a Taliban commander, gave Gopal this matter-of-fact, grisly account of a beheading, a reprisal against an Afghan who had collaborated with the U.S.-backed Karzai government -<br /> <br />“... and when he struggled, two of the men placed their weight on his arms and body and tied his hands behind his back. He began to scream, a deep madman’s scream, and the Talibs looked on and waited. One of them lowered a butcher’s knife onto Sidiqullah’s neck as if measuring , and began to cut. It surprised Manan how long it took, how much work it was, to decapitate a man. Afterward, when they tossed the head aside, it looked to him like a deflated balloon.”<br /> <br />The Mullah, in answer to Gopal’s question of how often this happened, “answered in his shy and quiet voice: ‘We were doing this two, maybe three times a month.’ ”<br /> <br />But perhaps just as shocking as this casual butchery on the Afghan side is the way U.S. forces were so easily duped into targeting, killing and arresting innocent Afghans fingered by their personal enemies as terrorists or Taliban. And even then our troops often arrested the wrong man. These prisoners were then remanded to remote Field Detention Sites, and from these to the prisons in Bagram or Kandahar, or even shipped off to Guantanamo. And in all of these places they were often starved, beaten and tortured. These accounts often came from prisoners who had been subsequently released, sometimes after months or even years of incarceration. Many of these wrongfully accused and imprisoned came back hating the Americans, ripe for recruitment in the newly revived Taliban movement. Gopal recorded too many horror stories of alleged innocents, sometimes whole families shot and killed in raids by U.S. forces, based on so-called ‘intelligence from reliable sources.’ U.S. officials would initially call the dead “mostly militants,” and then much later cautiously say things like “there was some potential that some of those killed were civilians.” And then compensation would be quietly paid - two thousand dollars to each of the victims’ families. One such grieving and angry family member told Gopal -<br /> <br />“When you go back to America, give Obama a message. You say you’ll give us roads and schools? I don’t give a sh** about your roads and schools! I want safety for my family.<br /> <br />I have no doubt that Gopal’s book will be controversial for many reasons, not the least of which will be the negative image painted of U.S. involvement there for the past twelve years. But the thought that kept bothering me most as I read these accounts was how could I trust the veracity of these stories offered by Afghans, many of whom have proved themselves to be masters of deceit and betrayal, often causing their fellow countrymen to suffer and even die. The one saving grace here in the Americans’ favor is the way they helped the war-widowed Heela to escape her hopeless circumstances, save her children, and build a new life. But otherwise, I am afraid that Gopal’s book will fall victim to an endless “they said, we said” vein of discussion. Do we believe the official U.S. version of how this war has been waged, or do we believe these many first-hand accounts from Afghans? While I believe that Gopal did everything he could to cross-check his stories, I still wonder. And I suspect I will not be the only one. <br /> <br />Yes, NO GOOD MEN AMONG THE LIVING will be controversial, but these are stories that needed to be told. Heartbreaking, disturbing stories. I applaud Gopal for gathering them and giving them a public forum in this well-written and compelling narrative. It is perhaps one of the most comprehensive look at the modern-day Afghan wars since Edward Girardet’s excellent KILLING THE CRANES. There is much to think about here. Highly recommended.

I think there are better reviews of the book available on goodreads which come from a better understanding of the war but this is review from someone who doesn't know alot but is interested in making sense of stuff and getting to the truth. <br />When the American Troops were withdrawing from Afghanistan and Taliban were capturing at such a fast pace, seeing the amount of doctored news, whitewashing of war on terror, call for women's right drenched in white-saviourism and biased and selective reporting on Afghanistan, got me really interested in understanding what was really happening and what was really happening and what did the common Afghan people really want. To my surprise they weren't many narratives by Afghan people (the only other one I found that might be unbiased and honest was Raising My Voice by Malalai Joya, another on my list) and those by Western journalists where either drenched in white-saviourism or blaming Islam with the typical stereotypes of titles like "lifting the veil" and such. I happen to came across this title on twitter tweeted by a few Afghan Journalists and decided to give it a try.<br /><br />Wikipedia Intro of the author: Anand Gopal is notable for his reporting in Afghanistan and the Middle East. He is believed to be one of the few Western journalists to have embedded with the Taliban. His book was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, the 2014 National Book Award and the 2015 Helen Bernstein Award. It was awarded the 2015 Ridenhour Prize for demonstrating "why the United States' emphasis on counterterrorism at the expense of nation-building and reconciliation inadvertently led to the Taliban's resurgence after 2001.<br /><br />The title is an Pashtoon expression, "There are no good men among the living, and no bad ones among the dead" which basically means there are no heros and villians. The author, Anand Gopal, briefly tells the story of Afghanistan from the Communist Government, the Soviet Occupation, the Mujahideen Movement, Soviet Withdrawal to The Civil War, The Rise of Taliban, the 2001 American Invasion and the days of the War On Teror as it was seen through Afghan eyes. There are many stories of Afghans in and out throughout the book but it mostly centers around three Afghans; Mullah Cable (a Talib or US's enemy), Jan Muhammad (former Mujaahid and US led miltiaman), and Heela Achekzai (a civilian woman). <br />After the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by American Forces, most Al-Qaeda members fled to tribal regions of Pakistan and Iran, and most Taliban, except for a little few, also surrendered their weapons, retiring to their homes, shifted their loyalties and pledged allegiance to the new government some even encouraging other members to do the same. So the Taliban movement had basically died. American Forces with a mandate to fight terrorism and virtually no enemies, created alliances with local Warlords like Jan Muhammed, a former Mujaahid and a friend of Hamid Karzai, who used this US allyship to their advantage, furthering their interests, settled personal disputes and seeking power and hold falsely accused their enemies, former Taliban and sometimes innocent civilians and even people who were Anti-Taliban, Pro-Government and allied with the US as Taliban. American forces targetted these people conducting Raids, detained them under Counter-terrorism and subjected them to torture, sent them to Guantanamo Bay, Bagram or killed them. American Forces, even when they were aware about these things turned a blind eye, sometimes even awarding the soldiers and army staff involved with medals with next to zero compensation to those who lost their family members. All of this eventually led to Taliban Resurgency after the movement had previously died.<br />Mullah Cable, a talib who joined (Hizb e Islami), the Taliban movement initially during the civil war seeking protection when some of his close families members got killed during the civil war, left the moment and escaped to Pakistan after the 2001 invasion started to live a civilian life but ended up rejoining it after his struggles with making ends meet and his brush up with the corrupt warlords.<br />Heela Achekzai, a teacher, forced to give up her urban lifestyle during the civil war moves to the rural countryside to be a housewife, trains to be a nurse/midwife under Taliban and runs a secretive vocational centure for women under the Warlords allied by American Forces, and later gets widowed when the warlords kill her husband. She eventually ends being a senator in the city of Khas Uruzgun.<br /><br />The narrative in the book is non-linear and attempts to humanize the war and different categories of people involved in the war. I think the book did a really good job bringing the Afghan perspective to the table!

The one book you need to read to understand why the NATO mission in Afghanistan was doomed and why years more of US military presence in the country would not have made a difference. By 2002, the Taliban movement was pretty much dead, but through its intransigent policies and foolish alliances the US effectively helped resurrect the movement.