Books

The Best Books I Read in 2013

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This year was a big one. 79 books in total, and still a few days to go. I only have one Afghanistan-related pick this year, and that's Vanessa M. Gezari's The Tender Soldier. Gezari's tale of incompetence, misunderstanding and tragedy packs a punch. Some of the middle sections of the book -- profiling those involved higher up in the Human Terrain Teams' management -- could probably have been ditched. Speed through them, though, and you have a story whose complexity and strangeness has the eerie ring of reality. Definetely the best book I've read on Afghanistan in recent years.

The rest of my favourites are a bit all over the place:

Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch needs no selling by me, but it's a real return to true form. As always with Tartt, be careful when you start as it is incredibly gripping and you'll be neglecting work, friends and family in order to keep reading. Also, be careful: this one's a bit of an emotional kick-in-the-guts.

Jon Moallem wrote Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America as a way of reconnecting with the natural world while his daughter grew up, and it was one of the most unexpectedly enjoyable books I read this year. Stories about conservation, humans and how we interact with all the other species on the planet. The book is broadly structured in three parts, covering polar bears, butterflies (Lange's Metalmark) and the whooping crane. Mooallem looks at the ways in which people are involved in efforts to save these three species, often ending up telling us more about humans than the animals that are nominally his subject. He tells a hopeful tale, for the most part, and although his slightly saccharine ending wasn't really to my taste, it probably is correctly pitched for an American audience. We don't understand the effects of our actions in the world, or when we think we do, we don't anticipate second and third-order consequences. It's not a new idea, but it was memorably told in this well-written book.

Lion Kimbro's How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think (available for free here) isn't new, and it definitely wins the strangest-book-of-2013 prize. Kimbro decides he wants to map out his thoughts 24-7 for a few months and the book is a description of the process he used to map it all out. It's written in a stream-of-consciousness style, and there's an awful lot about pens and paper and binders and organisational systems and information hygiene (for want of a better term). There's a lot worth taking away from the experiment, though, and if you can make it through the book you'll have learnt a few tricks on the way.

I LOVED Matt Potter's Outlaws Inc., the first book I've read where a piece of technology (in this case the IL-76 cargo plane) is a lead character, but WHAT a story. Potter takes you through the world of air cargo transport and the post-Soviet airmen who fly the planes. It's perhaps a bit long, but that's probably me being unfair. I was up all night reading this book. Definitely recommend it for shining a light on something I hadn't really thought about but that is very much a part of trade and international aid.

Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language wasn't an easy read, but it's the smartest (and easy-to-understand) book on linguistics I've read. It offers an overview of how languages work, and how they change over time (fragmenting and joining together in a myriad of strange ways). I'm looking forward to reading Deutscher's other book in 2014.

I've been a big fan of Marie (aka puredoxyk) for about a year now. I did a 2-month experiment switching to a polyphasic sleep cycle earlier this year -- that's 2-4 hours of sleep only per day, depending on various things -- and I couldn't have done it without her book Ubersleep: Nap-Based Sleep Schedules and the Polyphasic Lifestyle. (She's also very nice/helpful online). This book offers clear, useful advice on shifting to a polyphasic sleep cycle. If you're interested in sleep modification (and being able to sleep only 2 or 4 hours per day without medium-long-term issues), give this book a read. If nothing else, it'll expand your sense of what is possible, and that's always a good thing.

Finally, two health-related books. The past couple of years have been filled with various health issues (some mine, and some of others close to me) and I read more about health, fitness and diet than usual. Anti-Cancer by David Servan-Schreiber was one of the more helpful books on cancer that I read. It could probably use a bit of updating, but it is clear, offers evidence with references to follow up with further reading, along with useful lists of the basic ingredients of the so-called 'anti-cancer' diet. Was also glad to see that emphasis is placed on the mind-body connection. Could easily have been left out with all the focus on diet and nutrition. Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn has a bit of a hippy title, but it's full of really important and powerful techniques. I'd strongly recommend it to anyone with ongoing chronic pain/illness issues.

Those were the best. Drop your book recommendations for 2014 in the comments below. I'm going to try for 100...

Book of the Week: 'Al-Shabab in Somalia'

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shabab An excellent overview of the history of the Somali al-Shabab group, one with many lessons or reminders of Afghanistan (at least for this reader).

This is a short book, based on some reports written for FFI and others, and in that it has the virtue of concision. Hansen covers al-Shabab's history starting with early proto-Islamist movements and groups started several decades ago. It was the best explanation of where the networks that make up al-Shabab come from that I've read, although it may just be that I haven't been following this too closely since the last time I was last in Mogadishu a couple of years ago.

It was packed with stories and trends that reminded me of Afghanistan, both in the way the international actors chose to respond and intervene, and also in the development of al-Shabab itself. For this reason I'd strongly recommend this book to those working in and on Afghanistan. You'll find a rich vein of material that you can bring back to enrich your understanding of the Taliban and/or the past decade or three. (Needless to say, I'm the last person to suggest that everything is the same in every country, and that there aren't hundreds of reasons why comparisons aren't useful in a this-happened-in-somalia-so-it-must-be-the-same-in-afghanistan.)

There are lots of names and places mentioned, and if you're not familiar with at least the bare outlines of the plot so far as well as some of the key players, you might find it confusing. I wish there was some sort of reference in the back to allow you to keep track of all the different people mentioned.

As always, I wasn't really sure I got a sense of the leaders of al-Shabab (or their fighters) as people in this book, but maybe that's one step too far and one in which it's harder to offer anything that isn't highly subjective or just unrepresentative. Perhaps we can look forward to a book of al-Shabab's songs and poems from Hurst in the future?

Overall, though, an impressive collation of information. Hansen has done us all a service in spending time in Somalia doing fieldwork and in taking the time to put this book together.

Buy it here.

Some Things I Read

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bookshelf I read 43 books this year. 44, if you count the book I'm about to finish. For some reason, 2012 doesn't feel like it was a particularly great year in terms of the books and longform articles that were published.

Jeevan Deol and Zaheer Kazmi edited a fantastic collection of essays entitled Contextualising Jihadi Thought. Anyone interested in that kind of thing should read it.

For a fun read about the Taliban pre-2001, check out Mohammad Kabir Mohabbat and L.R. McInnis' Delivering Osama. As you can tell from the title, it covers some of the Taliban's internal policy over bin Laden before the September 11 attacks. This is something I have written about together with Felix Kuehn, but this manuscript wasn't published when we wrote our book. If you're the kind of person who enjoys downloading old archive documents relating to Afghanistan till the wee hours of the morning, give this book a read.

I loved this profile of a complex character from Pakistan's Sindh by Saba Imtiaz. Go read it now if you haven't done so already.

Finally, I wrote about this one two years ago, but I have to mention it again since I've been revisiting its arguments for a new research project I'm working on: Noah Feldman's Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. It remains one of the most lucidly-written books I've read on the aspirational statebuilding of Islamists and what happens when they start thinking about constitutional law.

Drop me your book recommendations in the comments below and I'll see if I can get through 52 books in 2013...

UPDATE: I've now finished book #44 and think I'll get to #45 before the year is over...

Catching Up: Poetry of the Taliban

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Poetry of the Taliban - Cover The second book that came out this year -- I co-edited it together with Felix Kuehn -- was Poetry of the Taliban. Some people weren't entirely happy with that idea, but on the whole the reviews were pretty positive, both about the collection and about the idea of publishing these translated songs.

The very existence of these cultural artefacts provoked a discussion -- ultimately one of the things we had hoped would happen -- and if you browse through the list of responses you can get a sense of the diversity of that debate.

If you haven't managed to get hold of a copy, it should be available in most good bookshops (or on online retailers).

(Hint: this would make an excellent Christmas stocking filler.)

Catching Up: An Enemy We Created

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aewc cover It's been a while now that An Enemy We Created has been out now. You can get it from all decent bookshops, as well as on kindle (finally), both in the UK and in the USA.

The reviews that have come in have been almost entirely positive. You can read clippings and mentions and browse through the full list over here.

I was invited to talk at the University of Oklahoma (Norman, Oklahoma) and at Creighton University (Omaha, Nebraska) where An Enemy We Created is being assigned as required reading for some courses. The students had many (many) questions and it was great to be able to interact with an audience that had read the book.

If you haven't had a chance, perhaps take a look next time you're in a bookshop. It's about a lot more than just the Taliban-Al-Qaeda relationship. You can read some excerpts from the reviews over here.

Vietnam's Kill-Capture Raids

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Have been dipping into Mark Moyar’s Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam in recent days. I find the Afghanistan-Vietnam comparison a bit of a non-starter (for various reasons) but the extensive use of targetted operations perhaps akin to the capture-and-kill raids being employed across Afghanistan mean it’s at least worth exploring. (One recent article for the Foreign Policy Research Institute makes that explicit connection).

What follows is an extended sequence of quotations taken from that book; I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions. Bracketed numbers after quotations are page references:

“The [insurgent] shadow government, it is certain, expanded greatly from 1960 to 1965, then shrank somewhat from 1965 to 1967. The most reasonable estimate of political cadre strength in 1967 probably came from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which concluded that it lay somewhere between 80,000 and 150,000.” (11)

 

“The CIA will not release its own statistics, but the statements of certain CIA officers strongly suggest that the CIA actually understated the numbers of VC/VCI captured or killed in the documents made available to other U.S. government organizations and to the public. The CIA did so, in all probability, to avoid negative publicity. The figures in these documents, especially the 1971 figures, have a high ratio of captured to killed. Some have stated that the PRUs consistently killed more Communists than they captured. Enders spoke of his years as regional PRU adviser in both I Corps and III Corps: “It was very hard for us to bring the number of captures above the number of kills — we tried hard to do that — because it was difficult to capture people. I’d say that the ratio of killed to captured generally was about two to one.” Jack Harrell stated, “In II Corps and III Corps, when I was in those areas, the ratio for the PRUs was probably two Communists killed to one captured. In the documents, the CIA did not wildly exaggerate the numbers of VC/VCI captured; doing so might have attracted unwanted attention. The number killed, therefore, must have been much higher than the documents state.

A number of CIA advisers have indicated explicitly that they thought the PRUs generally captured or killed more VC/VCI per month than the available documents list. [...] PRU National Director William Redel, for instance, told CIA officer Orrin DeForest at the end of 1968 that the PRUs had been responsible “for approximately seven thousand Vietcong killed per year for the past four or five years,” which averages out to 583 per month. Rear Adm. Irve LeMoyne gave a figure that suggests even larger nationwide neutralization totals: “We were capturing, in the delta, a thousand to twelve hundred VCI monthly.”

My best estimate, based on my own conversations with many PRU advisers and on other sources, is that the CIA leadership believed that the PRUs capptured or killed anywhere from 700 to 1,500 Communists during most months from 1967 to 1972.” (172-3)

 

There then follows two chapters which provide evidence for the “statistical falsification” which “inadvertently allowed the Allies to use seemingly impressive statistics to make misleading claims of success” (235). See chapters 16 and 17 to read those in full. Chapter 18 shows how “the Allies captured many VCI and reported them as neutralized but then released them from captivity after a short period of time. Some rejoined the shadow government, but the Allies had no way of knowing exactly how many.” (236) See Gareth Porter’s story for an Afghanistan parallel.

There’s a little bit on what I guess would be the equivalent of Afghanistan’s reintegration programme.

"The GVN’s Third Party Inducement program proved much more detrimental to statistical accuracy than these other factors. Under the terms of this program, which lasted from 1967 to 1969, the GVN offered rewards to anyone who induced a Communist to rally. The program caused the number of ralliers to mushroom. Some South Vietnamese convinced friends or relatives in the VC to rally, but others presented non-Communist friends or relatives as VC or VCI ralliers. A fraudulent rallier typically received part of the reward from the third party. GVN officials often took their cuts, as well, in return for tolerating the deceit and even encouraged people to rally fraudulently so as to increase the flow of American money into their pockets. In some places, the Americans estimated that as many as half of the people who rallied through this program did not belong to the VC. Some Communists and non-Communists also rallied in more than one province in order to collect multiple rewards, thus inflating the statistics even further. Brig. Gen. James Herbert commented: “The Vietnamese are very flexible, and they know how to beat the system. If you had a reward for becoming a Hoi Chanh [rallier], some VC would rally and collect the reward. After a period of time, they’d be fed back into the society. They might wander somewhere else and give up there. They’d give a different alias each time, and communication among the various provinces was not very good, so they could do it easily. I think a VC could almost make a living giving himself up across the country.” Considerable disagreement among the Americans over the VCI rallier numbers provides further evidence that the statistics were far from precise. A Rand Corporation study gives figures for VCI ralliers that differ sharply from those of Phoenix.” (238-9)

 

And something on the classification of those being killed or captured:

“Not only did the Allies report many non-VCI as VCI, they also assigned false ranks to many of the VCI whom they did neutralize. The South Vietnamese often assigned high ranks to corpses and, to a lesser extent, to prisoners and ralliers, who actually were low-ranking Communists or not Communists at all. In so doing, of course, they wanted to make their reports look better. Jack Harrell commented, “I would say that in many cases, few of the people we captured or killed were as important or as highly placed in the VCI as they were classified.”” (241)

 

I'm looking forward to reading some statistical studies of these kinds of operations as found in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years. There are various people formerly serving in the military in both countries who are writing up their experiences as Masters or PhD theses. Please leave a comment below if you know of any related research in the works.

'The Kill Team'

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I've been thinking about the so-called 'Kill Team' over the past few days, prompted by a disturbing article in Rolling Stone magazine. I'll try to write something later this week, but for the moment, I'd strongly recommend two books (both out of print, I think, so use bookfinder.com to locate a copy) to help put it all in some sort of context. They're both oral history sources for the experiences of Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan (and one also offers the additional comparison point of US soldiers in Vietnam). At any rate, give these two books a read:

I've just finished another round of edits of An Enemy We Created, so have a bit more time to take my head out of the sand and blog here and at Current Intelligence over the next few days hopefully.

Real People as Agents

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I was reading in the first volume of Taruskin's history of music -- all right, procrastinating from overdue PhD chapters -- and came across this useful and timely reminder:

"Statements and actions in response to real or perceived conditions: these are the essential facts of human history. The discourse, so often slighted in the past, is in fact the story. It creates new social and intellectual conditions to which more statements and actions will respond, in an endless chain of agency. The historian needs to be on guard against the tendency, or the temptation, to simplify the story by neglecting this most basic fact of all. No historical event or change can be meaningfully asserted unless its agents can be specified; and agents can only be people. Attributions of agency unmediated by human action are, in effect, lies -- or at the very least, evasions. They occur inadvertently in careless historiography (or historiography that has submitted unawares to a master narrative), and are invoked deliberately in propaganda (i.e., historiography that consciously colludes with a master narrative)." (Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol 1, p.xviii)

It's good to be reminded of this when thinking about most things, but especially when discussing ideology and influence with regard to the war in Afghanistan and the identity of the various groups fighting. People have thoughts; ideas do more than just 'emerge'. I'm just as guilty of this as anyone else, but I think writing on the nature of the Taliban, for example, could become a lot clearer if we stuck to the agency of real people rather than abstractions.

Deedee Derksen picks her 2010 books

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This is a guest-post by Deedee Derksen, a Dutch journalist just out with a good book on Afghanistan that helps deflate many stereotypes commonly believed.  It's only out in Dutch at the moment, but I'll bet an English version will come out before not too long...

I love reading autobiographies and biographies.  A few I’ve read this year convey profound belief, be it in:

a.    creating the best rock band in the world (Keith Richards) b.    establishing the best Islamic Emirate in the world (Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef) c.    writing the best books in the world (Somerset Maugham, Patricia Highsmith) d.    great reporting (Martha Gellhorn, Hugh Pope) e.    himself (Tony Blair)

Keith Richards and Mullah Zaeef share more than their belief. They’re both icons of their time, or at least wingmen to icons. They were both part of a band that made headlines the world over. They both know a thing or two about the dangers of drugs and loose women. And they were both once wanted men – though the hordes of semi-naked girls and English bobbies after Richards probably weren’t quite as menacing as the war on terror justice unleashed on Mullah Zaeef.

Both excellent autobiographies offer rare insights to lives otherwise closed off, and often misrepresented.  Anyone doing anything Afghanistan related should read Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef’s memoir (My Life With The Taliban, ed. Alex Strick van Linschoten, Felix Kuehn), which provides a unique insider’s view on the Taliban movement. Keith Richard’s book (Life, co-author: James Fox) may not be as vital to world peace as Mullah Zaeef’s, but it’s nonetheless a lot of fun to read. For all the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll stories (and there are many), what struck me most was that Richards is, above all, an ambitious, hardworking guy.

Two biographies of writers that appeared in 2009, which I read in 2010 and which are unlikely to be bettered, are The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, by Selina Hastings, and Beautiful Shadow – A life of Patricia Highsmith, by Andrew Wilson.  Somerset Maugham’s short stories are among my favourites (as are those of Alice Munro, mentioned elsewhere on this blog), and this biography gives an account of the tortured, and often quite unpleasant, genius behind them. Like Maugham, Patricia Highsmith was a loner, according to the beautiful biography by Andrew Wilson.  I read her series of Tom Ripley thrillers again after reading about the author. They’re amoral, and gripping from the first page. Terrific.

Martha Gellhorn’s reporting on the Second World War is some of the most interesting. As a woman, she wasn’t permitted to embed with the American troops. So while reporters like Ernie Pyle and Gellhorn’s husband Ernest Hemingway were embedded, and thus subject to official censorship, Gellhorn wrote freely about the horrors in Europe (Gellhorn: a Twentieth-Century Life by Caroline Moorehead).  Now women reporters can go embedded, many consciously choose to work independently, like Minka Nijhuis from the Netherlands in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her beautifully written and very moving book on Burma -- Birma. Land van Geheimen (2009) -- won a well-deserved, and prestigious, Dutch award in 2010.

Many foreign correspondents find it difficult to convey to their editors images or impressions that contradict stereotypes at home. This is especially so in the Muslim world, as Hugh Pope explains in Dining with al-Qaeda.  Pope, after thirty (!) years reporting across the Middle East, has some tremendous stories to tell – and he does so with much empathy and wit.  A great read. I also liked People Like Us by the Dutch former-correspondent Joris Luyendijk, a Dutch book on Middle East reporting which was published in 2006 but translated into English in 2009. Luyendijk rightly shatters any lingering belief in objective coverage of the Middle East.

I haven’t yet started Tony Blair’s eulogy to himself. Judging from the bits I’ve read here and there, I don’t have high expectations. Not only does it beg for a good edit (I assume he made the fatal mistake of writing it himself as it reads like a column in Good Housekeeping). But Blair’s take on civil liberties would make Dostum blush (read Dave Eggers's wonderful Zeitoun, also out this year, for the sharpest antidote to Blair’s call for the suspension of Habeas Corpus). Perhaps just as offensively, Blair expresses no remorse over Iraq, and lumps all Islamists together, conflating Hamas and Hizbollah with al-Qaeda, and portraying them as an existential threat, the gravest ever faced by mankind, perhaps with the exception of Gordon Brown. And all this from one of most successful politicians of our times and the man currently entrusted to bringing peace to the Middle East. Now that’s a great piece of fiction.

The Best Books of 2010 (UPDATED)

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It's the end of the year again -- so fast! -- and I thought it'd be worth taking a moment to reflect on what I'd read over the past year. I also managed to rope in a few friends in to provide their own roundups for the sake of variety. I allowed myself to include long-form journalism as well as books, since this year saw two really fantastic examples of that; of course there were many, many more, but the two below really stood out.

For non-fiction, I came to Noah Feldman's Fall and Rise of the Islamic State a few years after it was published, but found it both interesting and lucidly written, as fine an example for how to explore these issues of ideology and political aspiration in Islam as I know. Students and scholars of political Islam take note.

Matt Aikins notes how a new round of Iraq memoirs are being released, and at the top of these (although it's only half-memoir) must be Wendell Steavenson's The Weight of a Mustard Seed. She tells Iraq's story through the voice and life of a relatively senior figure from within Saddam's armed forces, interspersing it with her own efforts to to research that same story. It's beautifully written -- like her previous book on Georgia -- and, along with Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near, is always something I recommend to people on Iraq. David Finkel's The Good Soldiers tells the story of the American military's struggles post-2003, again powerfully written.

From Afghanistan, Elizabeth Rubin's New York Times Magazine profile of President Karzai was simply one of the most compelling and interesting pieces of writing that I've read from the post-2001 period. You must read this if you haven't already. Looking across the border, Jane Mayer wrote an absolutely devastating New Yorker piece on the drone strike campaign in Pakistan. I'm surprised it hasn't received more attention. If you haven't read it, stop what you're doing; print it out and make time.

Reconciliation has been one of the most misused buzzwords of 2010. For a different perspective, look no further than Ed Moloney's Voices from the Grave. This is an edited/commentary-rich oral history of two figures from Northern Ireland, published earlier this year now that both voices have died. It shows the inner machinations going on behind the scenes -- including some amazing accounts of prison dynamics and the hunger strikes -- and every pundit and politician seeking to involve themselves somehow in the debate must read this book as a historical and contextual corrective.

I didn't get the chance to read much fiction this year on account of work, but Shahriar Mandanipour's Censoring an Iranian Love Story (reviewed in the New Yorker here) was definitely the most memorable. Time will tell whether it will last, but my sense is that this was something special.

There were countless numbers of books that I wanted to read but didn't find the time. They will be priorities in 2011:

-- Alice Munro's short-story collection, Too Much Happiness

-- Priya Satia's Spies in Arabia (described to me by Matt Aikins as follows: "It's about the cultural environment of Edwardian-era British secret agents in Arabia – their dissatisfaction with Western modernity, their search for some pre-modern, inscrutable purity in the ‘vast desert’ with its ‘timeless inhabitants’, the intuitionist methodologies they developed in response to a ‘mysterious Orient’ that scientific empiricism could not fathom, their cultivated literary mystique and ambitions, their habits of dressing in Arab garb and living so as to ‘become one with them’ – and the complex relationship this had to the military and political imperatives of empire and war.") Who wouldn't want to read that?

-- Nir Rosen's Aftermath (although I'll have to read his earlier Iraq book first…)

-- Two books on Kashmir: Arif Jamal's Shadow War and Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night.

-- Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, an account of the killings and deaths in central and eastern Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.

-- Mary Kaldor's The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon

-- Michael Lewis's The Big Short, on the financial crisis and how it happened

-- and (although I reckon this'll keep me going into 2012) Richard Taruskin's magisterial Oxford History of Western Music. It's five volumes, but Taruskin is one of the truly great living musicologists and cultural scholars of our day. It's been out for a while but Oxford University Press have recently issued a paperback version selling at just under £60 on Amazon. That's a bargain if ever there was one.

Here are some selections from Matt Aikins, intrepid journalist and the talent behind Harper's profile of General Razziq, The Master of Spin Boldak:

Every year it seems as if there are more good books being published and less time to read any of them. 2010 was no exception. There is a sort of 'second wave' of in-depth reporting coming out of the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts. Joshua E. S. Phillips' chronicle of torture by US soldiers in Iraq, None of Us Were Like This Before, is among the best. It's unflinching in every sense of the word: neither from incendiary portrayals of the depravities US military might inflicted on innocent Iraqis, nor from a nuanced and empathetic understanding of the torturers themselves, in many cases ordinary Americans who found themselves swept up, beyond morality, by forces within and without that they could hardly comprehend.

Finally, two of my favorite reads from 2010 were not actually published in 2010. Jane Mayer's The Dark Side is astonishing not only for its comprehensive indictment of the expansion of executive power under Bush, but for how well-written and engrossing it is. And Out of Afghanistan, Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison's out-of-print account of almost a decade of negotiations leading to the Geneva Accords, (which paved the way from Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan) should truly be a must-read for every Afghanistan expert. It's extremely relevant right now.

And these from Anand Gopal, by far and away the best-connected and most interesting writer on the insurgency in Afghanistan (just see his paper on Kandahar if you need convincing):

In 2010 we finally saw some quality Af-Pak books hit the shelves, three of which are indispensable. Antonio Giustozzi's Decoding the Taliban: Insights From the Field contains selections from some of the most careful and learned observers of the Afghan insurgency; if you don't have time for the whole book, read Tom Coghlan's take on Helmand. Giustozzi's other release this year, Empires of Mud, is a fascinating study of warlordism in Afghanistan, a much-abused term that warranted the close attention. My Life in the Taliban by Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef provides a rare glimpse into the mind of a senior Taliban figure. In particular, the descriptions of life during the anti-Soviet insurgency in Kandahar are an important contribution to our understanding of the country's history.

Outside of the South Asia field, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks gives a compelling look at the intersection between genetics, medical research, race and class. It traces the story of a poor, cancer-ridden African American woman and her unlikely (and unknowing) contribution to medical science: a cell sample that has been used to study cancer for decades. Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom looks at Bush-era American suburbia. I don't think it quite lived up to its hype, but it is an important and enjoyable read nonetheless. Finally, for the mathematically inclined, I recommend Oded Goldreich's P, NP and NP-completeness: The Basis of Complexity Theory, which gives of a good overview of the P-NP problem in computer science, which made the news this year for almost getting solved.

And these from Naheed Mustafa, a friend and journalist who is hopefully soon starting work on a great project she has up her sleeve:

I always feel like I’m six months to a year behind in my reading. I end up doing so much reading for work that I can’t get around to reading the things I want. But certainly there are worse problems one can have. I do read a lot of long form journalism and some of the pieces I especially enjoyed have already been mentioned above (Elizabeth Rubin’s profile of Hamid Karzai) and Jane Mayer’s drone piece.

Daniyal Moinuddin’s collection of short stories In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was compelling and on the whole I thought it was an eloquent presentation of the fading of the traditional landowning class in Pakistan’s Punjab. The other two books I finally got around to reading and am happy that I did: Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb and The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill – both Canadian writers. Neither was published in 2010 but, like I said, I’m always behind.

There are several long form pieces I’d suggest as well. Two from Basharat Peer who I think is one of the most phenomenal journalists of our time and has an eloquent, literary style of writing: Kashmir’s Forever War in Granta 112: Pakistan and The Road Back from Ayodhya in The Caravan. The third is an astonishing portrait of Roger Ebert written by Chris Jones for Esquire entitled The Essential Man. Jones’ attention to detail and the tiny cues he picks up are brilliant. Roger Ebert wrote a response to Jones’ profile (on the whole positive) that you may want to read to get some sense of the process (I’m obsessed with “process”). Also, another Esquire piece called Eleven Lives by Tom Junod about the oil workers who were killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion back in April of this year.

My last recommendation is actually a short excerpt from a memoir my dear and lovely friend Rahat Kurd is writing. It’s about growing up Muslim in Canada. The essay was printed in Maisonneuve magazine: Things That Make Us Muslim.

Your suggestions and recommendations are welcome in the comments below.

Irish Parallels

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I'm finally getting round to finishing a book I blogged about a while back, Talking to Terrorists. In the conclusion, I keep getting struck with a sense of deja vu. No, Afghanistan is not Northern Ireland, nor are the Taliban the IRA. But there's definitely something to be learned here:

"It was this absence of a long-term strategy which was to be one of the key contributory factors to the sharp increase in violence from 1969 to 1975-6. The rapid oscillation of policy in these years proved particularly damaging: from an 'ostrich-like' policy of neglect as the province spiralled towards collapse, to full-blown intervention and 'Direct Rule', to negotiations with the IRA in 1972, to an abortive attempt at power-sharing with moderate parties in 1973-4, only to return to more exploratory talks with terrorists in 1975. What characterised this era was the inability of the state to recognise how its own behaviour could exacerbate the situation. The lack of a consistent approach or over-arching vision -- not to mention periodic flirtations with the possibility of a complete withdrawal from Northern Ireland -- heightened suspicion of British intentions and undermined those moderate voices who were the most likely partners for peace (including the Irish government). […]

"From the mid-1970s, as violence spiralled out of control, the British government -- with some reluctance -- came to the decision that it needed to establish a 'long haul' commitment to Northern Ireland, in order to end the instability upon which the terrorist campaigns (both loyalist and republican), had thrived. By focusing their energies on 'normalising' the security situation and prioritising economic regeneration over constitutional experiments, the British effectively abandoned the hope that they might reach a peaceful settlement in the near future. Yet in taking this new path, they also wrested the initiative away from those violent groups that were prepared to use spectacular attacks to influence political events at important junctures. It was this change of tactics that forced the IRA to adopt its own 'long war' strategy -- effectively an admission of weakness on the part of the republicans and a marked departure from the 'one last push' philosophy which had prevailed in their ranks until that point." (p.243)

Jere van Dyk's 'Captive'

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I'm looking forward to this book, just reviewed (below) by Publisher's Weekly. Quite apart from the whole survival-memoir thing, Jere knows a lot about the Haqqanis (having spent time with them during the 1980s).


"Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban" (Jere Van Dyk)

Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban Jere Van Dyk. Times, $25 (288p) ISBN 978-0-8050-8827-4

An American journalist exploring the war zone on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border reports unwanted lessons in its perils in this harrowing memoir. Having traveled with the “freedom fighters” in the '80s, Van Dyk thought he had the connections and knowledge to navigate the tribal lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but he was captured by a fractious band of Taliban fighters in 2008. Van Dyk (In Afghanistan: An American Odyssey) and his Afghan guides spent 44 days in a dark cell. Well-fed but terrified, he felt a nightmare of helplessness and disorientation. Dependent on a jailer who mixed solicitude with jocular death threats and a ruthless Taliban commander who could free or kill him on a whim, the author performed Muslim prayers in an attempt to appease his captors; wary of murky conspiracies involving his cellmates, he “was afraid of everybody, including the children.” Van Dyk's claustrophobic narrative jettisons journalistic detachment and views his ordeal through the distorting emotions of fear, shame, and self-pity. But in telling his story this way, he brings us viscerally into the mental universe of the Taliban, where paranoia and fanaticism reign, and survival requires currying favor with powerful men. The result is a gripping tale of endurance and a vivid evocation of Afghanistan's grim realities. 1 map. (June 22)