Books

PhD Tools: DevonThink for File Storage and Discovery

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[This is part of a series on the tools I used to write my PhD. Check out the other parts here.]

Discovering similar notes in one of my DevonThink databases

Discovering similar notes in one of my DevonThink databases

I first heard about DevonThink in the same breath as Tinderbox. They go together, though they serve different purposes. Some people want to make an either/or decision about which to use. I see them as sufficiently different to assess them on their own merits and as per your usage scenario.

As with all tools, you should come to the decision table with a set of features that you're looking for. Don't just shop around for new things for the sake of newness or for the sake of having a really great set of tools. These programmes are not cheap. Luckily almost all of them come with generous trial versions or periods, but I don't recommend 'newness' as a feature of any particular merit.

Devonthink (I use the Pro Office version) is a place to store your files and notes. It can, I think, take any file you can throw at it. It comes with software for processing PDFs into fully-searchable documents (OCR software, in other words) which is part of the reason why the license for the Pro Office version of the programme is so expensive.

If you're anything like me, you're drowning in PDF documents. They all come with helpful names like "afghanistan_final_report_02_16.pdf" and unless you have a rigorous file hierarchy and sorting system, you'll probably be unable to find one file or the other. And using the basic file hierarchy system for storage doesn't help you with situations like when you want to store the same file in multiple folders (i.e. what if a report is about Afghanistan and Tunisia). (DevonThink has a feature which allows you to store the files in multiple locations, but without saving two copies of the file. Any changes or annotations you make in one file will automatically be transferred to the other).

You might ask yourself why you would need DevonThink and Tinderbox (see this post for more). The short answer is that they store different kinds of files/data, and that DevonThink is less about thinking than about storage (to a certain extent) and discovery.

One of the key features of DevonThink Pro Office is its smart searching algorithms, its ability to suggest similar texts based on the contents of what you are looking at, etc. It does this by means of a proprietary algorithm, so I can't really tell you how it works, but just know that it does. It works best on smaller chunks of text. In this way, I was reading through a particular source from the 3 million-word-strong Taliban Sources Project database and then I clicked the "See also" button and it had found a source I would never otherwise have read on the same topic, even though it didn't even use one of the keywords I would have used to search for it. It uses semantic webs of words to figure this stuff out. Anyway, beyond a certain database size, this power becomes really useful. It can also archive websites, store anything including text, do in-text searches on e-books etc etc. (Read more on how I use DevonThink for research in general here.)

I also used it a little as an archive for substantive drafts / iterations of the writeup process. That's another important part of the process: making backups of many different kinds. I never found any use for them, but at least they were there (just in case).

If you're a data and document hoarder at heart, like me, you'll soon have a Devonthink database (or several databases, split up by topic) that is bigger than you can fully comprehend it, or remember what was inside the files. At that point, search becomes really important. Not just a straightforward search, but the ability to input 'fuzzy' terms (i.e. if you search for "Afghanistan" it'll also find instances where it's incorrectly spelt "Afgahistan"), and boolean language, into your query is really powerful/useful. DevonThink is an amazing search tool. The company that developed the database software also make something called DevonAgent, which is basically a power-user search tool for the internet. Google on steroids, if you will. Fully customisable, scriptable... you can really go crazy with this stuff. I use it, but my PhD wasn't really about searching things on the internet, so I didn't use it much for my research or writeup. But it's a great tool, too.

In short, DevonThink is a research database tool that will help you store and find the documents that relate to your research, and do smart things to help you find sources and texts that maybe you'd forgotten you'd saved. Highly recommended for anyone working with large numbers of documents.

Reading the Afghan Taliban: 67 Sources You Should Be Studying

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I'll be taking a break from regular blogging for the next few months while I focus on finishing the writeup of my PhD dissertation. Most of what I'm interested in about the Afghan Taliban is their pre-2001 history, so I recently put together a list of 'value-added' sources that offer useful and/or unique information. As I write things up for my research, I'll often come across someone's name or some minutiae I know very little about. These are the sources to which I turn when I reach those moments. They're often biased, but they're rich in detail and in first-person observations. I've long grown frustrated by long analyses of the Taliban that don't contain the results of time spent in Afghanistan and that haven't bothered to engage with the ever-growing list of useful primary sources on the movement.

What follows is an annotated version of my go-to list of sources. The first part consists of books or reports, ordered by year of publication. The second part is a list of institutions or collections of multiple sources. If you think of anything I'm missing, drop me a line and I'll update the list. Note, too, that this list is mainly focused on pre-2001 history (often neglected by scholars of the Taliban), so I realise I'm missing various things on the post-2001 period.

UPDATE: I added a few things as of August 2021 below. Notably, The Taliban Reader, a one-stop shop collection of primary source material, and the website of the Taliban Sources Project.

Books & Reports

Jere van Dyk’s book contains recollections of time spent in south-eastern Afghanistan (including conversations with Jalaluddin Haqqani) and Kandahar during the early 1980s. Lots of atmospheric description and snippets of discussions. Not definitive, by any means, but useful nonetheless.

This was the first mainstream book published about the Taliban movement in English. It should come as no surprise that Hurst Publishers (in London; also my publisher) were the ones to put it out. This is a fairly variable book in terms of the criteria specified above. Most essays are synoptic in nature rather than based on fieldwork or reporting from Afghanistan itself. Anthony Davis’ essay on the Taliban’s military strategy and tactics is based on time spent on the ground during the early years of the movement’s expansion, though, and offers a lot that isn’t available elsewhere.

This report was initially commissioned/published by Mercy Corps in 2000. The text was republished as a book in 2001. Pont was investigating the situation for women in Helmand and she managed to gather (together with a team of Afghan researchers) interviews with women in Lashkar Gah, Darwishan, Nad Ali, Gereshk and Naw Zad. She also did some interviews in Baluchistan (Pakistan). These interviews were carried out in 1998 and, as such, offer a fascinating window into the lives of women in an area where the Taliban had strong support and presence. The report/book includes lots of quotations of the testimony. It is also of interest since a lot of what emerges offers a counterfactual to what is often written about the experiences of women under Taliban rule. Download the original report here.

This was another early account of the Taliban, published a year before 2001 saw a glut of books on the movement. Gohari includes some details quoted from Taliban publications which are unavailable elsewhere, but this isn’t otherwise particularly useful as a source.

This story for the New Yorker contains a lot of unique interview material and closely observed profiles of individuals in the Taliban leadership. I don’t see it referenced much, but there are some useful details in here.

Often held up as the grandfather of Taliban studies, Rashid’s 2001 work is a compilation of magazine articles originally published during the late 1990s. The book is highly variable in its contents and the sourcing is minimal. That said, it contains a lot of original reporting and quotes from various figures within the Taliban. The book was revised and reissued in 2010. Essential reading for anyone interested in the Afghan Taliban pre-2001, but treat its contents with caution.

  • Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, "The Official Gazette" (2001)

This book was published in an impeccable English translation in the mid-2000s by Dr Khaled Abou El Fadl at talibanbook.com. It is a translation of one of the legal compendium’s released by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan on September 4, 2001. The book itself is part of the Taliban Sources Project (TSP) collection, but we didn’t translate it as the quality of this version is excellent.

  • Mohammad Salah, "Narratives of the Jihad Years: The Journey of the Afghan Arabs" (2001) (2001)

Mohammad Salah is a journalist who wrote in Arabic for al-Hayat and various other publications. This book is a recollection of some memories and interviews he carried out with Arabs (particularly those from Egypt) who were involved in Afghanistan during the 1980s and 1990s. There are interesting details on how the Arabs interacted with Afghans during this time period. Parts of this book are quoted in my book, An Enemy We Created.

Kaplan travelled inside Afghanistan during the 1980s and this book contains memories of that time. He was in southern Afghanistan as well (unusual among foreign journalists, most of whom went with Massoud or Haqqani’s groups in the north and/or east), spending time with Hajji Latif and as such, this is useful for the richly described account of those travels.

This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the fronts functioned during the 1980s in southern Afghanistan. The author, an Egyptian who came to Afghanistan to fight during the mid-1980s, spent time in and around Kandahar, participating in a number of important battles towards the end of the war. He includes a wealth of names and places, all of which can be used to triangulate information about the location of fronts, commanders and fighters in the south.

Edwards’ book only explicitly mentions the Afghan Taliban movement towards the end. There are some interesting interview quotations in that final chapter. The book is also interesting for its portrait of a couple of the key religious schools and groups that operated during the 1908s war. This includes Harakat-e Enqelab-e Islami and Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e Islami with extensive primary source quotation (in the form of interview transcripts).

This is a collection of Jon Lee Anderson’s dispatches for the New Yorker, published post-2001 but including recollections of the pre-2001 Taliban government as well. There are recollected stories about Mullah Mohammad Omar, for instance, that you won’t read anywhere else.

This was the writeup of Peter Bergen’s earliest investigations into bin Laden’s activities pre-2001. It includes time spent in Afghanistan during their 1990s rule of the country (including conversations with senior figures during that time). There isn’t that much of value relating to the Afghan Taliban, however, in this book, and you’d be better off reading his later edited volume, The Osama Bin Laden I Know.

I hesitate a bit about including this book in among the list of sources. This is a somewhat overblown account of some of the negotiations between the Taliban and foreign governments over oil pipelines and the like during the time of the Taliban’s government. It includes original documents, however, so check those out, albeit with a forewarning that the narrative/analysis in this book strains credulity at times.

  • Muzhda, Wahid, "Afghanistan va panj sal-i sultah-i taliban [Afghanistan Under Five Years of Taliban Sovereignty]" (2003)

Wahid Muzhda was an official working in the Taliban’s Foreign Ministry during their rule over Afghanistan during the 1990s. This short memoir includes a number of recollections from that time, for example of meetings between senior Taliban leaders and foreign delegations. It’s unclear how accurate all of the book is, but a lot has been confirmed through other interviews so, to my mind, this is a useful atmospheric source for insight into the inner workings of a Taliban ministry from a somewhat dispassionate observer.

Much of the information in this book is of dubious provenance, and it’s very difficult to verify or check any of it. Nevertheless, there is a lot of ‘stuff’ here. It covers “Jehadi Organisations” in Pakistan, so the intersection with the Afghan Taliban is relatively limited. There are some interesting clippings from the late 1990s, however, and accounts derived from interviews that are unavailable elsewhere. Handle with care, but perhaps of use in some limited sense.

  • Mustafa Hamid, "The Cross in the Sky of Kandahar" (2004)

Mustafa Hamid is a prolific writer and this is just one of over a dozen titles published online since 2001. This volume specifically covers the details of the relationship between the Taliban and bin Laden (and his associates) as relayed through a series of stories from the pre-2001 period. This book isn’t available in English apart from liberal quotations used in my own book, An Enemy We Created. The Arabic version appears online from time to time, though currently I can’t seem to find a stable link to share with you.

  • Husayn Ibn Mahmud, "Al-Rajul al-‘Amlaaq: The Giant Man" (2005)

This is an account of Mullah Mohammad Omar by an Arab who spent time in Afghanistan during the late 1990s. The translation was made by At-Tibyaan Publications and is mostly sound, apart from Arabic-derived spellings of Afghan place names and people (“Bashtoon” for Pashtun and so on). The account is extremely hagiographic, but there are some useful details here and there. The account also includes a transcription of a Taliban-era radio broadcast in which Mullah Mohammad Omar speaks and describes the early days of the movement in his own words. Worth a read for those pages alone. An archived version of the document (in English translation) is available here.

  • Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, "De Afghanistan Islami Emarat de Dustoor [The Constitution of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan]" (2005)

This document was the product of the Taliban’s internal constitutional review process that took place from 1999-2000. IEA authorities never ratified the document while they were in power, but it was published in 2005 on the Taliban’s website along with dozens of signatures. It was scrubbed from the movement’s website a few years later and is no longer available for download online. Unchanged since the late 1990s, it offers a semi-official vision of the movement’s conception of the state and how they thought governance should work.

Excerpts of this book are included in Bergen’s The Osama bin Laden I Know, but the full account is worth a read. Only some of it is germane to the Afghan Taliban, but there are some interesting gems in those sections relating to the relationship between the Taliban and the foreign fighters in Afghanistan during the era of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (late-1990s).

Fisk reported from Afghanistan from the Soviet War through the Taliban era (albeit infrequently). He was famously one of the last to receive a visa from the Taliban to enter Afghanistan prior to the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7, 2001. There are some recollections of the Taliban’s government and character portraits of certain officials in this book.

Murshed was Pakistan’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan during the late 1990s and as such, this book is filled with interesting stories about the author’s time spent interacting with the Afghan Taliban. Lots of this is unavailable elsewhere, so it’s worth reading for exposure to the stories, even if it’s unclear how much of it can be relied upon as an accurate account.

This is a treasure-trove of oral history accounts by individuals involved in bin Laden’s story. As such, the focus of this book is mostly concerned with things that haven nothing to do with the Taliban, but for the periods when bin Laden spent time in Afghanistan (the 1980s and then again post-1996) there is a lot of useful testimony. Much of it is unavailable elsewhere.

  • Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, "Layeha" (2006, 2009, 2010, 2011)

These so-called ‘rulebooks’ for the Afghan Taliban started publication in 2006 and there have been several versions issued since then. Initially a semi-random list of injunctions, these grew in complexity as they were revised by various individuals within the senior leadership — notably Mullah Baradar in 2008-9. They offer a glimpse of the kinds of problems that the Taliban movement faced post-2001, especially with regard to command-and-control of subordinate commanders and groups. The documents are publicly available at the following addresses:

2006 Layeha (Pashto / English)
2009 Layeha (English)
2010 Layeha (English)
2011 Layeha (Unavailable online)

Kathy Gannon is a long-standing reporter based out of Pakistan and this book contains lots of first-hand interviews that the author made with Taliban figures from the early days of the movement onwards. Towards the end, the tone of the book becomes a little 'preachy', but otherwise this is an extremely useful collection of perspectives and conversations.

Sarah Chayes lived in Kandahar for several years post-2001 and her book was one of the first to really explore how southern Afghanistan worked. She delves into the history of greater Kandahar and the south and explores various biographies of key figures. As such, there’s a good deal of second-hand observations and stories.

  • Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, "Afghanistan aw Taliban [Afghanistan and the Taliban]" (2007)

Of all the Taliban memoirs, Mutawakil’s is perhaps the least interesting. This is unfortunate, given how much he must have been exposed to as Foreign Minister, but perhaps unsurprising that he’s chosen to retain a lot of stories for possible narration in the future. Nevertheless, this is part of the ‘canon’ of memoirs by senior leadership figures and as such is essential reading.

A lyrical look at life for foreign fighters in Afghanistan during the late 1990s by someone who sought to infiltrate al-Qaeda for international intelligence agencies. Nasiri encounters the Taliban during his time in Afghanistan and as such, this book offers insights and anecdotes that are unavailable elsewhere.

I haven’t mentioned Giustozzi’s earlier work, Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop (2007), because it is mainly a synthesis of various secondary source materials. This edited volume, however, offers various encounters with primary sources, whether this is Joanna Nathan’s account of Taliban propaganda, Graeme Smith’s writeup of his ‘Talking to the Taliban’ interview series, or Tom Coghlan’s oral history of the Taliban in Helmand. Lots of gems quoted in this book.

This is an edited volume of essays, some of which include materials that are otherwise unavailable. A good example is that written by Lutz Rzehak in which he details the Taliban’s rule in Nimroz province through various interviews conducted with residents.

Loyn spent time in Afghanistan during the mid-late 1990s with the Taliban, including trips to Kandahar. As such, parts of this book offer recollections and stories about senior figures within the movement that are unavailable elsewhere.

This article was published by Newsweek in 2009 and it consists of raw testimony from a variety of figures within the Afghan Taliban about their post-2001 history. The sources aren’t identified so it’s hard to know who is reliable or not, but I trust Yousafzai’s ability to turn up the kind of people would would have real knowledge of these events. In any case, treat with caution, but make use of the detail in this long set of accounts.

I helped edit this book together with Felix Kuehn. It is the memoir of a participant in the Taliban movement, and tells the story of his life from childhood till the present day. Zaeef was present and involved in events from the 1980s onwards and tells many stories relating to the early jihad days as well as the 1990s Emirate and his role in that government. It’s essential reading, though obviously treat the recollections with a decent amount of caution as with any primary source.

Gretchen Peters sources a lot of this book to interviews with “Western officials” (some named, many unnamed) but she was on the ground in Afghanistan during parts of the late 1990s and she did extra interviews while she was preparing the book. Because some parts are unclearly sourced it’s difficult to know how to assess some of the anecdotes, but there are a number of stories that are unavailable elsewhere.

Jere van Dyk’s second book on Afghanistan details the time he spent as a Taliban prisoner in Pakistan. He relates many conversations he had with his captors and thus, like David Rohde’s account, this is a useful, albeit biased, source.

This is the co-authored account of one of bin Laden’s wives and his sons. It details time spent in Afghanistan during the 1990s as part of the book, and as such it’s interesting for the stories told about bin Laden’s interactions and relationship with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. Treat with care, but it’s worth a read nonetheless.

Published upon Rohde’s release/escape from Taliban captivity, this book contains long recollections of the author’s contact and conversations with his Taliban captors. As such, it’s a useful encounter with those perspectives, albeit from a biased observer.

Tawil gathers together a number of new materials and interviews with those who knew bin Laden, were involved with Afghanistan and who interacted with the Taliban. There are unique anecdotes in this book about the relationship between the Taliban and bin Laden. To sample some of the anecdotes that relate to the Afghan Taliban, check out Tawil’s report entitled The Other Face of Al-Qaeda, published in November 2010.

Fergusson spent time in Afghanistan during the late 1990s. He also returned to Afghanistan post-2001 to report parts of this book and as such, it includes a number of interviewees and accounts of the Taliban that are unavailable elsewhere. This is a somewhat partisan account, but the interview materials make it a worthwhile read.

It remains unclear to me why more people haven’t discovered this quirky memoir of an Afghan who gets involved with the Afghan Taliban government in order to try to limit the influence of bin Laden and others during the late 1990s. The text is available for purchase from Google Books. Lots of interesting anecdotes relating to diplomacy, oil politics and international intelligence agencies’ activities during the Taliban’s rule of Afghanistan. There are also a number of photos and scans of original documents published as part of this book.

This book is a collection of oral history accounts from Kunduz and Takhar provinces. It covers several decades, but parts venture into the Taliban’s time in northern Afghanistan and as such this is a fascinating book. Moreover, these are not the recollections of senior leaders (with axes to grind) but rather those with little or no power. As such, this book has limited but focused value.

This internal report on the Taliban, based on the testimonies of dozens of Taliban prisoners was leaked to the media in 2012. It offers an interesting snapshot of the war post-2001 as international involvement started to wind up.

My own book, written together with Felix Kuehn. Most of this is a summary of the research of others, though we supplemented that research with interviews with various individuals associated with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Mindful of the fact that the original interview transcripts are often left out of research writeup, I pushed to include the raw texts as much as possible, so you’ll find lots of lengthy quotations peppered throughout the book.

This is an edited collection of poetry published on the Taliban’s website. We made sure to include examples from the pre-2001 period as well as more recent texts. Two years after this book was published, the Taliban released their own anthology/book online. That ‘official’ anthology is available in Pashto only and can be found among the collection of the Taliban Sources Project.

This is the fruit of several years’ research by Don Rassler and Vahid Brown. They use a huge trove of documents relating to the Haqqanis available as part of the Combating Terrorism Center’s (CTC) Harmony database. It’s very unfortunate that much of this isn’t publicly available, but items quoted in the book (I think) are there, in translation and in the original. The book quotes these primary source materials pretty liberally and even if you (like me) find the overall argument in parts of the book doesn’t hold up, this is still essential reading for contact with those primary sources.

Malkasian spent time in Helmand with the US State Department and this book is the product of interviews he made during that time. Much like Mike Martin’s Helmand book, this explains local histories through the stories of individuals, often with extensive quotation from his interview subjects. Again, there isn’t as much on the 1980s and 1990s as I would have liked, but there is a lot here that isn’t available anywhere else and as such it’s a useful source.

I started First Draft Publishing together with Felix Kuehn in part so that accounts like that of Akbar Agha would find a public outlet. The first volume of his memoirs, I Am Akbar Agha (another is forthcoming in Pashto), contains a lot of detail about the networks and individuals fighting together during the 1980s as part of the Taliban fronts in southern Afghanistan. As a memoir, parts are inevitably self-serving, but nevertheless there is a lot to learn from this book about the early years of the movement. Read more here.

  • Gumnam, "Kandahar Assassins" (2014)

This is the first of two books dealing with the 1980s jihad in the greater Kandahar area. Gumnam was a Afghan doctor in Quetta treating patients arriving from the war’s front lines across the border. He gathered these stories from interviews with various fighters. This first volume, Kandahar Assassins, details the lives of the assassins who worked inside Kandahar City. The second volume, Kandahar Heroes (forthcoming from First Draft Publishing), details what it was like to fight in the trenches against Soviet and Afghan government forces. Both books are rich in detail and filled with names and mini-biographical portraits of a variety of figures, many of whom would take on roles during the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan. Read more here.

Mike Martin’s research includes a lot of interview material which he gathered in Helmand. This book is extremely valuable if you are interested in hyper-local histories of the Taliban. There isn’t as much about the 1980s or 1990s as I would have liked, but this book contains lots of information that you won’t find anywhere else.

Originally published in the late 1990s, Mufti Rasheed’s text explains a lot about how the Taliban movement functioned and how religious clerics situated their claims to power. The text is available for the first time in a translation by Yameema Mitha. Michael Semple has written introductory materials that give the document context. I recently wrote on my blog that this was one of the most interesting primary source texts I’ve read relating to the Afghan Taliban in recent years. Highly recommended.

  • Farrall/Hamid, "The Arabs at War in Afghanistan" (2015)

This dialogue between two individuals contains a lot of material and discussion of the Taliban as far as it impacted the presence of foreign fighters inside Afghanistan, particularly pre-2001. There's lots of new details raised here, and the book is a goldmine of little stories.

  • Mullah Mohammad Omar, "Eid Statements" (Twice yearly)

You’ll have to dig around online (and offline) to find these, but he gave speeches and/or issued statements twice every year from 1995 until he died. Post-2001, there is much to be doubtful as to whether he was writing the statements himself (or as to what parts of the statements were written by him), but nevertheless they were put out under his name and that indicates something: i.e. this is what the Taliban movement wanted you to think he was writing, even if it wasn’t him doing the writing. It’s possible to do interesting compare-and-contrast exercises with all the texts of these statements from the mid-1990s up to the present day.

  • al-Suri / al-Uyayri, "Are the Taliban from Ahl as-Sunnah?" (Unknown (pre-2001)) (Unknown (pre-2001)) (Unknown (pre-2001))

This is a compilation of two texts written by prominent Arab Islamist writers. The original texts were published during the late 1990s in response to growing unrest among so-called ‘Afghan Arabs’ about the Afghan Taliban. Al-Suri and al-Uyayri wrote in defence of the Taliban along ideological lines and this compilation/translation (again from at-Tibyaan Publications) offers various interesting details that aren’t available elsewhere. Get a PDF copy here.

  • The Taliban Reader: War, Islam and Politics in their Own Words (eds Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn)

This is a collection built on everything listed above. It’s a great starting point / one-stop shop for primary sources relating to the Afghan Taliban movement. I edited it together with my colleague, Felix Kuehn.

Databases & Institutions

AIP is a Pakistan-based news service. They had good access to the Taliban during the 1990s so their archive from that time (available for a subscription fee online) contains nuggets of information unavailable elsewhere. Post-2001 their access was less unique.

This is an odd site, of uncertain provenance. Yet it’s undeniable that there’s a lot of information available. Profiles of individuals are often highly partisan or partial to unproven gossip, yet it’s often worth checking against the names of those you are interested in.

AAN has long been the go-to place for analysis and commentary on Afghan politics. There is an abundance of riches available in its back-catalogue of reports and dispatches. Reports are impeccably sourced and pretty much anything you read on a particular topic will be essential reading. Dive in.

If you’re in Kabul, make sure to visit the ACKU library. It has a large collection of old documents, reports, newspapers and magazines. A lot (if not most) of that is digitised and available through a partnership with the University of Arizona. There is lots available here, particularly on pre-2001/historical aspects of the Taliban.

AREU has information in its research papers as well as in its physical library collection, maintained for many years by go-to librarian Royce Wiles. A lot of the valuable material in the library’s collection are documents that are unavailable elsewhere. Make sure to visit if you are in Kabul, but gather your wishlist of titles beforehand by using their online search tool.

This is the passion-project of Fawad Afghan Muslim, a sometime employee of the Afghan Foreign Ministry. He has collected wire (and other) news reports from Afghanistan and made them searchable and indexed them all by date. Best of all, his collection dates back to 1998 so anyone researching the years of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has a good place to search most (English-language) wire reports from that time. It’s a bit difficult to navigate, but if you use an ‘in-site’ Google search, there is a way to search by year.

This is hard to access without an expensive subscription (or via your university or research institution) but there are real gems in this collection of reports from the early-late 1990s. It’s particularly valuable for summaries or transcripts of radio reports, many of which are now lost/unavailable.

Lots of primary source documents in this collection, most available in the original and in translation. There are more available behind the scenes, so enquire with the CTC for access to that larger collection. Not all of it has relevance to the Afghan Taliban, and what does is often tangential, but this is still an important and unique source for researchers.

Graeme Smith won an Emmy award for this project, and it’s not hard to see why. Interviews with over thirty Talibs in southern Afghanistan are presented in the raw, alongside extensive explanation that offers relevant context. Essential watching to understand the post-2001 Taliban. [Note, I was involved in this project in a very limited fashion, helping out with some of the subtitling of these interviews].

This newsletter/publication has been running since 2003. The quality of reports is variable — of late they have been less-than-essential — but a few years back they were running important analyses based on fieldwork and interviews with key players.

This is a goldmine for anyone interested in the Afghan Taliban, albeit from a certain perspective, that of the US government. The National Security Archive presents and collates recently-declassified documents relating to a variety of issues. The collections that contain new and interesting materials relating to the Afghan Taliban include the following, ordered by date: (each link contains a summary and links to multiple original primary source documents)

- “Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War” (October 2001)

- “The Once and Future King” (October 2001)

- “The Hunt for Bin Laden” (December 2001)

- “The Taliban File” (September 2003)

- “The Taliban File Part III” (January 2004)

- “The Taliban File Part III” (March 2004)

- “The Taliban File Part IV” (September 2004)

- “Update: The Taliban File Part IV” (August 2005)

- “Pakistan: "The Taliban's Godfather”?” (August 2007)

- “1998 Missile Strikes on Bin Laden May Have Backfired” (August 2008)

- “The Taliban Biography: The Structure and Leadership of the Taliban 1996-2002” (November 2009)

- “"No-Go" Tribal Areas Became Basis for Afghan Insurgency Documents Show” (September 2010)

- “Secret U.S. Message to Mullah Omar: "Every Pillar of the Taliban Regime Will Be Destroyed”” (September 2011)

- “The Central Intelligence Agency's 9/11 File” (June 2012)

- “The Haqqani History: Bin Ladin's Advocate Inside the Taliban” (September 2012)

Released in May 2015, this is a collection of documents found in the raid on bin Laden’s house. It includes a number of letters relating to the Afghan and/or Pakistani Taliban, or sometimes details conversations with affiliates. As such, there are interesting details available here (in the originals and in translation).

  • Taliban Websites

Obviously, go to the ur-source. The list of Taliban-affiliated websites is constantly changing, either as new ones are created or as they are taken offline. There are sites for each language, and for certain themes or topics (i.e. one for films, one for poetry, one for Islamic matters, another for news, another for certain magazines etc). Make use of archive.org to access old or extinct sites. Most of what you’ll find currently available dates back a few years only, so you have to be creative about finding the old stuff.

  • The Taliban Sources Project (TSP)

Read more about this collection here. This is the largest (to my knowledge) publicly-accessible archive of materials relating to the Afghan Taliban. It’s not online yet, but we’re working hard to make it available. It consists of digitisations of Dari, Pashto and Arabic-language primary sources, but a lot of it has been translated into English as well.

UPDATE: this collection is (mostly) available online here.

  • Wikileaks, "Gitmo Files"

This is a collection of profiles (“assessment briefs”) posted by Wikileaks relating to prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A good number of those are Afghans. The quality of the information is often dubious, but information it is nonetheless. It shines a light on the US government’s conduct alongside that of the subjects it is attempting to describe. Proceed with caution.

The Best Books I Read in 2015

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This year was my biggest yet. 150 books in total and 15 days still to go.

Of those, 29 were fiction and the remaining 121 non-fiction. I’m not really happy with that disparity, but more on that below. Five of the books this year were in Arabic, including two novels. Readers of this blog will know that I’ve been steadily working my way up to the level where I’m comfortable reading Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt trilogy in the original. I’m not quite there yet, but getting there. The five books in 2015 is a start. Watch this space.

Goodreads tells me that my 150 books total to some 32,686 pages. That’s almost 90 pages every day given a 365-day year, but I was away studying Arabic for two months so actually it’s more like 107 pages per day. Look at the dip in my Beeminder graph where I read nothing:

49 of the books I read were written by women. One-third is better than last year’s 1:9 ratio, but still not many as I’d have liked. (Last year I wrote that I’d be happy with one-third.)

Last year I upped my goal from 100 to 150 for 2015 and on one hand I’m glad I did that. I’ve long felt that the more I read, the more I expose myself to. On the other hand, my two-months-where-I’m-only-allowed-to-speak-Arabic gave me a solid disadvantage going in. I felt the pressure, and I felt that I rushed through some books that I’d maybe have liked to savour more. So next year I’m going back to 100. It’s only a mild challenge to ensure that I read a hundred, but it’s enough that I’ll get exposed to new things.

I’m also going to make sure that 50% of what I read is fiction. I liked the way I tried to do this towards the end of the year, and I realise I miss reading fiction. Or perhaps a lot of the non-fiction I read these days has a ‘samey’ quality to it. I also realised that I have a lot of books in my library (digital or physical) already, so I’m not going to spend any money on books in 2016. (The only way I can read a book that was published in 2016 is if someone buys it for me, or if I get a gift card as a present etc). If you catch me buying any books, feel free to scold me.

As for the things I really enjoyed this past year, you’ve heard me praise Jonathan Brown’s Misquoting Mohammad already. I’ll stick with what I originally wrote for Pacific Standard:

“Misquoting Muhammad is a book I wish I had the money to buy for all my friends and colleagues, because he presents readers with a guide to Islamic thought that portrays it not as a fixed entity but as a complex product of utterly human machinations… Ultimately, Brown teaches a simple, if vital, lesson: Authenticity is elusive in religion, and those who claim it tend not to be searching for the truth but grasping for power.”

Seriously. Go read that book.

The Paris conference has just concluded. World leaders are taking a moment to bask in their self-reflected satisfaction at the agreement they produced. I don’t know enough to be able to offer a substantive critique, but I’m highly doubtful that anyone actually took the kinds of hard decisions to go against financial or national interests. Two things have offered a kind of salve to my pessimism about the environment. Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain Project offers a bracingly dark vision of our future, but one that meshes with what my gut tells me might be a useful path to go down. Roy Scranton’s short book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilisation, has two core messages: “We’re fucked” and “Prepare to die”. Scranton suggests that we embrace philosophy as a way to respond to the crisis – the crisis of humanity’s extinction, no less. If nothing else, Scranton gets you to ponder your future death, and that’s never a bad way to spend one’s afternoon.

As co-host of a podcast that is at least nominally about doing better work, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention two books related to this theme. Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc. was a surprisingly deep read, offering thoughts on developing ideas, managing teams and growing as a leader. As it turns out, the team pushing out films at Pixar have spent a lot of time thinking about what does and doesn’t work when it comes to collaborating together on creative projects. If you have to do that, I’d strongly recommend you give this a read.

Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel) is now the book I give to people starting out on a new course of study or reading. I wish I’d read it year ago myself. The authors explain how to study, how to learn things for long-term retention, and how to tweak the school experience to encourage retention. The authors strive to make examples practical and applicable. Spaced-repetition software is never mentioned in the book – in fact technology really isn’t the focus – but it’s possible to read it as a love letter to Anki. (Read more of my full review/summary here).

The exchange of letters between Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee felt like something I wasn’t meant to read. The latter is high up there in the pantheon of my favourite writers and Here and Now was a true pleasure to read. If you don’t care for either of the correspondents, though, this book may fall flat.

As a society, we think too little about death and dying and what it means to become old. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End is about the care that we give to people at the ends of their lives. (He also encourages us to think about what that might look like for our own lives). The practice and profession of medicine is slanted a certain way, but Atul Gawande shows fairly clearly how that isn’t necessarily beneficial. Short, but hits hard.

As my only fiction pick for this year, Shandana Minhas’ Survival Tips for Lunatics is a delightful romp through Pakistan. This is a children’s book on the surface, but appropriate for ‘adults’ who have a sense of fun and are willing to follow Minhas on her crazy journey. Some great characters in this book (including, but not limited to, a bear, a velociraptor and a sparrow). The plot is simple (two children get left behind on a camping trip and have to get back to their parents, via Baluchistan and a Pakistani military border post/facility on Afghan soil) but the adventures are many. Strongly recommended by anyone who is bored by the usual books given and read to pre-teen children.

Let me know if you enjoyed any of these over on Twitter or on Goodreads. And happy reading for the coming year!

'Obedience to the Amir', or how the Afghan Taliban govern

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It’s finally out. I’m really glad that other researchers, journalists and anyone else with a bit of curiosity can read this translated volume.

In the last year of the Taliban’s government in Afghanistan, visitors to Mullah Omar’s office in Kandahar received a parting gift. As they left, the movement’s supreme leader asked them to take a slim volume from a pile beside the door. He told them that if they wanted to know how the Taliban were meant to behave, they should read the book. The books which Mullah Omar handed out were Pashto and Farsi translation of Eta’t Amir, or ‘Obedience to the Leader’. Mufti Rasheed published the original in Urdu after having toured Taliban-run Afghanistan. Mullah Omar’s endorsement indicates that he believed that Rasheed had captured the essence of the Taliban Movement. Michael Semple and Yameema Mitha have translated this important primary source and added a commentary and appraisal.

Long-time Afghan scholar and analyst Barney Rubin had this to say upon reading the manuscript:

“In war, and especially guerrilla war, the best organised party is likely to win. While numbers of fighters and weapons count, organisation determines whether the leader can use them. This book is the guide the Afghan Taliban used to organise themselves differently from other Afghan groups. Anyone who wants to defeat them or negotiate with them should understand the organisational principles that guide them.”

Michael Semple has written a useful introduction in which he outlines the context of the document, and he worked on the translation together with Yameema Mitha.

This is one of the most interesting documents coming out of the Afghan Taliban that I’ve read in terms of helping explain how power works within the movement and, accordingly, how they govern. If you’re interested in the history or the present state of the Afghan Taliban, give this book a read.

How I use Goodreads to pick what I read

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So far this year, I have read 35 books. I'm trying something new for 2015 so I thought I'd write up the outline in case someone else finds it useful. As I wrote at the end of last year, I'll be reading 150 books over the course of 2015. That's fifty books more than I read in 2014. The point of it is to expose myself to lots of different ideas, different styles, different perspectives. I've found that 150 probably isn't an impossible amount to be reading (less than three a week) and I really relish brushing up against interesting authors and ideas.

I've used Goodreads as a way of tracking what I read for a long time now. I'm lucky enough to have an interesting group of 'friends' who also use it (more or less regularly) so there's usually a decent amount of new or niche books that I discover that way. I also use it as a way of noting down the books I want to read in the future. (Incidentally, I've never really had a problem in finding something new to read. The list of books I want to read will always be larger than the time I have to read them. That's just life.)

Goodreads offers a 'list' function whereby you can not only state that you 'want to read' a book, but where you can categorise things to your heart's content. Each year I set up a list ("2015toread" and so on) so I can see which books I think I'm more motivated to read that year. I'll usually take 5 or 10 minutes each weak checking over the list to make sure the things I added to the list are actually things I still want to read (versus things I added in the heat of a moment, after reading a particularly persuasive review, for example, but which I probably don't need to spend my time on).

Previously, I was generally following my gut with what I wanted to read next. Unfortunately, this often meant I went with the easiest option, or the path of least resistance. Long books (weighty histories, or more abstruse theoretical texts) would be passed up for the latest *it* novel or someone's entirely forgettable memoir about their time in Afghanistan that I'll feel obliged to read.

This year I've been trying a different approach. Goodreads allows you to sort lists by various bits of metadata attached to each book (author name, date added etc) but you can also sort by "average rating". This is the average rating given to a particular book by the entire Goodreads user base (20+ million users). You can see how this pans out in my current set of 'up next' books:

 
 

This "average rating" isn't in any way a guarantee of anything resembling quality. It's not that hard for authors to game the system, and books with few reviews (common for niche subjects like Afghanistan or Islam) have either really high or low ratings. But I'm finding this approach brings me to read far more books outside my path-of-least-resistance choices and often brings me into contact with some real gems.

Needless to say, this method of discovery is only a little better than putting all the names in a hat and picking one at random, but I am still finding some benefit. It does mess with my desire to read fewer male authors (you'll note in the picture above that only book number seven is by a woman; the rest are men) but everything in life is a tradeoff of some sort, I suppose.

Let me know if you find some use to this or if you have any other ways you pick what books to read next.

Apocalypse Then: a short review of Filiu's 'Apocalypse in Islam' (2011)

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An enjoyable account of the idea of apocalypse in Islamic discourse, from the Qur'an all the way up until 2011. Filiu gathered together a huge melange of written sources on the apocalypse and he presents an overview of how differing conceptions have been cultivated by Sunnis / Shi'is over time. There is a slight bias in that most of the sources are in Arabic, and his focus is, broadly, the Middle East so South Asia is not particularly part of this story at all, not to mention East Asia proper which gets nary a mention.

I was almost completely ignorant of much of the developments detailed in the book, perhaps because I've focused more on South Asia in my own research/work. Indeed, I finished the book with a question on my mind as to why Afghanistan seems not to have the same obsession with ideas of the apocalypse as Filiu is suggesting is present in the Middle East. Perhaps it has something to do with Deobandism, though I'm not really sure of that... something to look into.

One other detraction: this is a historiography of transmitted ideas, but mostly of those written down. Filiu has lived for a long time in the Middle East (mostly in Syria, if I'm not mistaken) but you don't really get much sense of this in the book, nor of how all the books and ideas he discusses were received by actual people. Instead, there's a dialogue among authors and publishers -- a fascinating one, at that -- but I was left with the sense that something was missing.

Filiu tells of the construction of the idea of apocalypse, how circumstance and context contributed to the development of the ideas. There's nothing particularly ground-breaking in that: the events of a particular age shape the way ideas are framed. But the details of how publishers saw a market in apocalyptic literature were fascinating to read. Similarly, it was interesting to see how Shi'i interpretations seem to have followed a fairly different (though parallel) track of development.

The book has the really helpful feature of one-or-two-page summaries at the end of each chapter to help remind you of the overall argument that was covered. All-in-all a really clear presentation from Filiu of his ideas/argument.

Some other things I learnt while reading: (helped out by quotes from the book)

  • "The Qur'an has rather little to say about the end of the world, and still less about the omens of the Last Hour, whose prediction and description later came to be based on prophetic reports." (28)
  • "The apocalyptic narrative was decisively influenced by the conflicts that filled Islam's early years, campaigns of jihad against the Byzantine Empire and recurrent civil wars among Muslims" (28)

After page 70, the book gets into the post-1979 world, looking at three events that really spurred the development of apocalyptic ideas: the Siege of Mecca, the Iranian Revolution and the arrival of Soviet troops into Afghanistan. I hadn't realised, for example, that the war in Afghanistan was one factor that spurred the 1982 Hama uprising as their spiritual leader saw in it "certain signs of the Hour" (81). The book is filled with many such fascinating asides.

Covering the 1990s, Filiu shows how ideas from Christian messianism start to creep into the books being written about apocalypse in the Middle East, also including things like UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle. This is when he also starts detailing how certain publishers and authors become factories for apocalypse literature, churning out books to satiate an eager audience.

All this is further accelerated by 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with more intermingling of sources and ideas. Filiu also chronicles how certain Islamic orthodox establishment figures (and their state sponsors) sought to play down apocalypse narratives. Interestingly, he shows how it wasn't really a significant theme for al-Qaeda either, at least not for its senior ideologues or leadership.

You can see how prescient Filiu was in reading the apocalyptic tea leaves when you get to the end of the book. Remember, he was writing this in 2007/2008 (when it was published in French), but he concludes by speculating that a merger of jihadism with messianism was probably due and that the mutation would be particularly difficult to manage:

"No inevitability pushes humanity in the direction of catastrophe, even if the popular fascination with disaster may seem somehow to favor a sudden leap into mass horror. And yet, coming after the gold of the Euphrates, widely interpreted in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq as a sign of the Hour, a fire in Hijaz may be all that is needed to set in motion a new cycle of eschatological tension, inaugurating an age of widespread fear and expectation that the end of the world is at hand. If an inflammatory and incandescent event of this sort were to occur, the chance that global jihad might undergo an apocalyptic mutation would give grounds for genuine apprehension." (193)

Anyway, for all the detractions mentioned above, this was a quick and fun read that gets you up to speed on thoughts about the apocalypse in the Islamicate world. Recommended, if this sort of thing gets you excited...

North Waziristan: A Reading List

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Technically, this is South Waziristan... Photo credit: Drregor (via Flickr)

Technically, this is South Waziristan... Photo credit: Drregor (via Flickr)

 

I've been doing a bit of reading about North Waziristan in the English-language sources that are available outside Pakistan. It took a bit of time to put together a decent collection that gave real information. By 'real information', I mean things that speak of names, dates, places and events. I wasn't really interested in analysis, though that forms part of what follows. I was interested in the basic factual building blocks that must precede any analysis or understanding of a place. (That, and actually going there yourself). Most of these sources have are filled with stories and little details, all of which need triangulating with one another and with interviews on the ground.

I can't vouch for the veracity of any of it -- my experience in Afghanistan has given me an innate distrust for anything I read in a report, particularly if it was assembled outside the country -- yet this is what we have. There are, of course, thousands if not hundreds of thousands of news articles in the databases of Pakistan's media outlets, but I didn't trawl those yet. Needless to say, this is a work in progress and I will continue to update as and when I read more. It seems the area is also missing a well-sourced chronology akin to something like what I did for Kandahar or for the Taliban/Al-Qaeda relationship. I don't have the time at the moment to do this myself, but perhaps someone will be inspired to work on it. If you have any suggestions for additions to this list, please let me know.

Books (Core)

Books (Supplementary / Tangential)

Reports

Articles

Websites

UPDATE: This continues to be added to as recommendations come in from various places here and there. (Last Update: January 3, 2015)

Some Books and Other Things from 2014

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I have read 117 books so far this year. I think there are another five still likely to happen before the end of the month. Goodreads tells me that amounts to 28,616 pages or an average of roughly 80 pages per day. Seems like a lot, but it didn't feel that way. I set my goal for the year at 100 and it was consciously a very high number, almost unrealistically so. But in the end I never felt rushed, nor did it feel like a chore. As a result, next year I'm going to notch it up to 150. I enjoy reading books more than I fear the very occasional sense of pressure when I get behind on my reading. Beeminder has helped keep me honest and on track when it comes to my reading goals.

 
My Beeminder chart c. late November. I disabled it after I hit the 100 mark...

My Beeminder chart c. late November. I disabled it after I hit the 100 mark...

 

The breakdown of fiction:non-fiction in the books I read this year was pretty low (1:9 approx) but the gender balance was about 4:6 female-male, which isn't bad considering I was only side-glancing at that proportion as the year went on. For 2015, I will be consciously making sure to get more fiction in my reading diet, hopefully by as much as one-third or two-fifths of the total.

The only fiction book this year that really blew me away was Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Imagine a cross between J.M. Coetzee, Barbara Kingsolver and A.M. Homes. That's sort of what this book is, but to try to pre-introduce you to the plot or premise would do you a disservice. I'd strongly advise you not to read any reviews, comments or synopses of the book -- even the one written by the publisher. Just go read it. It's not only extremely moving, but it will also make you think.

I read Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams much earlier this year, and it made me think about essay writing afresh. The book is a collection of pieces examining the idea of empathy from different vantage points. The showstopper first essay (from which the collection takes its name) was originally published in The Believer. You can read it here. I suspect after reading that you'll go and get the book. Her essays combine the confessional with the abstract and overthought. It's a very attractive mix, and, with the exception of one or two pieces, the book is compulsively readable.

The second non-fiction book that, really, everyone should go read right now is by my friend and colleague, Anand Gopal. No Good Men Among The Living covers the conflict in Afghanistan through the voices and perspectives of three Afghans -- one man who ends up fighting for the Taliban, a urban-educated woman who ends up in Uruzgan province, and a US-backed military strongman. Just for starters, it's refreshing to read something in which the author doesn't insert him or herself into the narrative like a sore thumb. It's sad that has to be said, but this is the exception not the rule these days. Anand dismantles the evidence surrounding the resurgence of the Taliban post-2001 and what he finds -- I'll let you follow him down that path -- is extremely disturbing if not entirely unexpected. This book is certainly one of the best things written about post-2001 Afghanistan and given the amount of energy and money that has been spent, it's worth taking the time to consider what worked and what didn't.

For some books, as you near the end you speed up as the plot comes to its inevitable conclusion, eager to find out how the story ends. For others, you slow down, not only because the themes of the book have started to intertwine around and in between one another, but also because you realise that soon this book will come to an end and this companion of the past few hours or days will start becoming but a memory. Rohini Mohan's The Seasons of Trouble:  Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka's Civil War is a superb book. I can hardly imagine how the author managed to put it together. It reads like a novel yet feels so immediate as well. Mohan takes a similar approach to Anand, removing herself completely from the story and choosing instead to focus on the stories of three individuals who were caught up in Sri Lanka's unfolding civil conflict. I had read Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost in the past, but wasn't left with a very strong sense of Sri Lanka or its history. With this book, I feel I've learnt a lot. Mohan writes beautifully and the book has a strong narrative drive, such that I was up into the early hours of the morning finishing it. Just take my word for it. Buy this book. Read it. Thank me later. You'll be better off having read it.

Not everything in life is civil war and strife, though. This year I've been reconnecting with my body in various ways: by reading, through gymnastics classes and by working on my free-standing handstand. In this vein, I really connected with two books. Katy Bowman's Move Your DNA approaches movement from a bio-mechanical perspective (hinges, joints, and how the body works together as a system). Once you've read it, you can't think about your body and/or how you move it the same way again. The book introduces the idea of "diseases of captivity", which is to say, diseases brought about because of biomechanically skewed or minimised movement patterns. It's a really interesting concept, and as you read you'll find yourself sufficiently freaked out ever few pages to get up, check your posture, check your feet alignment and/or go for a walk. Unfortunately, Bowman doesn't always write in the clearest manner. Part of the premise of the book is that modern people have lost touch with their bodies (how to feel, how to describe, how to move) so I was hoping she would have found a language that would allow us alienated masses to better reconnect. That said, this is a great starting place. I could have done with a book with a thousand videos for each of the exercises she describes (and 3D interactive diagrams for the anatomy lessons) but this is a minor quibble. I will have to learn all that in due course. Bowman also offers courses, which I imagine are excellent in that there is a good deal of hands-on and individual experiential aspects to this book that I didn't quite get just from a read-through. I'll be working on the exercises over the coming months (years?). Certainly one of the most interesting/challenging books I read this year.

Jill Miller's The Roll Model: A Step-by-Step Guide to Erase Pain, Improve Mobility, and Live Better in Your Body addresses similar things as the Bowman book but from a highly practical standpoint. There is a lot of theory and anatomy explained, but the core of the text are hundreds of pages of beautifully illustrated exercises. Miller recommends rolling on somewhat-soft balls to release the fascia (basically, the connective tissue in the skin and muscles) throughout the body. If you haven't done something like this before, the first time is really instructive. As someone who spent a good part of the past decade sitting behind a computer or book, writing or researching, I can testify to the toll this has taken on my body. This book is a really excellent first step in moving away from that tension, dysfunction and inflexibility.

My movement journey wouldn't have been possible without an initial boost from the kind people of Gold Medal Bodies. They're all genuinely nice people and they have provided useful guidance and support in this project of reconnecting with my body that I mentioned earlier. I'd particularly like to thank Verity Bradford for the help she's been giving me over the past couple of months while I've been working on my free-standing handstand.

Finally, a few words about death and time. The past year has been full of confrontations with the passing of time and the inevitability of death. These confrontations have taken various shapes and forms and have been closer to home as well as further afield. This is always a useful reminder, I feel. I reread Seneca's essay On the Shortness of Life this year and that helped drive the message home. But it's easy to forget. To help with that, I'm really glad to have been using a MyTikker watch for the second half of the year. It's a little bit like that chart of a human life in weeks that did the rounds earlier this year. On the watch, one row of digits shows the current time, and the other two show a countdown (based on statistical estimates calculated using a questionnaire) of the time you have left in your life. Of course, things can always happen out of the blue. You can't do much to prevent that. But to push back against the passing of time, death works to jog the mind. So now, every time I look down to check the time, I'm reminded that time is passing, that our days are short.

[Read previous year-end posts here: 2013, 2012, and 2010.]

New book: An Educator's Tale

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The publishing house that Felix Kuehn and I set up has two new books out. The first of these is called An Undesirable Element: An Afghan Memoir and it tells the story of Sharif Fayez, the man responsible for much of the progress seen in Afghan higher education since 2001. The book also includes a lot from the 1980s jihad and pre-Taliban periods where the author was forced to leave the country -- fleeing to Iran before heading for the United States. This is an extremely readable book, and the story has a fast pace to it.

It's important to keep these Afghan voices and Afghan narratives in mind whenever thinking about the country. Amidst the plethora of commentary on Afghanistan written by foreigners it is easy to forget that Afghans understand their country best. Multiple 'understandings' exist, to be sure, but a failure to privilege the lived experiences makes useful intervention and hamkari much harder.

But don't take my word for it. Here are some clever people writing about what they learned from Fayez's book:

"An Undesirable Element is a fascinating tour through the tumultuous years that helped create modern Afghanistan. Fayez survived Soviet Afghanistan and revolutionary Iran, only to find himself watching from exile as his country devoured itself. Improbably, he returns after 2001 to help resurrect Afghanistan's devastated higher education system, giving an insider account of the challenges of building education in a land dominated by warlords and fundamentalism. The result is a poignant reminder of how much Afghanistan has endured, and the flicker of hope that remains despite it all."

-- Anand Gopal, author of No Good Men Among The Living

"A compelling read, An Undesirable Element recounts an Afghanistan many have forgotten. It serves as a rallying cry to once again imagine all that country might be. It's a tale as extraordinary as the land from which it comes."

-- Elliot Ackerman, author of Green On Blue

"An Undesirable Element moves fast as flames and offers a luminous account of the last half century of Afghan conflicts and redevelopment. Trevithick's oral history of Sharif Fayez's story is a trove: from a kiss on the head by the Afghan former King Zahir Shah, Fayez's life intersected with the future leaders and quiet supporters of his country--both heroic and tyrannical--from Columbia University to a Post-revolutionary University in Mashad, Iran. Fayez is a modest but robust storyteller whose eventual position as Afghanistan's first Minister of Education after the Taliban is only one of the strange twists and turns his story offers. His deft handling in the rebuilding of Afghanistan should be read by anyone interested in how one can use patience and determination to bring hope to a country reduced to rubble."

-- Adam Klein, editor, The Gifts of The State: New Afghan Writing

"The term visionary tends to be misapplied to those who are merely headstrong. But it is a perfectly apt description for Sharif Fayez, the most important figure in education in 21st-century Afghanistan, yet one that history may have neglected without his memoir. Such an omission would have deprived future generations of Afghans from understanding how Fayez, perhaps more than any single person, created hope for the country’s young minds at the turn of the millennium and, in so doing, altered a nation's destiny."

-- Martin Kuz, freelance journalist

Links to purchase paperback and electronic copies here...

Note-Taking Jujitsu, Or How I Make Sense Of What I Read

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Note-taking is a problem. It's an interesting problem, but still a problem. Many people have switched over from paper books to digital copies. I am certainly one of the early adopters in this trend, having wrangled Graeme Smith and his sister into facilitating a first iteration of Amazon's Kindle to be delivered to my house in Kandahar.

My colleague Felix Kuehn and I used Kindle versions of books heavily in our research for An Enemy We Created. Using those references in footnotes was difficult at the time: the format was so new that established footnoting styles (APA/Chicago etc) hadn’t developed the standards for referencing kindle documents. All this was made harder by the fact that Kindle copies of books added a whole new problem into the mix by abandoning page numbers for ‘Kindle location numbers’. This changed a few years later, and current users probably won’t have this problem, but if you go look at the footnotes for An Enemy We Created, you’ll still find that many, if not most, of the references are to Kindle locations and not page numbers. In fact, I think our book was probably the first serious history work to rely so extensively on digital Kindle references in the footnotes; I remember having discussions with our publisher about it.

 
 

All this isn’t to say paper copies don't have their uses. But some books just aren't available in digital format. I'll get into the workaround for that later. The best way to make this less of a problem is to gently nudge publishers to issue their books on a kindle format.1 But I am already getting off track.

All this seemed to come to a head this past week, where a podcast I hosted together with Matt Trevithick took up the topic of notes and note-taking. Mark Bernstein, our guest on the show, wrote a really excellent book on the topic some years ago entitled The Tinderbox Way. I’d strongly recommend you read if you’re involved in knowledge work in any way. Here’s a short excerpt defining the importance and use patterns for notes:

“Notes play three distinct roles in our daily work:

•Notes are records, reminding us of ideas and observations that we might otherwise forget.

•Shared notes are a medium, an efficient communication channel between colleagues and collaborators.

•Notes are a process for clarifying thinking and for refining inchoate ideas.

Understanding often emerges gradually from the accumulation of factual detail and from our growing comprehension of the relationships among isolated details. Only after examining the data, laying it out and handling it, can we feel comfortable in reaching complex decisions.”2

Later in the week, Maria Popova (of Brainpickings fame) was on Tim Ferriss’ podcast to talk about her website, her reading and her workflow. Both Tim and Maria expressed frustration over the lack of tools for people wanting to download and interact with their Kindle clippings:

“I highlight in the kindle app on the iPad, and then Amazon has this function that you can basically see your kindle notes on the desktop on your computer. I go to those, I copy them from that page, and I paste them into an Evernote file to have all my notes on a specific book in one place. But sometimes I will also take a screengrab of a kindle page with my highlighted passage, and then email that screengrab into my Evernote email, because Evernote has, as you know, Optical Character Recognition, so when I search within it, it’s also going to search the text in that image. I don’t have to wait till I’ve finished the book.

The formatting is kind of shitty in the kindle notes on the desktop(…) if you copy them, they paste into Evernote with this really weird formatting. (…) It’s awful. If you want to fix it you have to do it manually within Evernote. (…) There is no viable solution that I know.”3

She then goes on to some more detailed points of how this doesn’t work, and Tim commiserates, suggesting that maybe they should hire some people to fix this problem. But the good thing is that there are solutions. The problems Maria and Tim bemoan are things that every other Kindle user has had to deal with since day one, so thankfully there are a number of workarounds that simplify the process of reading, annotating and sifting within one’s notes of a book or document.4

So notes are important, we get that. But how do we use them to their utmost? How do we even gather them together and store them? How do we use them for our writing, for our thinking? These are all important questions which I don’t feel have been properly answered, and where those answers have been given, they’re buried or hidden somewhere out on the internet.

I want this post to get into the weeds about how to get your materials off a Kindle device, how to store it usefully on a Mac (my apologies, PC/Linux users), and how to repurpose those notes to be creative, to write, and to think.

This post has three parts:

  1. Storage
  2. Clipping & Splitting
  3. Discovery & Meaning

It will by necessity be an overview of some useful tools and options for researchers, but if you leave comments I can probably expand on individual points/sections in follow-up posts if needed.

1. Storage

This is a problem that wasn’t explicitly raised in the things that motivated this post, but it’s something I get asked frequently. Maria and Tim both seem to be avid Evernote users, and I know many others also use this, but there are other options. It’s worth starting here because the tools will determine what you can do with your notes.

I’ve offered advice to other Mac users on what software to use for research projects that require a certain deftness in handling large quantities of sometimes disparate materials. The same applies to people who are just trying to keep track of the things they read, trying to draw together connections, and to derive meaning from it all. I’ll get into the meaning-creation in the final section, but for the moment, let me briefly describe our four options for file/note storage as I see it.5

  1. Finder/PathFinder. This is the lowest-tech option. Basically, once you split your files up (see section two) you store them in folders and refer to them that way. I don’t find this option very attractive or useful, because it’s like a filing cabinet. Your ability to discover connections and to remember what’s in those folders is pretty limited. I don’t recommend this at all, but from conversations with other researchers and writers, it seems this is the default option.
  2. Evernote. I include this here because it’s part of a workflow that we’ll cover later on. Evernote is great for all the reasons you can read about on their site. It syncs across all your mobile and desktop devices, it OCRs images so you can search for text captured inside photos you upload into your library of notes.
  3. DevonThink. This is my default ‘bucket’ for information, documents and notes. You can read up on the many (MANY) things that DevonThink Pro Office or DTPO (the version you should get, if you’re getting this software) does. Not only does DTPO store your documents, but it allows you to access that information in a number of extremely useful formats. There is a mobile app, too, though it could do with a bit more work. The most interesting feature of DTPO is its search and discovery functionality (using some magic sauce algorithms). They don’t make as much of this on their website as they used to, but I’d strongly recommend you check out these two articles (one, and two) by Steve Berlin Johnson which explain a little of the wonderful things DevonThink can do for your notes. As with the next recommendation, it’s not cheap. But powerful doesn’t always come cheap. It’s a solid investment if you spend the time getting to know this piece of software.
  4. Tinderbox. I discussed this at some length on the Sources & Methods podcast with Mark Bernstein, so I’d recommend you listen to that as your first port of call. Tinderbox is not an everything-bucket in the way that Evernote and DevonThink are, and I use it slightly differently, but it’s a great place to actually do the work of thinking, organising and writing once you have something (i.e. a project of some sort) for which you want to use all your notes. I’ll explain more about this in section three.

I’d recommend getting to know the different bits of software to get a sense of what they can do. DevonThink has a handy section of their website where you can see how people use it in their work lives. Tinderbox has something similar, with some case studies of usage.

For DevonThink, it’s generally good to keep your ‘buckets’/databases of files separated by topic. I have a mix of these kinds of databases (50 in total): some are country-specific, some are project-specific (i.e. to contain the research that goes into a book or a long report), and some are topic-specific (i.e. I have one for clippings and notes relating to Mathematics, one for things relating to Cardiology etc). I’d also recommend you give Steve Berlin Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From a read, particularly chapter 4.

Given the learning curve with some aspects of the workflow that follows, you might want to consider introducing these pieces of software one-by-one, or as needed. That way you’re using only what you understand and can implement things without being too overwhelmed by the novelty of the systems. It took me years (almost a decade) to implement and iterate the systems described below, and I’m still not finished modifying as the tools change.

2. Clipping & Splitting

This section is all about getting materials off mobile devices and onto your computer where you can put them into some sort of overarching database.

Accessing Your Amazon Kindle Clippings

First let’s sort out how best to get notes from a kindle onto your Mac. Don’t use Amazon’s website. It’s going to create all sorts of problems for you in terms of formatting.

First thing’s first: sync your kindle to the cloud. Just turn on the wifi/3G and select the “Sync” option. This will ensure all your highlights are backed up to the cloud.

Then plug your Kindle into your computer via USB. Then go into the “Documents” folder, and search for a file called “My Clippings.txt”. If you’ve been using your kindle for a while, it’s probably going to be quite large. Nevertheless, copy that file to your desktop. Feel free to eject your Kindle from your laptop now. We won’t be needing it any more.

 

An example of what you might see when you open your "My Clippings.txt" file

 

If you open the txt file that is now saved to your desktop, you’ll find all your clippings and annotations preserved in a useful plaintext format. This may solve your problems straightaway, in which case, congratulations: you now have all your annotations in a useful format that you can use however you wish.

If you want to take it to the next level, though, you’ll want to split this file up. At the moment, you have a very large plaintext file which contains all your notes. You’re likely to have notes from a wide variety of topics and books in here, so it doesn’t make sense for you to keep them all in a single location. The ideal solution is for you to have a single file for every clipping, a single file for every annotation.6

This is where Split-ter.scpt comes in. I’m afraid I don’t know who to credit for this wonderful piece of code. I downloaded it somewhere on the internet some years back and can’t seem to find a link to the author either in the code or elsewhere online. (Whoever you are, thank you!)

This script works with another piece of software mentioned above — DevonThink Pro Office. For now, I’ll ask you to ignore that bit, and focus on what’s happening to the file. I use the script to convert our “My Clippings.txt” file into multiple files. It goes in, finds a delimiter (any piece of text or syntax that repeats itself in the original file) and creates a new note/file every time it comes across this delimiter. In this way, you’ll quite quickly from the file shown above to something like this:

Now you have a note for every annotation and/or clipping. This is then something you can dump into Evernote, or keep in DevonThink. Again, more about the difference between these programmes in the next section. (Note, that you can use Tinderbox to split up the “MyClippings.txt” file as well using the “Explode” tool).

UPDATE (a little later on Friday night): Seb Pearce has just let me know that there are other options available for dealing with the 'My Clippings.txt' file. Check them out on his site.

The second problem raised on the Tim Ferriss podcast was Amazon’s limitations for clippings. This differs from publisher to publisher, it seems, so there’s no way of predicting it. An unfortunate rule of thumb: the more useful the book, the more likely the publisher has locked it down. When you’re making clippings inside the book, Amazon gives you no notification that you’ve reached the book’s limitations. But when you go to check your “My Clippings.txt” file to start using your notes, then you may find the note says:

"<You have reached the clipping limit set by the publishers>"

All the work you’ve done selecting pieces of text are for nothing, it would seem. The publisher has prevented you from using your book.

One solution is to remove the DRM from the book before you put it on your kindle. This is legal so long as you’re not sharing the book with other people (as this process would theoretically allow you to do).7 Follow this link to find out how to de-DRM your Kindle and iBooks documents. You can also visit libgen.org to download an already-DRMed copy of the book you’ve purchased. These will often be in .epub format so you’ll have to convert these over to a .mobi format if you want to use them on your kindle device. (To convert from .epub to .mobi, use the free Calibre cross-platform software.)

If you read a de-DRMed copy of a kindle book on your kindle device, there will be no limitations as to how much you can annotate. The publishers limitations will all be gone. So that’s one option.

For those who aren’t comfortable removing the DRM on your books, you can get all your annotations out, but it comes with a little bit of hassle.

Here’s an example of what I mean (screenshot from my DevonThink library). I was reading in Hegghammer’s excellent Jihad in Saudi Arabia and making highlights (at 4:06am, apparently) but at some point I hit the limit imposed by the publisher.

 
 

The workaround to bypass this limit from the publisher is to first export all your notes out of your “MyClippings.txt” file. So all your clippings are saved, even though some of them may not work. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the final three notes aren’t working because of the publisher’s limitatations. That’s the case in the screenshot above. What you do is (again, once you’ve backed up the clippings txt file) delete three of the earlier clippings that you already have. Then you sync your Kindle to the server and it will think that you have clipped three less quotes, so these will then become available (both in the myclippings.txt file and on the website. Like I said, it’s a bit fiddly. I would much rather remove the DRM completely and not have this hassle at all, though when you do that Amazon will not sync your clippings to the cloud and to their kindle.amazon.com database. You’ll have to export them using the tools I mentioned above.

Keeping Up With The Joneses, or How to Use Instapaper to Clip Web Articles

This may be something completely idiosyncratic to my own workflow, but I don’t enjoy reading articles in a web browser. I’d also prefer not to be hijacked into reading all these articles. For instance, when I’m in Tweetbot/Twitter or Facebook and I see a link that I like, I will almost never read that article then and there. Rather, I’ll send it to my Instapaper queue.

First, a quick word about Instapaper vs Pocket. I use Instapaper. I started off with them, switched over to Pocket for about two years, and now I’m back with Instapaper. They’re both more or less the same. Instapaper happens to be what I’ve chosen for myself because of their handy Kindle service. (If you have articles in your queue, you can have Instapaper send the most recent articles to your Kindle at a particular time (i.e. first thing in the morning) which you can then clip and archive to your heart’s content.) Both Pocket and Instapaper work with what follows, so just pick one and stick to it. I’d recommend Instapaper because they allow for the sharing of the full texts of articles and because of the Kindle digest feature.

I find I have so much to stay on top of and keep tracking online, I can’t just click around and read things as and when I see them online. I schedule time apart for reading of my Instapaper queue (and for reading books on my Kindle) and only read during those times. (I do the same with email, only checking and responding to email between the hours of 12-1pm and 5-6pm each day. The rest of the day email is off and disabled. I even deleted my email account on my iPhone as inspired by this medium.com post.)

My workflow with web articles is to follow as much as possible via RSS. I prune the sites I’m following every three months, but in general the number is stable around 650. I use Newsblur as my RSS reader, and every time I find an article I’d like to read (later), I use the handy ‘send to instapaper’ bookmarklet. This sends the article to my Instapaper queue.

The same goes for twitter. I follow enough people on Twitter for it to be impossible for me to read every post that passes through my stream. I will dip once or twice a day, however, to see what people are saying. I use two services to monitor my Twitter and Facebook streams to pick out the most-shared articles to ensure that I don’t miss the big sharks of the day. They’re both free, and I’d strongly recommend you signing up and getting their daily summaries of what people were talking about on Twitter that day. News.me has been around for a while and I trust their article selection. Nuzzel is newer, but it seems to have a few more options. I guess you could probably do with picking only one of the two.

After reading articles on my Kindle (or sometimes on a mobile device like my iPad or iPhone), you can clip the article if you want to save it (just like making a clipping inside a book, only the entire article is saved).

 

This is what you see in an article when you click to "Clip This Article" on a kindle...

 

Then your clippings will be captured in the ‘MyClippings.txt’ file as explained above and you can export them directly to DevonThink or Evernote or Tinderbox. (The main downside to doing things this way is that when the kindle clips it, all formatting is lost (including paragraph breaks)).

Alternatively, you can ‘Favourite’ the article. I use this setting because it then sends the article and URL to my @stricklinks twitter account, something I created to share the best things I was reading. It also saves the full text of the article to Pinboard (a service I’ve already written about on my blog here) and to Evernote. (I use If This Then That to facilitate this.)

Once I’m done reading, I can go into Evernote and all my articles are waiting for me to be sorted through. Because I use DevonThink as my everything-bucket, and because all the sorting and discoverability features are there, I have a separate stage of exporting my notes out of Evernote into DevonThink. I’ve already probably taken you a little too far down the rabbit-hole of my workflow, but this is an important stage because otherwise you can’t do anything with your notes.

Luckily, someone has written a script which makes this possible. Many many thanks to the good people at Veritrope for updating the script every time updates to the software get released. It’s fairly self-explanatory. You select the notes that you want to export, choose which DevonThink folder you want to export to and then it goes to work. It can occasionally be buggy and stop half-way through, but usually a little trial-and-error will let you pinpoint which Evernote note is causing the problem and you can transport that one over manually.

I usually do an export session to bring everything from Evernote into my DevonThink inbox once a week. This way the number of clippings doesn’t get too out of control, and I’m not constantly playing around with this during the week. You might find this all is overkill, but it has become an essential part of my workflow to store the various things I’m reading on a daily basis.

Pillaging Your Hard Copies, AKA Living the Paperless Dream

You may have hardcover copies of books that you want to use as part of this system. One way to use them is to scan the books into your DevonThink library. DevonThink Pro Office comes with an OCR package (via ABBYY FineReader) so whatever you scan can then become searchable and useful.

In the past, particularly with books I’ve purchased in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are unlikely (read: never) to be made available as electronic versions, I take a Stanley knife to the bindings, feed the pages into my ScanSnap scanner which scans both sides and compiles all the scans into a single PDF document that is searchable on my laptop. The whole process is destructive of the book, but it gives the text inside a new life. Given how fast the new ScanSnap models work (around 25 pages per minute, both sides), this is an attractive way to get digital access to materials that are only available in paper form.

You can highlight text within the resulting PDFs and then later export your clippings from those PDFs as notes into DevonThink. There’s another useful script to help with that. It only works with the free Skim PDF reader, but that’s my default PDF reader so it works out well.

For more on paperless workflows, check out David Sparks’ Field Guide on the topic.

3. Discovery & Meaning

If you made it this far, congratulations. This is the section where all the fiddling with export starts to take on some meaning. After all, we’re not reading and exporting these notes purely because we are hoarders or to fetishise the art of collection (though in some cases, that may be what’s going on). No, we are taking notes because we are trying to understand difficult topics, because we are trying to solve important problems.

Discovering Links and Connections

The Steve Berlin Johnson articles referenced earlier are an essential first stop, particularly in demonstrating how DevonThink can add some serendipity into how you use your individual notes. To give you an example of how this works, here’s a screenshot from my ‘TalQaeda’ database that I put together while working on An Enemy We Created:

 
 

In the upper part you can see a bunch of notes relating to the Haqqani family. The lower left part is the contents of a note (Note: exported from Instapaper). The bottom right list of documents (under “See Also”) is a list of notes that may be related to this particular quote. This is the magic algorithmic sauce I mentioned earlier that makes DevonThink so powerful.

If I click through to some of those suggested notes, I’m taken to similar quotes on the same topics, two PDFs of reports (of dubious analytic value, but that’s a separate issue), three clippings from Kindle books where people are making reference to the relationship between the Haqqanis and al-Qaeda (the subject of the original note). Note that I didn’t have to pre-tag documents for this ‘see also’ functionality to work its magic. It analyses inside the text and makes its suggestions based on the similarities it identifies. (Needless to say, it’s not simply a matter of matching individual words. Some of the suggested notes don’t mention al-Qaeda or the Haqqanis by name, but they are implied; DevonThink catches this all).

Once you start to build up a decent database of notes (my Afghanistan database has just under 65 million words of notes, including 12,800+ PDFs) this ‘See Also’ functionality really allows for some unexpected links to be made, especially when you’re at the stage of writing up a project/book. One note will lead to another note, which will lead to another note. If you follow these trails of notes (like breadcrumbs) you can develop a pretty idiosyncratic picture.

I do not know of a manual method which allows for this kind of process.

DevonThink has an extremely robust search function which allows you to find things along similar principles (including a very useful ‘fuzzy spelling’ option, perfect when checking my database for notes on someone whose first name could be spelt Mohammad, Muhammad, Mohammed or any of the other variations).

Figuring Out What It All Means

Once you have an idea of the outlines of the topic, once you’ve been taking notes for a while, your database in DevonThink is probably starting to fill with useful information.

If you’re writing a book, though, you’ll want to start writing alongside this gathering process. (Check out Michael Lopp’s overview of the process of writing a large research book, which, to my mind, is fairly accurate.)

I don’t find DevonThink a particularly pleasant place to write, so I do that elsewhere. Before I write things out in long form, I usually do some outlining, particularly if it’s something where the dense collection of factual detail is important to the development of the argument (as was the case with An Enemy We Created). For this, I find Tinderbox indispensable for working up an overview of what I know, for figuring out how I’m going to structure it, and for helping me put together my first draft.

Tinderbox can display notes in a number of different ways. You can view your documents as outlines, as maps, or even as timelines:

 
 

In this image you can see the information arranged as an outline, but here (below) you see the same information organised as a map (mirroring the actual layout of the map of those districts in a particular part of Kandahar):

 
 

Just to show you that it can handle complexity, here’s a map created by Felix to help him figure out how people involved in militant Islamism were/are connected across different geographical sectors:

It's complicated...

I’ll often use Tinderbox maps to store outlines for how I’ll write a particular section or chapter, making notes inside the document, dragging quotes in from DevonThink to supplement the argument that’s being constructed.

Getting to the point where you can actually start writing on the basis of your notes is the whole point of all of this. Technology is useful, but mainly when directed at a specific problem or goal. All the tips, tricks and software described in this post has helped me write books, reports and (coming soon!) even my doctoral thesis/PhD. I have encountered only a few (barely a handful) researchers who use their computers for this collation, sifting and discovery process. There’s no way to keep it all in your head. Here’s hoping more people start adopting these tools…

Footnotes:

  1. For many years, Amazon offered users the ability to let publishers know that you wanted to see title X or Y on a Kindle format, but they failed to make this piece of interaction useful by keeping track of what you'd requested of publishers (so as then to be able to let you know when it was finally released in Kindle format). ↩
  2. Excerpt From: Mark Bernstein. “The Tinderbox Way.” iBooks. ↩
  3. Selective transcript from around the 50-minute mark in the podcast audio. Needless to say, the rest of this blogpost constitutions a ‘viable solution’. ↩
  4. Most of these are derived from other people, I should say. I try to give credit where I can, but sometimes I can’t remember where I first read something or who first recommended a particular tool or trick. ↩
  5. Yes yes, I know, I’m going to leave out some mentions for useful software here. This is an overview, and I’m just trying to describe some options for what might work in certain situations. ↩
  6. A clipping is when you have selected and copied a passage from the book for safe-keeping, and an annotation is when you yourself write a note connected to a particular passage. ↩
  7. Needless to say, don’t take legal advice from me. ↩

Our First Publication: "I Am Akbar Agha", Memoir of a Taliban Insider

in ,

I_am_Akbar_Agha-cover Very happy to announce the publication of First Draft Publishing's inaugural book, I Am Akbar Agha. Felix and I have been working on this initiative for a while, and it's nice to have it see the light of day.

Akbar Agha's book is the latest in an (increasingly) long line of memoirs by individuals associated with the (Afghan) Taliban. So far we have insider accounts from Zaeef, Mutawakil, Mujhda, Mustas'ad, Abu al-Walid al-Masri and rumours of works being written by figures like Mawlawi Qalamuddin and others.

As for what's in the book, I'll refer you to the blurb on the back:

Following in the tradition of Mullah Zaeef’s My Life With the Taliban, Akbar Agha’s memoir tells a story of war, friendship and political intrigue. Starting in 1980s Kandahar, the difficulties and successes of the mujahedeen come through clearly as Akbar Agha struggles to administer a group of fighters. He details the different groups fighting in Kandahar, their cooperation and the scale of the Soviet Union’s efforts to crush them. Not directly a participant in the Taliban government that ruled post-1994, Akbar Agha offers a sometimes-critical account of the administration built by many of his former fighters. After the fall of the Islamic Emirate in 2001, Akbar Agha was involved in the Jaish ul-Muslimeen opposition group and for the first time he has revealed his account of what happened in the kidnapping of UN aid workers. I Am Akbar Agha ends with an analysis of the problems afflicting Afghanistan and outlines a vision for the political future of the country post-elections and post-2015. Anand Gopal has written an introduction to the book.

 

If you're interested in Afghanistan and want to delve a little deeper into the Taliban's (pre-)history, you'll enjoy this book. Lots of new material.

We also published an exclusive interview with Akbar Agha over on our blog.

Anand Gopal has written a great foreword to introduce and contextualise the book. If you're interested in learning more about the book but don't know whether to commit to buying it, I'd recommend downloading the free preview/sample of the text via iBooks or the Amazon Kindle Store where you can read the full text of Anand's foreword.

If you end up reading it, please leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads as a way of supporting our publishing initiative to get more of these primary source texts translated and made available to a wider audience.

Buy a paperback or electronic copy here: LINK

Find out more about First Draft Publishing here: LINK