THE AFGHANS: THREE LIVES THROUGH WAR, LOVE AND REVOLT
By Asne Seierstad
Virago, Rs 1,999
Asne Seierstad’s 2002 bestseller, The Bookseller of Kabul, was hailed in the English-speaking world as an intimate portrait of ordinary Afghans set against massive conflict and geopolitical change. It acquired a certain notoriety when Seierstad was sued by the bookseller himself for defamation, a case Seierstad won subsequently.
The present work is in the same narrative tradition: Seierstad describes it as a “documentary record… based on testimonies.” The Afghans chronicles the lives and the experiences of three unrelated protagonists based on detailed conversations and interviews with each one of them and their families collected over a period of time.
Jamila is the oldest. Crippled by polio from childhood, Jamila comes from a well-to-do family that had been forced to flee to Peshawar — part of the mass displacement from Afghanistan that followed the Soviet invasion — to live the life of refugees. Jamila struggled with her family to go to school and then to university, but she succeeded. By the time the Taliban was evicted from Afghanistan in 2001 and the family relocated to Afghanistan, she was running her own NGO; for a time, she was also a deputy minister in the government of Afghanistan. Her experience there provides a good insight into the corruption and the dysfunctionality that became the hallmark of post-Taliban Afghanistan.
The second protagonist is Bashir who embodies Afghan history from the opposite direction. Coming of age post 9/11, Bashir aspires to become a Taliban commander as he grows up in the AfPak badlands. Family life proves to be a constant in Bashir’s life; his status and influence steadily increase as he moves up the Taliban hierarchy. There is also loyalty to the cause. Bashir is captured by the security forces and the American troops but he refuses to crack despite torture and long periods of imprisonment.
Ariana, the third protagonist, is a true millennial who grows up in the hothouse of post 9/11 Kabul amidst freedoms and opportunities that were unimaginable earlier. Ariana’s father is a senior officer in the ministry of defence. Her mother is a teacher. Education opens many doors for Ariana. Intent on completing her degree in law, it appears to her that Afghanistan would provide endless opportunities.
Each of the trajectories of these three lives would be dramatically altered by Afghanistan’s changing fortunes — “Bit by bit the republic was becoming an emirate.” When the end finally came in August 2021, Jamila and her family — perhaps amongst the lucky ones — had no choice but to emigrate. From being somebody, she became a faceless refugee. But she continued valiantly to run her NGO remotely.
For Bashir, the Taliban victory meant the opposite. He was now a prominent Taliban commander and someone greatly valued by the new regime. But a life in combat means that a new frontier beckons quite often. Since the Taliban transformed Afghanistan into an Islamic Emirate, surely, the reasoning goes, the same can now be attempted first in the tribal areas of Pakistan and then the whole of Pakistan itself.
Ariana’s case mirrors the hopelessness of many girls and women in Kabul after August 2021. The closure of the university to women meant that a question mark hung over her plan to complete her degree in law. Then parental pressure to get married mounted. Consequently, she got swept along against her will: for Ariana, this, more than anything else, marks the triumph of the Taliban.
Each of these life stories is compelling, moving and reflective of Afghanistan’s constantly interrupted trajectories. Seierstad situates each of her three characters against the broader canvas of Afghan history, thereby giving us a sombre book. Will The Afghans be as successful as The Bookseller of Kabul? Perhaps not, although this too is an excellent read. But war exhaustion, the fact that the Western enterprise ended in defeat and, finally, Ukraine and Gaza mean that Afghanistan no longer triggers the attention it did in the early 2000s.