From The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead Books, 2003), pp. 145-147:
“Be careful, Amir,” he said as I began to walk. “Of what, Baba?”
“I am not an ahmaq, so don’t play stupid with me.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Remember this,” Baba said, pointing at me, “The man is a Pashtun to the root. [...]
In the forthcoming issue of the Claremont Review of Books, Stanley Kurtz reviews three books by Akbar S. Ahmed, a social anthropologist who once served as Pakistan’s appointed “king” of Waziristan. Here are some excerpts about its grim political culture.
The British solution in Waziristan was to rule indirectly, through sympathetic tribal maliks (elders), who received [...]
From A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead Books, 2007), pp. 159-161:
IN JUNE OF THAT YEAR, 1992, there was heavy fighting in West Kabul between the Pashtun forces of the warlord Sayyaf and the Hazaras of the Wahdat faction. The shelling knocked down power lines, pulverized entire blocks of shops and homes. Laila [...]
From A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead Books, 2007), pp. 269-270
In the summer of 2000, the drought reached its third and worst year.
In Helmand, Zabol, Kandahar, villages turned into herds of nomadic communities, always moving, searching for water and green pastures for their livestock. When they found neither, when their goats and sheep [...]
I’ve been too busy with other projects lately to follow up on some news reports that relate to my recent excerpts from Rory Stewart’s travels in Afghanistan, in particular Anne Applebaum’s column last Tuesday advocating control rather than eradication of opium, the country’s largest cash crop by far.
Of course it isn’t fashionable right now to [...]
For the last three months, whenever I checked my e-mail at a Nepali town with an Internet cafe, I had received a message from someone just gone to govern Afghanistan. The UN application forms started passing around in October 2001, and then the circulars appeared: “Please don’t expect to write to this e-mail—there is no [...]
Seyyed Kerbalahi joined me after dinner. His real name was Rasul. He was called Kerbalahi, he explained, because he had been to Kerbala in Iraq to visit the sacred Shia shrine of Imam Hussein twice in the late 1950s, once for three months and once for five. I asked him why he had not completed [...]
We saw a young boy drawing water and Abdul Haq threatened to kill him. The boy cried. Then Abdul Haq laughed and said, “I drove over the edge of this road three years ago, in a jeep. We crashed into the ditch where the boy is whining. The other six people in the car were [...]
Our host picked up the teapot.
“No, no,” said Abdul Haq. “I will pour it.”
“I insist—you are my guest.”
Abdul Haq grabbed the handle; Haji Mumtaz took it back. This was a ritual I had gone through almost every night as I walked across Iran. This village had been part of an empire centered in Persia for [...]
In June 1998 the treaty for the International Criminal Court was signed in Rome…. Despite the positive publicity the court has already received from the human rights movement, it can only magnify the dangers of the ad hoc tribunals. The standard of justice that will be delivered has already been widely questioned, as the odds [...]
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