If current wars are preoccupying you this Remembrance Day, Jared Ferrie’s article in The Tyee recommends two books on Afghanistan to help understand that very complicated mess.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has written extensively on religious insurgencies and terrorism in Central Asia. Ferrie says Rashid’s new book, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia tells the definitive story of the Taliban’s rise to power. The first generation of Taliban insurgents were mostly recruited from Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, Rashid says. “They were literally orphans of the war, the rootless and the restless, the jobless and the economically deprived.” Warlords and gangsters, on the other hand, have been adept at playing all sides to their own advantage.

Many now hold positions in President Hamid Karzai’s government. The northern Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum is a prime example. Dostum, now a military chief of staff, once fought alongside the Soviets as an officer in the Afghan army. He continued to fight for the Soviet-supported Afghan government until it was clear that Kabul would fall to the mujahedeen in 1992. Then the formerly godless communist joined the ultra religious mujahedeen.

Ferrie’s second recommendation is Steve Coll’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, which examines how a relationship between Saudi, U.S., and Pakistani intelligence agencies fed the violence in Afghanistan.

Ferrie praises both books’ attention to detail and balance: “What emerges is a complex web of tribal, ethnic, religious, regional and global interests. The picture is complicated, but stark, and neither author falls into a deeply ideological interpretation of events.”

Related links:
Click here for the full review in The Tyee