After the United States’ 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, the country all but disappeared — at least from most Americans’ screens. We know that the US evacuation left many would-be refugees behind, and that women, in particular, are suffering under Taliban rule. But Afghanistan’s political and cultural turmoil has receded from our media and our consciousness.
Into this information vacuum steps Åsne Seierstad, an award-winning Norwegian journalist whose best-selling “The Bookseller of Kabul” (2003) tunneled memorably into the Afghan psyche. Written entirely from the perspective of its characters, it probed a family’s challenges as the country transitioned from late 1990s Taliban rule to a US-backed regime. Seierstad discovered that the country’s patriarchal norms were more enduring than any government, even in the relatively liberal capital of Kabul.
“The Afghans,” Seierstad’s latest, is an even more ambitious, and equally absorbing, nonfiction narrative. Burrowing into both Afghan family life and the country’s convoluted politics, the book follows three people over several decades, culminating in the dramatic first year of the Taliban restoration. Readers of “The Bookseller of Kabul” will encounter familiar themes, including the struggle of Afghan women for agency and the competing pulls of Western values, tribal traditions, and radical Islamic ideology.
Seierstad began her research with two subjects whose worldviews are poles apart. Jamila Afghani, a polio and shooting survivor, had to beg her prosperous family for an education. Her knowledge of Islam would eventually bolster her human rights activism. She married her former Arabic teacher, became a government minister, and even engaged in (futile) negotiations with the Taliban. Seierstad met her in Norway, where, in exile, Jamila was continuing her human rights advocacy via Zoom.
Far more remarkable (and harder to obtain) was the cooperation of Seierstad’s second subject: Bashir, a fatherless boy from rural Afghanistan who became a mid-ranking Talib and jihadist. Bashir survived battle, imprisonment, torture, and a death sentence, all of which he described in detail to Seierstad. Like many military leaders, Bashir struggled in peacetime, glorying in the Taliban victory while missing the excitement of war.
Both subjects allowed the author extraordinary access, as well as permission to use their real names. At one point, for example, Seierstad was in the room when Bashir paid visits to relatives of the Taliban’s “martyrs,” offering them cash and consolation. She also interviewed Bashir’s two wives and his fiancée, all seemingly reconciled to the Afghan practices of arranged marriage and polygamy.
The details are fascinating. Bashir, nothing if not fair-minded, scrupulously divided his nights between the wives, whom he called “concentrated joy.” The two women had become friends, sharing in both housekeeping and bombmaking. The fiancée, by contrast, had pressed for a separate domicile, an expensive request to which Bashir acceded. “What I found no hint of,” Seierstad writes, “was the wish for a more independent life.”
In their submission to tradition, these women couldn’t have been more different from Seierstad’s third subject. The pseudonymous Ariana, who aced all her school exams, is heir to the grim struggle for cultural supremacy represented by Jamila and Bashir. She was on the verge of completing her legal studies when the Taliban regained power. By curtailing women’s education, forcing them to don burkas, and urging them to stay home, the new regime seems to have snuffed out Ariana’s future.
Seierstad’s short, punchy sentences, ably translated by Seán Kinsella, draw readers into the narrative. She starts by alternating between Jamil and Bashir’s childhoods, both marked by tragedy and hardship. War — against the Soviet invaders, among Afghan tribes and factions, and finally against the Americans — is a constant backdrop. “You get out of bed, build the fire, boil some water, perhaps warm up some of yesterday’s bread and suddenly you’re dead,” Seierstad writes. The story gathers momentum as the characters’ worlds collide, and Ariana’s plight shows just how high the stakes have become.
One key takeaway from “The Afghans” is the fecklessness of American efforts in Afghanistan. “The Bush administration made a fatal error in blurring the distinction between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and then tarring them with the same brush,” Seierstad writes. Later the US continued to pour aid into the corruption-fueled governments of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani. To a country in chaos, scarred by decades of war, the Taliban at least seemed to promise order and stability. So what if (some) women’s hopes for education and careers were collateral damage?
From Norway, Jamila and her family immigrate to Canada, where she plans to stay involved in Afghan affairs. Ariana’s fate is more dire. Her once supportive parents prod her into an engagement that she soon tries, vainly, to sever. “Your happiness means nothing to me,” her mother tells her. Seierstad leaves Ariana in extremis: battling with her family, locked into marrying a man she already abhors, and dreading the joyless enforced domesticity that seems destined to follow.
THE AFGHANS: Three Lives Through War, Love, and Revolt
By Åsne Seierstad; translated by Seán Kinsella
Bloomsbury Publishing, 448 pages, $32.99
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Slate, Mother Jones, and other publications.