THE AFGHANS: Three Lives Through War, Love, and Revolt, by Asne Seierstad; translated by Seán Kinsella
Afghanistan has largely disappeared from the news since the Taliban took over in August 2021, in a victory that restored the restrictive Islamic movement to power, humiliated the United States and crushed Afghan women who had embraced the Western notion that they could follow their dreams.
In light of this neglect, Asne Seierstad’s new book, “The Afghans,” is a valuable addition to the canon of literature on the country. A Norwegian journalist who has published several other books set in war-torn countries, including the best-selling “The Bookseller of Kabul” (2003), Seierstad writes compellingly, with an eye for the details and dialogue that make her subjects come to life. She manages to achieve a rare intimacy, something that is tough in a book about Afghanistan, a place where outsiders are seldom allowed inside homes and most men don’t speak the names of their wives publicly. But her book also raises questions about how she constructs her narrative nonfiction.
At nearly 430 pages, “The Afghans” is a sprawling epic focused largely on three figures whose lives Seierstad recounts with vivid granularity: Jamila, a high-powered women’s advocate; Bashir, a Taliban commander; and Ariana, a young law student (Seierstad has changed her name to protect her privacy). Through their stories, the book also traces the country’s complicated recent history — from the Soviet invasion of 1979 through an American-backed insurgency, civil war, the initial rise of the Taliban, the return of the United States and its allies after 9/11, and, finally, the restoration of the Taliban after the U.S. withdrawal in 2021.
For nearly 20 years, between 2001 and 2021, Western intervention created a unique laboratory in Afghanistan’s major cities, primarily in Kabul, the capital, for testing what a version of democracy could mean in a country where the Taliban had banned women from the public sphere and required everyone to conform to their vision of a strict Islamic way of life. Women shed burqas and joined the work force. Boys dressed in Western clothes, watched Bollywood movies and hoped to build a new Afghanistan. Girls started school.
The book’s two main female characters share characteristics with many Kabuli women of that era: Jamila, born a few years before the Soviet invasion, overcomes a physical disability and her family’s objections to get an education and start a nonprofit organization to empower women. When the Taliban return, she has to decide whether to remain or flee.
Ariana, born the year before the Sept. 11 attacks, wants to be a judge, and her family, especially her grandfather, supports her. After the Taliban take over, she, too, must decide what to do. Ariana’s fate should haunt any reader of the book — anyone who’s ever wondered about the repercussions of the West entering and then abandoning Afghanistan.
Bashir’s road is different: hard in the beginning, and pretty comfortable by the end. His father is killed in the 1980s during the jihad against the Soviet-backed government. He becomes a Taliban commander after the Sept. 11 attacks and revels in his own jihad, training suicide bombers and firing rockets at his enemies, accumulating wives and children along the way. Bashir has to decide how to adjust to peace, what role he will play when the Taliban move from fighting to governing.
The most interesting part of the book comes after August 2021, when Western journalists stopped going as frequently and freely to Afghanistan and not much of a public record exists documenting how life changed there. This is when Seierstad visited to research “The Afghans” and this section makes up more than 40 percent of her book.
As well written and immersive as “The Afghans” is, I also began to wonder about Seierstad’s reporting. The best narratives rely on scores of interviews and documents, observations of subjects for months or years, and, given the fallibility of individual memory, a willingness to challenge people’s recollections to be able to construct the most truthful possible version. In an epilogue titled “The Basis of the Book,” Seierstad writes that though she initially spoke with Jamila over Zoom and met with her in Norway, she also made “three extended trips” to Afghanistan between January and July 2022 and explains that, apart from scenes for which she was present, her book “is built upon what the people in it have told me.”
This last fact is evident on nearly every page. “The Afghans” includes thoughts and dialogue recalled not only by its main characters of events in which they were directly involved, but also, in the case of Jamila, by her of what her parents did and said to each other before she was born. Describing the meeting between Jamila’s mother, Bibi Sitara, and her future husband, Ibrahim, when they were teenagers, for example, Seierstad paints a scene worthy of a novel. “Clear off! Get out of our area!” Bibi Sitara allegedly yelled at Ibrahim, throwing stones at him as he pushed a cart full of goods near her home. “He tried to turn the cart but was pelted with more stones,” Seierstad writes. “He squinted in the direction of the voice and saw it was just a kid.”
At another point, Seierstad relays an extensive conversation between a teenage Bashir and an old fighter teaching him how to shoot a rocket. “Within a couple of hours,” she explains, “Bashir had learned the theory behind perfect accuracy.”
Maybe. But Afghanistan is a country with a rich oral tradition, where exaggeration is practically an art form. No matter how many times Seierstad says she asked Bashir about a long-ago battle, it’s hard to trust exactly what he says. Bashir is relating his own heroic exploits, which no one in his orbit would dare challenge. He is, after all, a Taliban commander.
One of the first books I read after arriving in Afghanistan was “The Bookseller of Kabul,” an intimate account of the man who ran one of Kabul’s main bookstores and his family. It was wonderfully crafted. Seierstad changed his name and those of his family members, but since only one bookseller in Kabul fit the bill, everyone knew who he was. He was depicted as a hero and a tyrant, a man who risked punishment by the Taliban to sell unapproved books but who abused his wives and children.
He complained about the implications of the book for his life and for his family, and one of his wives sued Seierstad for invasion of privacy. She was eventually cleared of wrongdoing. Yet intimate portraits of her subjects remain a hallmark of her work, with the effect that the very trait that makes “The Afghans” so appealing is also what makes it troubling to a reader who has lived among, and reported on, the people she is writing about.
THE AFGHANS: Three Lives Through War, Love, and Revolt | By Asne Seierstad | Bloomsbury | 428 pp. | $35
Kim Barker is a Times reporter writing in-depth stories about the war in Ukraine.
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