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Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan
Today, most Westerners still see the war in Afghanistan as a contest between democracy and Islamist fanaticism. That war is real; but it sits atop an older struggle, between Kabul and the countryside, between order and chaos, between a modernist impulse to join the world and the pull of an older Afghanistan: a tribal universe of village republics permeated by Islam.
Now, Tamim Ansary draws on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, and Western and Afghan sources to explain history from the inside out, and to illuminate the long, internal struggle that the outside world has never fully understood. It is the story of a nation struggling to take form, a nation undermined by its own demons while, every 40 to 60 years, a great power crashes in and disrupts whatever progress has been made. Told in conversational, storytelling style, and focusing on key events and personalities, "Games without Rules" provides revelatory insight into a country at the center of political debate.
Now, Tamim Ansary draws on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, and Western and Afghan sources to explain history from the inside out, and to illuminate the long, internal struggle that the outside world has never fully understood. It is the story of a nation struggling to take form, a nation undermined by its own demons while, every 40 to 60 years, a great power crashes in and disrupts whatever progress has been made. Told in conversational, storytelling style, and focusing on key events and personalities, "Games without Rules" provides revelatory insight into a country at the center of political debate.
397 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2012
179 people are currently reading
4250 people want to read
About the author
Tamim Ansary
32 books537 followersMir Tamim Ansary is an Afghan-American author and public speaker. Ansary gained prominence in 2001 after he penned a widely circulated e-mail that denounced the Taliban but warned of the dangers of a military intervention by the United States. The e-mail was a response to a call to bomb Afghanistan "into the Stone Age." His book West of Kabul, East of New York published shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, is a literary memoir recounting his bicultural perspective on contemporary world conflicts. Ansary writes about Islam, Afghanistan, and history. His book Destiny Disrupted retells the history of the world through Islamic eyes. His new book The Invention of Yesterday explores the role of narrative as a force in world history Ansary directed the San Francisco Writers Workshop for 22 years.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 226 reviews
November 12, 2012
(Perseus Books Group kindly gave me a pre-publication galley of this book, but it will be available to the general public on 27 November 2012.)
Of all the histories I have read on Afghanistan, and I have read more than a few, Tamim Ansary’s is absolutely the best. Whether your knowledge is a clean slate and you are looking for one book that will explain this complex nation, or you are fairly conversant in the country, but want a brief refresher, Mr. Ansary will lay out everything you need to know in his latest offering. [b]Games without Rules[/b] begins with the rise of the Durrani line and brings the reader up through the present, with reporting through May of 2012.
Tamim Ansary does a number of things in his book that make it especially accessible for readers, but chief among them is linking events in Afghanistan to events with which his readers might be more familiar, such as the fact that the opening of his work, the dawning of the Durrani Empire, with its founder Ahmad Shah Baba, known as Afghanistan’s Founding Father, happened in 1747, roughly the same time as the founding of the United States of America. Over the course of reading the book the reader will also learn a great deal about the histories of India, Pakistan, and the neighboring central Asian republics, as the destinies of these nations and that of Afghanistan are all inter-linked. Another fact about Mr. Ansary’s writing that becomes quickly apparent is that this is not the writing of a dry, boring scholar of a historian. While never stooping to comedy or disdain, he manages to always keep a storyteller’s mien, full of adventure and humor and at times even anger and despair.
In addition to being written in an easily accessible style, this history is very well organized, carrying the reader seamlessly from one era into the next, clearly illustrating how each event, and not always those occurring solely within Afghanistan’s borders, caused the next to proceed. Perhaps most valuable is Mr. Ansary’s explanation of Afghanistan’s placement upon the world stage-the role that it has played over the last two hundred years, so often caught up geographically in the maelstrom between world powers, for instance, between Russia and British India.
As he takes his reader along on a journey through the various powers, foreign and domestic, who have vied for power over her people, Tamim Ansary, in a marvelously conversant manner, gives a cultural education that is unparalleled. From the cities to the furthest reaches of the valleys, the governance and social customs of the country are explained, and he uses this information to break down for the reader exactly why he feels that attempts by various foreign powers over the centuries to govern the Afghani people have not succeeded. His analysis is insightful and well-laid-out, and for those not well-versed in the subject, this book will prove especially useful in helping you to understand exactly why the political and social situation there is so complex.
My one very slight reservation for my conservative readership is that Mr. Ansary is very clearly a liberal, and that does bleed through, especially with regards to our current president. He is quite a fan of the president’s policies with regards to Afghanistan, something with which most conservatives do not agree. To give credit where credit is due, he also admits that Clinton made errors while in office. However, for the most part he does strive for partiality and is generally successful. No matter how conservative your leanings, you would be doing yourself a disservice not to read this book-Mr. Ansary’s political views only come into play in the very last section and are toned down enough that even this conservative reviewer did not find them obtrusive enough to overwhelm all the excellent material contained within the rest of the book. And I personally found his views even here to be insightful and interesting, even if I might not agree with them.
In four hundred pages of reading a person’s time will be well vested here. I give Tamim Ansary’s newest history my highest endorsement, not only for the knowledge it imparts, but for its readability. If you read one book on the modern history of Afghanistan, her culture, her politics, and her role in our global peace (or otherwise), this should be the one you reach for.
Of all the histories I have read on Afghanistan, and I have read more than a few, Tamim Ansary’s is absolutely the best. Whether your knowledge is a clean slate and you are looking for one book that will explain this complex nation, or you are fairly conversant in the country, but want a brief refresher, Mr. Ansary will lay out everything you need to know in his latest offering. [b]Games without Rules[/b] begins with the rise of the Durrani line and brings the reader up through the present, with reporting through May of 2012.
Tamim Ansary does a number of things in his book that make it especially accessible for readers, but chief among them is linking events in Afghanistan to events with which his readers might be more familiar, such as the fact that the opening of his work, the dawning of the Durrani Empire, with its founder Ahmad Shah Baba, known as Afghanistan’s Founding Father, happened in 1747, roughly the same time as the founding of the United States of America. Over the course of reading the book the reader will also learn a great deal about the histories of India, Pakistan, and the neighboring central Asian republics, as the destinies of these nations and that of Afghanistan are all inter-linked. Another fact about Mr. Ansary’s writing that becomes quickly apparent is that this is not the writing of a dry, boring scholar of a historian. While never stooping to comedy or disdain, he manages to always keep a storyteller’s mien, full of adventure and humor and at times even anger and despair.
In addition to being written in an easily accessible style, this history is very well organized, carrying the reader seamlessly from one era into the next, clearly illustrating how each event, and not always those occurring solely within Afghanistan’s borders, caused the next to proceed. Perhaps most valuable is Mr. Ansary’s explanation of Afghanistan’s placement upon the world stage-the role that it has played over the last two hundred years, so often caught up geographically in the maelstrom between world powers, for instance, between Russia and British India.
As he takes his reader along on a journey through the various powers, foreign and domestic, who have vied for power over her people, Tamim Ansary, in a marvelously conversant manner, gives a cultural education that is unparalleled. From the cities to the furthest reaches of the valleys, the governance and social customs of the country are explained, and he uses this information to break down for the reader exactly why he feels that attempts by various foreign powers over the centuries to govern the Afghani people have not succeeded. His analysis is insightful and well-laid-out, and for those not well-versed in the subject, this book will prove especially useful in helping you to understand exactly why the political and social situation there is so complex.
My one very slight reservation for my conservative readership is that Mr. Ansary is very clearly a liberal, and that does bleed through, especially with regards to our current president. He is quite a fan of the president’s policies with regards to Afghanistan, something with which most conservatives do not agree. To give credit where credit is due, he also admits that Clinton made errors while in office. However, for the most part he does strive for partiality and is generally successful. No matter how conservative your leanings, you would be doing yourself a disservice not to read this book-Mr. Ansary’s political views only come into play in the very last section and are toned down enough that even this conservative reviewer did not find them obtrusive enough to overwhelm all the excellent material contained within the rest of the book. And I personally found his views even here to be insightful and interesting, even if I might not agree with them.
In four hundred pages of reading a person’s time will be well vested here. I give Tamim Ansary’s newest history my highest endorsement, not only for the knowledge it imparts, but for its readability. If you read one book on the modern history of Afghanistan, her culture, her politics, and her role in our global peace (or otherwise), this should be the one you reach for.
May 4, 2018
This was a really excellent book delving into the history of Afghanistan, a rather misunderstood, yet pivotal, country. The author, Tamim Ansary, was born in Afghanistan and his family pops up throughout its history in fascinating ways. It is clear form his writing how much he cares about his home country and his desire to properly explain its nature to outsiders.
As a history Ansary hits all the important markers: names, dates, events and the like. The story of Afghanistan unfurls in a linear way and he shows the slow, incremental progress that was being made to knit together a group of peoples who are fiercely independent. The evolution is fascinating with a succession of strong leaders building up social connections between notable tribal leaders and beginning the formation of a national character. These development, however, is often interrupted by foreign invasions which tend to jumble things up and reset the national consolidation progress.
The consistent theme, and I think the most important take away from this book, is that the story of Afghanistan is not one of rival ethnic groups or foreign interventions or even battling ideologies (though all three did have significant impacts on the development of Afghanistan) but rather one of Kabul and a outward view of the world versus the countryside and an inward view of the world. The pendulum has swung back and forth between these two centers of power, sometimes resulting in Afghanistan open to foreign influences and culture and other times resulting in a return to more traditional ways of life. Much of the conflicts and changes in Afghanistan can be clearly explained through their paradigm. Leaders rise and fall but this dynamic seemed to be a consistent driver of Afghan society.
Until the damn Societs showed up. I truly did not appreciate just how much that invasion servery disrupted Afghan society. Not only did it create millions of refugees, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a destroyed nation, it also broke the cultural link between that generation of Afghans and their history. Women and children huddled in refuee camps while the young men went off to kill Soviets. Ansary puts forth the idea that this social climate, completely male and infused with violence, left a psychic scar on these men, the same men who would rule and fight over Afghanistan after the Soviets left. Their ties to a community and family were massively weakened and violence, instead of social standing and the ability to make deals within a community, was seen as the social currency of their post Soviet state. The result was Warlords, more violence, and the eventual ascendancy of the Taliban (helped greatly by rogue elements of the Pakistani government), and an explosion of opium production.
This book is a great gateway into understanding the character of Afghanistan and how to came to be the way it is today. It was written in an extremely accessible manner that also succeeded in conveying some subtle and nuanced observations about the country. I felt like I not only learned alot but have a new perspective on how the world works.
As a history Ansary hits all the important markers: names, dates, events and the like. The story of Afghanistan unfurls in a linear way and he shows the slow, incremental progress that was being made to knit together a group of peoples who are fiercely independent. The evolution is fascinating with a succession of strong leaders building up social connections between notable tribal leaders and beginning the formation of a national character. These development, however, is often interrupted by foreign invasions which tend to jumble things up and reset the national consolidation progress.
The consistent theme, and I think the most important take away from this book, is that the story of Afghanistan is not one of rival ethnic groups or foreign interventions or even battling ideologies (though all three did have significant impacts on the development of Afghanistan) but rather one of Kabul and a outward view of the world versus the countryside and an inward view of the world. The pendulum has swung back and forth between these two centers of power, sometimes resulting in Afghanistan open to foreign influences and culture and other times resulting in a return to more traditional ways of life. Much of the conflicts and changes in Afghanistan can be clearly explained through their paradigm. Leaders rise and fall but this dynamic seemed to be a consistent driver of Afghan society.
Until the damn Societs showed up. I truly did not appreciate just how much that invasion servery disrupted Afghan society. Not only did it create millions of refugees, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a destroyed nation, it also broke the cultural link between that generation of Afghans and their history. Women and children huddled in refuee camps while the young men went off to kill Soviets. Ansary puts forth the idea that this social climate, completely male and infused with violence, left a psychic scar on these men, the same men who would rule and fight over Afghanistan after the Soviets left. Their ties to a community and family were massively weakened and violence, instead of social standing and the ability to make deals within a community, was seen as the social currency of their post Soviet state. The result was Warlords, more violence, and the eventual ascendancy of the Taliban (helped greatly by rogue elements of the Pakistani government), and an explosion of opium production.
This book is a great gateway into understanding the character of Afghanistan and how to came to be the way it is today. It was written in an extremely accessible manner that also succeeded in conveying some subtle and nuanced observations about the country. I felt like I not only learned alot but have a new perspective on how the world works.
October 27, 2021
“'It’s me against my brothers, it’s me and my brothers against our cousins, it’s we and our cousins against the invader'— so goes an old Pushtoon saying."
"Rural Afghanistan was in many ways the real Afghanistan, and the social fabric of this universe of villages is a key to this story because it still exists and its tenacity continues to affect the politics of the country."
▪️GAMES WITHOUT RULES: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan by Tamim Ansary, 2012.
#Readtheworld21 📍 Afghanistan
Another fantastic history by Tamim Ansary.
His DESTINY DISRUPTED was a favorite from a few years ago - while that one looked at the whole Islamic world, GAMES WITHOUT RULES focuses specifically on the modern history of Afghanistan, where Ansary was born and lived until he was 16, before moving to the US.
His historical storytelling is like a casual chat, with a solid chronological history, background on some of the major tribes and peoples of Afghanistan, and the geopolitical bridge between central - south - east Asia that lead to the jostling imperial powers vying for Afghanistan - Russia, India, and various European- and the Afghan leaders over the decades in modern time, to the 1990s rise of the Taliban, 9/11, and the subsequent American occupation.
Brief anecdotes and personal annotations throughout - things like "you'd think Americans would've read their history on British and Russian occupations"... Or "this prime minister so and so was in my father's graduating class" and similar connections - make this one all the more interesting and entertaining to read.
This book filled in a lot of contextual gaps for me, largely based on historical fiction and reportage I've read from the region in the last 25 years.
Undoubtedly could be a lengthy addendum to this book and all of the events in Afghanistan since the 2012 publication - truly all the events that have occurred in the last 3 months alone, since the Taliban regained control and the US left - so, that "often interrupted history" bears true once again.
"Rural Afghanistan was in many ways the real Afghanistan, and the social fabric of this universe of villages is a key to this story because it still exists and its tenacity continues to affect the politics of the country."
▪️GAMES WITHOUT RULES: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan by Tamim Ansary, 2012.
#Readtheworld21 📍 Afghanistan
Another fantastic history by Tamim Ansary.
His DESTINY DISRUPTED was a favorite from a few years ago - while that one looked at the whole Islamic world, GAMES WITHOUT RULES focuses specifically on the modern history of Afghanistan, where Ansary was born and lived until he was 16, before moving to the US.
His historical storytelling is like a casual chat, with a solid chronological history, background on some of the major tribes and peoples of Afghanistan, and the geopolitical bridge between central - south - east Asia that lead to the jostling imperial powers vying for Afghanistan - Russia, India, and various European- and the Afghan leaders over the decades in modern time, to the 1990s rise of the Taliban, 9/11, and the subsequent American occupation.
Brief anecdotes and personal annotations throughout - things like "you'd think Americans would've read their history on British and Russian occupations"... Or "this prime minister so and so was in my father's graduating class" and similar connections - make this one all the more interesting and entertaining to read.
This book filled in a lot of contextual gaps for me, largely based on historical fiction and reportage I've read from the region in the last 25 years.
Undoubtedly could be a lengthy addendum to this book and all of the events in Afghanistan since the 2012 publication - truly all the events that have occurred in the last 3 months alone, since the Taliban regained control and the US left - so, that "often interrupted history" bears true once again.
July 28, 2015
This is a history of Afghanistan as seen through the eyes of an Afghan. The author, Tamim Ansary is an Afghan-American, and as such it is quite a personal history. Tamim writes, for example,
"Nadir [the king] attended a high school awards ceremony for academic high achievers. One of the boys was my father, then in tenth grade. Another was a boy rasied in a Charki household. My father and this kid played soccer together after school, and that week the boy had bragged that he would soon make some shots that would be remembered in history. My father assumed he meant soccer shots on goal. The next day, at the ceremony, when the king arrived, my father witnessed this boy stepping out of the line to shoot Nadir dead."
This type of violence is nothing new to Afghans. On top of all the internal strife and conflict, Afghanistan is a country that, since its modern birth as a state in 1747, has been invaded by another foreign power five times in the last two centuries. The British in 1839; the British yet again forty and eighty years after that; the Soviets sixty years after that; and recently the NATO and US invasion. There are familiar patterns emerging from every invasion: there is a consistent misunderstanding of what Afghanistan is. It isn't (at least it was not) a unified country in the way many Westerners often imagine it. As Ansary writes
"Foreign intervention in Afghanistan don't just undermine the designated proxy but the authority of Kabul within Afghanistan. The erosion of central authority releases the country's propensity to fragment, and so in the end the foreign power finds itself facing a burgeoning chaos that saps its resources, leaving little time or strength for carrying out the original intentions of the intervention, whatever those were."
This is already painfully apt in the case of the US invasion. There is a fundamental problem in thinking that you can send democracy abroad with missiles and Apache helicopters. As Tamim writes, the possibility for democracy and peace in Afghanistan depends on Afghans, and the ability of Afghans to find resolutions to the wild contradictions within the country. The pendulum in Afghanistan has swung from fragmentation to centralization, and back again, always more and more extreme with each swing. "The problem," writes Ansary, "is not that Afghans unite and then cannot be conquered; the problem is that Afghans fragment and then cannot be governed."
Afghanistan is a country today, according to Ansary, where "the twenty-first century lies directly atop the tweltfth." But he ends on an optimistic note: in the midst of it all, Ansary remains hopeful, and writes that "if Afghanistan succeeds in blending its many strains into a cohesive cultural whole, well, then, maybe there's hope for the planet too."
Maybe, Tamim. I sure hope so too!
"Nadir [the king] attended a high school awards ceremony for academic high achievers. One of the boys was my father, then in tenth grade. Another was a boy rasied in a Charki household. My father and this kid played soccer together after school, and that week the boy had bragged that he would soon make some shots that would be remembered in history. My father assumed he meant soccer shots on goal. The next day, at the ceremony, when the king arrived, my father witnessed this boy stepping out of the line to shoot Nadir dead."
This type of violence is nothing new to Afghans. On top of all the internal strife and conflict, Afghanistan is a country that, since its modern birth as a state in 1747, has been invaded by another foreign power five times in the last two centuries. The British in 1839; the British yet again forty and eighty years after that; the Soviets sixty years after that; and recently the NATO and US invasion. There are familiar patterns emerging from every invasion: there is a consistent misunderstanding of what Afghanistan is. It isn't (at least it was not) a unified country in the way many Westerners often imagine it. As Ansary writes
"Foreign intervention in Afghanistan don't just undermine the designated proxy but the authority of Kabul within Afghanistan. The erosion of central authority releases the country's propensity to fragment, and so in the end the foreign power finds itself facing a burgeoning chaos that saps its resources, leaving little time or strength for carrying out the original intentions of the intervention, whatever those were."
This is already painfully apt in the case of the US invasion. There is a fundamental problem in thinking that you can send democracy abroad with missiles and Apache helicopters. As Tamim writes, the possibility for democracy and peace in Afghanistan depends on Afghans, and the ability of Afghans to find resolutions to the wild contradictions within the country. The pendulum in Afghanistan has swung from fragmentation to centralization, and back again, always more and more extreme with each swing. "The problem," writes Ansary, "is not that Afghans unite and then cannot be conquered; the problem is that Afghans fragment and then cannot be governed."
Afghanistan is a country today, according to Ansary, where "the twenty-first century lies directly atop the tweltfth." But he ends on an optimistic note: in the midst of it all, Ansary remains hopeful, and writes that "if Afghanistan succeeds in blending its many strains into a cohesive cultural whole, well, then, maybe there's hope for the planet too."
Maybe, Tamim. I sure hope so too!
September 10, 2021
I knew nothing about the history of Afghanistan and wanted an objective POV written by an Afghan. This book was it. The writing is engaging; it’s never unnecessarily dense or academic; and it provides objective cultural and historical context.
January 18, 2016
If ever there was a lay history of Afghanistan that the average person should read, this'd be it. This is an often hilarious, never pretentious history of Afghanistan from 1750 on. Ansary is a fun writer he never gets lost in the academic morass or unneeded political niceties that dog so much of contemporary history. Afghanistan is fucked-up and he makes no bones about this, but he keeps his analysis simple, salient, and funny.
It's all here: the early attempts by Afghani rulers to hoist their region by its ankles, the British and Russians fucking around, the Soviets fucking around, the Taliban show up, then the Americans and everything goes even further to shit. All the while, normal Afghans bear the brunt of stupid conflicts imposed from without that most of them have nothing to do with it.
Ansary never loses sight of Afghanistan's complexity and, in fact, this serves as the backbone to the work: Afghanistan's cultural and social nuances and weirdness is exactly why it's been a perennial thorn in the sole of anyone attempting to meddle with it, not because conflict is ingrained or innate, somehow, but because its multifaceted nature makes any simple solution (read: military) meaningless from the get-go.
The recent decades of Afghanistan have been marked by this constant conflict from without, fed by crazies within who try to out-do each other in their zealotry. And the Afghan people suffer.
It's all here: the early attempts by Afghani rulers to hoist their region by its ankles, the British and Russians fucking around, the Soviets fucking around, the Taliban show up, then the Americans and everything goes even further to shit. All the while, normal Afghans bear the brunt of stupid conflicts imposed from without that most of them have nothing to do with it.
Ansary never loses sight of Afghanistan's complexity and, in fact, this serves as the backbone to the work: Afghanistan's cultural and social nuances and weirdness is exactly why it's been a perennial thorn in the sole of anyone attempting to meddle with it, not because conflict is ingrained or innate, somehow, but because its multifaceted nature makes any simple solution (read: military) meaningless from the get-go.
The recent decades of Afghanistan have been marked by this constant conflict from without, fed by crazies within who try to out-do each other in their zealotry. And the Afghan people suffer.
May 3, 2013
I don't think I could add much to the many good reviews already posted in regards to
Games Without Rules
. I picked this book up in a local book shop one weekend and was sucked into the story straight away. As soon as I got home I started reading the book, learning little bits and pieces of history as I went.
If you know the history of this region there may not be a great deal that is new to you, but regardless, this is a fresh look at Afghanistan's history from the perspective of the people and land, a look from the inside, not the outside. The telling of the story is engaging and at times funny:
Indeed, there is a robust tradition of the mullah as rascal, typified by Mullah Nasruddin, a fanciful figure featured in a rich body of humorous folk anecdotes. One such anecdote, for example, relates that the mullah’s neighbour came to borrow his donkey. The mullah was reluctant. He said, “I’m sorry but my donkey died yesterday.” Just then the donkey began to bray behind the house. “What’s this? What’s this?” the neighbour said. “Mullah-sahib: your donkey isn’t dead, I can hear it braying.” The mullah was indignant. “Who are you going to believe?” he snorted. “A mullah or a donkey?”
Or:
Abdu’ Rahman had a legion of mirzas. He put them in his cabinet and gave them command of his armies. Not only did he allow them to enjoy lives of luxury and grace but he insisted on it, for they represented his grandeur and, therefore, everywhere they went, they must be seen in the finest garments, riding the most magnificent horses. The trouble was, young men stepped in so much privilege tended to get big ideas. The amir was always on the lookout for plots that his pampered mirzas might be concocting. His favourite wife Halima, nicknamed Bobo Gul, once asked him why he didn’t kill the ones he didn’t trust.
“It wouldn’t be practical,” he replied. “I don’t trust any of them.”
What this book provides is a general, easy to read and understand overview of Afghanistan’s recent history. It helps put a back story to the many military accounts currently coming out of the country and helps readers to get a better picture of why things appear as they do. The book also helps answer the questions we have all asked at some stage about the war in Afghanistan; how & why did this happen?
It is well told account and I found quite a few things of interest whilst reading the book and managed to learn a few new things as well. I would recommend this for anyone who wants to get a better understanding of why the war in Afghanistan has taken the course it has and to actually get a feel for the people of Afghanistan who have been affected by the fighting. The author does offer some light at the end of the tunnel for those who are genuinely interested in the outcome.
If you know the history of this region there may not be a great deal that is new to you, but regardless, this is a fresh look at Afghanistan's history from the perspective of the people and land, a look from the inside, not the outside. The telling of the story is engaging and at times funny:
Indeed, there is a robust tradition of the mullah as rascal, typified by Mullah Nasruddin, a fanciful figure featured in a rich body of humorous folk anecdotes. One such anecdote, for example, relates that the mullah’s neighbour came to borrow his donkey. The mullah was reluctant. He said, “I’m sorry but my donkey died yesterday.” Just then the donkey began to bray behind the house. “What’s this? What’s this?” the neighbour said. “Mullah-sahib: your donkey isn’t dead, I can hear it braying.” The mullah was indignant. “Who are you going to believe?” he snorted. “A mullah or a donkey?”
Or:
Abdu’ Rahman had a legion of mirzas. He put them in his cabinet and gave them command of his armies. Not only did he allow them to enjoy lives of luxury and grace but he insisted on it, for they represented his grandeur and, therefore, everywhere they went, they must be seen in the finest garments, riding the most magnificent horses. The trouble was, young men stepped in so much privilege tended to get big ideas. The amir was always on the lookout for plots that his pampered mirzas might be concocting. His favourite wife Halima, nicknamed Bobo Gul, once asked him why he didn’t kill the ones he didn’t trust.
“It wouldn’t be practical,” he replied. “I don’t trust any of them.”
What this book provides is a general, easy to read and understand overview of Afghanistan’s recent history. It helps put a back story to the many military accounts currently coming out of the country and helps readers to get a better picture of why things appear as they do. The book also helps answer the questions we have all asked at some stage about the war in Afghanistan; how & why did this happen?
It is well told account and I found quite a few things of interest whilst reading the book and managed to learn a few new things as well. I would recommend this for anyone who wants to get a better understanding of why the war in Afghanistan has taken the course it has and to actually get a feel for the people of Afghanistan who have been affected by the fighting. The author does offer some light at the end of the tunnel for those who are genuinely interested in the outcome.
December 22, 2022
I often find it best to learn about the history of a region from someone who lived there and understands it, which is why when I decided to give myself a crash course on the history of Afghanistan, this was one of the books I picked out. For the most part, Tamim Ansary, an Afghan-American expatriate, does a fantastic job of providing this indigenous viewpoint and communicating it for an American audience. Sometimes he's a little US-centric in his perspective, but that's to be expected. Additionally, don't come to this book for a history of the region from the beginning - this is by design the history of the statehood of modern Afghanistan, beginning in the eighteenth century and skimming pretty quickly over the nineteenth before it REALLY gets going in the twentieth. So, if you want to a more detailed history of the region in those early years you should try Peter Hopkirk's THE GREAT GAME, while if you're interested in the brutal, blood-soaked, frost-bitten, trauma-inducing epic of the First Afghan War you can get THAT in horrifying detail from William Dalrymple's RETURN OF A KING.
Or, if you don't want nightmares, you can read GAMES WITHOUT RULES.
There's a small number of popular history authors who write with the flair, humour, and instinct for drama of a born raconteur. Tamim Ansary is one of them. His book is never dull, and if you're the sort of person who's likely to laugh, cry, or shriek while reading, try not to read this one on public transport. GAMES WITHOUT RULES isn't just a supremely entertaining work of non-fiction, however: it's genuinely informative and insightful. Modern Afghanistan, Ansary argues, is born from two interlocking games. One of those is the Great Game whereby Afghanistan - as the gateway to South-East Asia - becomes the buffer state between hostile empires and the graveyard to so far, three of them, to say nothing of literal millions of Afghans. But there's another game being played in Afghanistan, the one whereby the urban modernisers and the rural conservatives struggle for the soul of the nation, and it is this game, Ansary argues, that foreigners ignore to their peril:
The concatenation of forces pervading and surrounding Afghanistan has given rise to competing visions for the nation’s identity. Every foreign force that comes crashing in thinks it’s intervening in “a country,” but it’s actually taking sides in an ongoing contest among Afghans about what this country is. Every foreign intervention founders therefore on the same rock. Routinely, the foreign power puts a proxy on the throne and tries to govern the country through him. But the very authority given to this proxy, because it comes from foreigners, weakens his authority among the traditional forces of old Afghanistan. ...
Foreign interventions in Afghanistan don’t just undermine the designated proxy but the authority of Kabul within Afghanistan. The erosion of central authority releases the country’s propensity to fragment, and so in the end the foreign power finds itself facing a burgeoning chaos that saps its resources, leaving little time or strength for carrying out the original intentions of the intervention, whatever those were. The problem is not that Afghans unite and then cannot be conquered; the problem is that Afghans fragment and then cannot be governed.
The history of Afghanistan, in this view, is the history of the attempts of multiple strongmen, idealists, revolutionaries and reactionaries to weld the country into a unified state - too often, it seems, via naked repression. The book, which ends in 2012, barely ten years before the Americans' ignominious retreat, nevertheless provides context to explain the Taliban's resurgence which has led to its recent victory. Nevertheless, although the recent history of Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in 1979 is a grim one, following the systematic obliteration of Afghan civil society during the Soviet occupation, Ansary ends the book on a surprising note of hope: "The great powers have a stake in making Afghanistan more governable, but the only people who can achieve this happy result are Afghans." And, Ansary thinks, even under the Taliban this will be possible:
[C]onfoundingly enough, the constant threat of Great Power interventions make the centralizing power in Kabul outward-looking and oriented toward membership in the modern world. If “the Taliban” succeed in taking over, you can be sure they will develop this same outward-looking orientation and attraction to some version of modernity very shortly. ...
The real question for the United States, then, is not how America can forge true democracy in Afghanistan or end corruption in Afghanistan or change the status of Afghan women: those questions are for Afghans to settle, and Afghans will settle them if left to their own devices. The real question for the United States is how to liberate Afghanistan from the United States—and all other outside powers.
It's clear that the Taliban's reconquest is a tragedy for modern Afghanistan. But Tamim Ansary leaves us with hope that this is a tragedy that will one day be overcome. May it be so.
Or, if you don't want nightmares, you can read GAMES WITHOUT RULES.
There's a small number of popular history authors who write with the flair, humour, and instinct for drama of a born raconteur. Tamim Ansary is one of them. His book is never dull, and if you're the sort of person who's likely to laugh, cry, or shriek while reading, try not to read this one on public transport. GAMES WITHOUT RULES isn't just a supremely entertaining work of non-fiction, however: it's genuinely informative and insightful. Modern Afghanistan, Ansary argues, is born from two interlocking games. One of those is the Great Game whereby Afghanistan - as the gateway to South-East Asia - becomes the buffer state between hostile empires and the graveyard to so far, three of them, to say nothing of literal millions of Afghans. But there's another game being played in Afghanistan, the one whereby the urban modernisers and the rural conservatives struggle for the soul of the nation, and it is this game, Ansary argues, that foreigners ignore to their peril:
The concatenation of forces pervading and surrounding Afghanistan has given rise to competing visions for the nation’s identity. Every foreign force that comes crashing in thinks it’s intervening in “a country,” but it’s actually taking sides in an ongoing contest among Afghans about what this country is. Every foreign intervention founders therefore on the same rock. Routinely, the foreign power puts a proxy on the throne and tries to govern the country through him. But the very authority given to this proxy, because it comes from foreigners, weakens his authority among the traditional forces of old Afghanistan. ...
Foreign interventions in Afghanistan don’t just undermine the designated proxy but the authority of Kabul within Afghanistan. The erosion of central authority releases the country’s propensity to fragment, and so in the end the foreign power finds itself facing a burgeoning chaos that saps its resources, leaving little time or strength for carrying out the original intentions of the intervention, whatever those were. The problem is not that Afghans unite and then cannot be conquered; the problem is that Afghans fragment and then cannot be governed.
The history of Afghanistan, in this view, is the history of the attempts of multiple strongmen, idealists, revolutionaries and reactionaries to weld the country into a unified state - too often, it seems, via naked repression. The book, which ends in 2012, barely ten years before the Americans' ignominious retreat, nevertheless provides context to explain the Taliban's resurgence which has led to its recent victory. Nevertheless, although the recent history of Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in 1979 is a grim one, following the systematic obliteration of Afghan civil society during the Soviet occupation, Ansary ends the book on a surprising note of hope: "The great powers have a stake in making Afghanistan more governable, but the only people who can achieve this happy result are Afghans." And, Ansary thinks, even under the Taliban this will be possible:
[C]onfoundingly enough, the constant threat of Great Power interventions make the centralizing power in Kabul outward-looking and oriented toward membership in the modern world. If “the Taliban” succeed in taking over, you can be sure they will develop this same outward-looking orientation and attraction to some version of modernity very shortly. ...
The real question for the United States, then, is not how America can forge true democracy in Afghanistan or end corruption in Afghanistan or change the status of Afghan women: those questions are for Afghans to settle, and Afghans will settle them if left to their own devices. The real question for the United States is how to liberate Afghanistan from the United States—and all other outside powers.
It's clear that the Taliban's reconquest is a tragedy for modern Afghanistan. But Tamim Ansary leaves us with hope that this is a tragedy that will one day be overcome. May it be so.
October 25, 2013
A good, accessible history of the country. What I enjoyed most was how Ansary links current and recent events in Afghanistan to its own complex history, and how he puts Afghanistan into an international context; for example, he writes how events in India led the British and the Russians to engage in the “Great Game”, and how events in Afghanistan in the 1990s influenced, and were influenced by, events in Central Asia.
Ansary writes well, and the story never bogs down or gets boring. The story is full of humor, adventure, naivety and despair. The book is also well-organized, and Ansary does a good job linking each phase of Afghan history to the next, and to the preceding one. He gives us a great account of the power struggles that define Afghanistan’s history and makes them very understandable. The same is true for Ansary’s depiction of the social and political aspects of the country, where he gives us good cultural analysis that will benefit even those unfamiliar with the nation’s complexity.
Ansary’s story is focused on Afghanistan’s relations with the outside world, which sometimes leads to clichés like the “graveyard of empires.” The Great Game is a good example of this: the British aimed to use Afghanistan as a buffer against the Russians, who supposedly threatened India. Although the Great Game has been meticulously documented by numerous books, I still fail to see how the British saw the Russians as a threat: there were exactly zero Russians anywhere on the Afghan northern border at the time. And the British were invited into the country by Shah Shujah, who wasn’t even in Afghanistan at the time. The events that took place after 9/11 to the end of 2001 are covered, unsatisfactorily, in a mere two pages before he resumes his narrative.
Although I enjoyed the book, I did find a few issues: at one point in the book’s bibliography, the book jumps from chapter 25 to Chapter 27; no idea what Ansary’s sources were for Chapter 26.
A more irritating issue I had was the slangy, often awkward tone of Ansary’s writing. He uses exclamation points frequently, and often writes in first person in what is supposed to be a work of history. King Shuja was a “whiner”, and “some nameless nobody” assassinated Shah Shuja. And when discussing the Great Game, he calls Persia “Iran”, which didn’t come into use until 1935.
“This guy was too popular with the Afghan people!” is another painful example. “A bunch of rebels” kidnapped Soviet advisors in 1979.
“Many would say that real presidents don’t appoint themselves, but hey, political development is a slow process.”
“Even stupid Taraki would make a better head of state.”
“When Amin went in to use the facilities, they would lock the door---boom!Ha!”
“You have to take your legitimacy where you can find it, I guess.”
“They pressured Sudan to do something about this guy.”
“He renewed his friendship with the ISI folks he had gotten to know.”
“This was the country that was, to Western eyes, winning the Cold War and might soon (cue evil laughter) rule the world.”
“On the face of it, building a pipeline through explosive, anarchic Afghanistan seemed...what’s the word I’m searching for? Insane.”
Incredibly, Ansary, when discussing World War One, writes that “a leading member of the Axis group was the Ottoman Empire.” The Axis did not exist in World War One, they existed in World War Two, and they never had any support from the Ottoman Empire (which didn’t exist in Word War Two!). Ansary of course, means to write that in Word War One the Ottoman Empire was a member of the Central Powers. And they were hardly a “leading member.” Turkey was a third-rate power at the time. He also writes that the contra guerrillas brought down the Nicaraguan government; this is also incorrect. The contras were locked in a stalemate for almost a decade, and never succeeded in overthrowing the government. He writes that there were 22 hijackers on 9/11, but there were actually 19. He also, inexplicably, calls bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora “mysterious”; I can’t see why. We eventually had clear evidence that he escaped there and bin Laden’s whereabouts from his escape from Tora Bora to his fateful hideout in Abottobad are now fairly well documented.
Still, these are all side issues for the most part; they do not significantly detract from an otherwise enjoyable book.
Ansary writes well, and the story never bogs down or gets boring. The story is full of humor, adventure, naivety and despair. The book is also well-organized, and Ansary does a good job linking each phase of Afghan history to the next, and to the preceding one. He gives us a great account of the power struggles that define Afghanistan’s history and makes them very understandable. The same is true for Ansary’s depiction of the social and political aspects of the country, where he gives us good cultural analysis that will benefit even those unfamiliar with the nation’s complexity.
Ansary’s story is focused on Afghanistan’s relations with the outside world, which sometimes leads to clichés like the “graveyard of empires.” The Great Game is a good example of this: the British aimed to use Afghanistan as a buffer against the Russians, who supposedly threatened India. Although the Great Game has been meticulously documented by numerous books, I still fail to see how the British saw the Russians as a threat: there were exactly zero Russians anywhere on the Afghan northern border at the time. And the British were invited into the country by Shah Shujah, who wasn’t even in Afghanistan at the time. The events that took place after 9/11 to the end of 2001 are covered, unsatisfactorily, in a mere two pages before he resumes his narrative.
Although I enjoyed the book, I did find a few issues: at one point in the book’s bibliography, the book jumps from chapter 25 to Chapter 27; no idea what Ansary’s sources were for Chapter 26.
A more irritating issue I had was the slangy, often awkward tone of Ansary’s writing. He uses exclamation points frequently, and often writes in first person in what is supposed to be a work of history. King Shuja was a “whiner”, and “some nameless nobody” assassinated Shah Shuja. And when discussing the Great Game, he calls Persia “Iran”, which didn’t come into use until 1935.
“This guy was too popular with the Afghan people!” is another painful example. “A bunch of rebels” kidnapped Soviet advisors in 1979.
“Many would say that real presidents don’t appoint themselves, but hey, political development is a slow process.”
“Even stupid Taraki would make a better head of state.”
“When Amin went in to use the facilities, they would lock the door---boom!Ha!”
“You have to take your legitimacy where you can find it, I guess.”
“They pressured Sudan to do something about this guy.”
“He renewed his friendship with the ISI folks he had gotten to know.”
“This was the country that was, to Western eyes, winning the Cold War and might soon (cue evil laughter) rule the world.”
“On the face of it, building a pipeline through explosive, anarchic Afghanistan seemed...what’s the word I’m searching for? Insane.”
Incredibly, Ansary, when discussing World War One, writes that “a leading member of the Axis group was the Ottoman Empire.” The Axis did not exist in World War One, they existed in World War Two, and they never had any support from the Ottoman Empire (which didn’t exist in Word War Two!). Ansary of course, means to write that in Word War One the Ottoman Empire was a member of the Central Powers. And they were hardly a “leading member.” Turkey was a third-rate power at the time. He also writes that the contra guerrillas brought down the Nicaraguan government; this is also incorrect. The contras were locked in a stalemate for almost a decade, and never succeeded in overthrowing the government. He writes that there were 22 hijackers on 9/11, but there were actually 19. He also, inexplicably, calls bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora “mysterious”; I can’t see why. We eventually had clear evidence that he escaped there and bin Laden’s whereabouts from his escape from Tora Bora to his fateful hideout in Abottobad are now fairly well documented.
Still, these are all side issues for the most part; they do not significantly detract from an otherwise enjoyable book.
December 30, 2021
Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan, Tamim Ansary, informative conversational style that Afghan Tamin has, it kept me engaged, sharing points that's highly interesting and at times relate to his own and his families story. Afghanstan the landlocked land sandwiched between larger more powerful countries, where many armies routes east to west must pass through this region. Tribal and decentralised where tradition is valued above all else leads to a complex political landscape that isn't governed by any single leader but by numerous leaders charisma, this does lead to a chaotic approach to warfare, as seen seemingly somehow crazily successful either absorbing or expelling any and all foes, for centuries now.
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. R.Kipling.
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. R.Kipling.
December 29, 2012
A very bold and subjective view of history of Afghanistan from the time of Abdullah Shah Baba to the present. I enjoyed the particular take of history from Tamim Ansary point of view. Afghanistan is not unconquerable but ungovernable and Afghanis don't unite to fight against the occupier but divide even further, making the occupiers task impossible. As a Pakistani though, I found his views on Pakistan pretty difficult to digest. There was scant regard for Pakistan's hospitality role in housing millions of Afghanis in its midst. I myself saw my Islamabad literally invaded by thousands of Afghanis back in the 80's bringing the property prices up. I also didn't quite understand the 'non-aligned' role which Afghanistan seemed to have adopted. How can it be nonaligned if it was openly vowing both superpowers? Even the title and Afghanistan's analogy to Buzkushi seems to be very similar to most of the South Asian countries like Pakistan and India. Most traffic I have experienced in Pakistan is the same organised chaos as described by Tamim. so nothing new here.
Still Tamim's present book is a timely and important one, as little is written from the Afghani point of view .
Still Tamim's present book is a timely and important one, as little is written from the Afghani point of view .
March 20, 2017
Excellent history written with compassion and clarity. Tamin Ansary succeeds in covering two centuries of Afghan history without sounding bitter or cynical, despite confronting with open eyes the often appalling ingredients of his story. Threaded through a history of violence and reaction he manages to trace a process of evolution and modernisation by which Afghanistan, left to its own devices or not, always was and still remains capable of emerging as a viable, coherent and prosperous nation.
Part of his message is that a country, its culture and its people cannot be understood in simplistic terms. Afghanistan is internally complex, with a major division between the more sophisticated cities and the highly traditional rural communities. Strategically, it is located at the focal point of too many external interests to hope it can ever be free of foreign influence and the threat of foreign intervention. Invasions, especially by the Russians and then in different ways the Americans, have savagely wrecked many of the traditional social and economic arrangements that made Afghanistan distinctive. A huge proportion of the population has only experienced dislocation, life in refugee camps and the turbulence of war. Cultural intrusions acting to distort or destroy traditional values have included Western inspired educational innovations on the one hand and fundamentalist Islamic education and ideology in their refugeee camps in Pakistan, facilitated by the Pakistan state and often funded and controlled by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Yet within a web of foreign interests working so hard to corrupt all that is natural to Afghans, there remain huge physical and human resources from which to construct something of great value.
Perhaps two major features present Afghanistan with the possibility of future prosperity. One is the recognition of substantial mineral resources within the country. The other is the prospect of new and hugely important trade routes weaving through the country to Central Asia and hence to Russia and Europe, to China and India, as well as to the seaports of Pakistan. It turns out that this country in the middle of nowhere is actually in the middle of everywhere. And oddly enough, because it is of such interest to everyone, it has a real chance to avoid depending on any one of its neighbours. Ansary is a true optimist with an attractive vision of what really is possible.
Part of his message is that a country, its culture and its people cannot be understood in simplistic terms. Afghanistan is internally complex, with a major division between the more sophisticated cities and the highly traditional rural communities. Strategically, it is located at the focal point of too many external interests to hope it can ever be free of foreign influence and the threat of foreign intervention. Invasions, especially by the Russians and then in different ways the Americans, have savagely wrecked many of the traditional social and economic arrangements that made Afghanistan distinctive. A huge proportion of the population has only experienced dislocation, life in refugee camps and the turbulence of war. Cultural intrusions acting to distort or destroy traditional values have included Western inspired educational innovations on the one hand and fundamentalist Islamic education and ideology in their refugeee camps in Pakistan, facilitated by the Pakistan state and often funded and controlled by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Yet within a web of foreign interests working so hard to corrupt all that is natural to Afghans, there remain huge physical and human resources from which to construct something of great value.
Perhaps two major features present Afghanistan with the possibility of future prosperity. One is the recognition of substantial mineral resources within the country. The other is the prospect of new and hugely important trade routes weaving through the country to Central Asia and hence to Russia and Europe, to China and India, as well as to the seaports of Pakistan. It turns out that this country in the middle of nowhere is actually in the middle of everywhere. And oddly enough, because it is of such interest to everyone, it has a real chance to avoid depending on any one of its neighbours. Ansary is a true optimist with an attractive vision of what really is possible.
October 29, 2021
A plethora of books on Afghanistan have been written in English ever since the Soviet Union invaded it in 1979, and made Afghanistan yet another battleground for the Cold War. What makes Tamim Ansary's book unique is undoubtedly the fact that it is written by an ethnic Afghan man, who understands his country's culture and history as much as he understands the Western sensibilities for whom he is writing.
Ansary is not a trained historian, that much is clear from his style of writing; but that does not diminish the book's value and he retains the objectivity of a historian. His family had been intimately involved in the grand Afghan state-building project under the Musahiban Kings of Afghanistan, who ruled the country from 1929 until the Saur Revolution in 1978. And Afghan state-building lies at the heart of this book's topic.
We are given a panoramic view into this state-building project, which begins with the founding of the country by Ahmed Shah Durrani (also known as Ahmed Shah "Baba" to Afghans, a denomination which means "Father") in 1747, who was chosen as "King" by the clans to lead them through the turbulent times which were initiated with the death of Nader Shah, the King of Iran under whom Afghanistan was governed. As this "elective monarchy" makes it clear, Afghanistan wasn't a nation-state at the time of Durrani, these clans were independent sovereigns who jealously guarded their freedoms, and a "King" was appointed only when an emergency arose. Thus, it is under Durrani that this grand project of nation-building began, where independent clans in this land known as "Afghanistan" came to gradually see each other as kin, and which is why Durrani is known as the father of the nation.
This project which began under the Durranis gathered steam under the successors of the falling Durrani Empire, the family of Dost Mohammad Khan. Unfortunately, this project of state-building was often interrupted (hence the title of the book) by the Great Powers of the day for objectives that were global in nature. Under Dost Mohammad Khan, Afghanistan became an unfortunate victim of the "Great Game" between the Russian and the British Empires in the 19th century; the Russians in their never-ending quest for warm-water ports expanded eastwards until they finally reached the Indian Subcontinent, a fief of the British and the pearl of their Empire, poor Afghanistan was smack in the middle of this global rivalry. Thus, to safeguard their interests, the British invaded Afghanistan twice in the course of the 19th century to impose their strictures on Afghanistan's foreign policy, which meant no cozying up to the Russians. These invasions may have served British interests, but they halted the painful and very complicated task of state-building and increased the burdens of the House of Dost Mohammad, trying to create a centralized and modernized state where the independent "village republics" and tribes of Afghanistan needed to coalesce into something bigger to compete with the rest of the world.
The end of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th century saw the battlefield between the Great Powers of Europe shift to their very homeland, with the British and the Russians striking up alliances with each other against Germany in two World Wars, rendering the "Great Game" moot. It is in this first half of the 20th century that Afghanistan saw the greatest progress in its state-building project, and especially under the Musahiban Kings (a cadet branch of the House of Dost Mohammad), where Afghanistan made more progress playing catch-up to the world in terms of technology, infrastructure, education, and social norms than it had in the previous century. Afghanistan became more outward-looking, with investment money coming into Afghanistan to make it more developed, and with Afghan students going to the West and Egypt to bring back the knowledge to make their nation prosper.
Unfortunately, Afghanistan once more found itself in the midst of rivaling great powers, this time in the form of the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union. The ring of "containment" that America's foreign policy experts had wrought around the Great Soviet Empire broke because of Afghanistan's location (yet again), which was between Iran and Pakistan, two pillars of containment. This break was unacceptable to America, and presented an opportunity to Soviet Union. The students returning from the West, educated in eastern Europe, who were supposed to make their nation prosper unfortunately thought that this prosperity would come within the Marxist-Leninist framework. They conducted a coup, kicking out the modernizing Musahibans, who in their opinion, were too slow with their modernization. The PDPA (the Afghan Communist Party) proved itself to be horrible at governance, riddled with factionalism, and its own leaders assassinating each other to gain power. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan under the Brezhnev Doctrine to stabilize the country, and as they say, the rest is history.
Today, the extremism, chaos, and terror in Afghanistan are direct consequences of the almost ten-year Soviet-Afghan War which gave birth to the Islamist Mujaheedins funded and armed by America, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.
Unlike the early 20th century, the interlude between one Great Power withdrawing (the Soviet withdrawal in 1989) and yet another invading (America in 2001) saw no progress in the state-building project. In fact, all gains made under the House of Dost Mohammed were wiped clean, giving birth to the Taliban, who took religious fundamentalism to a whole new level. America entered to capture the dreaded Osama Bin Laden, the perpetrator of 9/11, who unfortunately managed to flee to neighboring Pakistan, saddling America with a war-torn, damaged country. As I write this in 2021, the Taliban have returned to rule Afghanistan yet again, making it clear that any ostensible state-building that Americans and their proxies in Afghanistan conducted from 2001-2021 turned out to be worthless. A lot of recent news articles deal with their failures, making it unnecessary for me to recount them here.
As Ansary makes it clear, any successful state-building in Afghanistan can only occur with Afghans at its forefront, driving Afghanistan to be a successful modernized nation. America's attempt at state-building, and the Soviet Union's attempt in stabilizing the country from chaos failed because they were foreigners who have no knowledge of the history, customs, and practices of the Afghans. More often than not, they'll be seen (and have been seen) as foreign infidels trying to reconfigure the culture of Afghanistan. This is not blind idealism, governance of Afghanistan under the House of Dost Mohammed has shown that Afghanistan will progress as long Afghans themselves are at the helm.
The best America and other Great Powers of the world can do is to leave Afghanistan alone and not make it subject to their depredations in the quest for global power. For Afghanistan to prosper, it needs to be given the status of a "central Asian Switzerland".
Ansary is not a trained historian, that much is clear from his style of writing; but that does not diminish the book's value and he retains the objectivity of a historian. His family had been intimately involved in the grand Afghan state-building project under the Musahiban Kings of Afghanistan, who ruled the country from 1929 until the Saur Revolution in 1978. And Afghan state-building lies at the heart of this book's topic.
We are given a panoramic view into this state-building project, which begins with the founding of the country by Ahmed Shah Durrani (also known as Ahmed Shah "Baba" to Afghans, a denomination which means "Father") in 1747, who was chosen as "King" by the clans to lead them through the turbulent times which were initiated with the death of Nader Shah, the King of Iran under whom Afghanistan was governed. As this "elective monarchy" makes it clear, Afghanistan wasn't a nation-state at the time of Durrani, these clans were independent sovereigns who jealously guarded their freedoms, and a "King" was appointed only when an emergency arose. Thus, it is under Durrani that this grand project of nation-building began, where independent clans in this land known as "Afghanistan" came to gradually see each other as kin, and which is why Durrani is known as the father of the nation.
This project which began under the Durranis gathered steam under the successors of the falling Durrani Empire, the family of Dost Mohammad Khan. Unfortunately, this project of state-building was often interrupted (hence the title of the book) by the Great Powers of the day for objectives that were global in nature. Under Dost Mohammad Khan, Afghanistan became an unfortunate victim of the "Great Game" between the Russian and the British Empires in the 19th century; the Russians in their never-ending quest for warm-water ports expanded eastwards until they finally reached the Indian Subcontinent, a fief of the British and the pearl of their Empire, poor Afghanistan was smack in the middle of this global rivalry. Thus, to safeguard their interests, the British invaded Afghanistan twice in the course of the 19th century to impose their strictures on Afghanistan's foreign policy, which meant no cozying up to the Russians. These invasions may have served British interests, but they halted the painful and very complicated task of state-building and increased the burdens of the House of Dost Mohammad, trying to create a centralized and modernized state where the independent "village republics" and tribes of Afghanistan needed to coalesce into something bigger to compete with the rest of the world.
The end of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th century saw the battlefield between the Great Powers of Europe shift to their very homeland, with the British and the Russians striking up alliances with each other against Germany in two World Wars, rendering the "Great Game" moot. It is in this first half of the 20th century that Afghanistan saw the greatest progress in its state-building project, and especially under the Musahiban Kings (a cadet branch of the House of Dost Mohammad), where Afghanistan made more progress playing catch-up to the world in terms of technology, infrastructure, education, and social norms than it had in the previous century. Afghanistan became more outward-looking, with investment money coming into Afghanistan to make it more developed, and with Afghan students going to the West and Egypt to bring back the knowledge to make their nation prosper.
Unfortunately, Afghanistan once more found itself in the midst of rivaling great powers, this time in the form of the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union. The ring of "containment" that America's foreign policy experts had wrought around the Great Soviet Empire broke because of Afghanistan's location (yet again), which was between Iran and Pakistan, two pillars of containment. This break was unacceptable to America, and presented an opportunity to Soviet Union. The students returning from the West, educated in eastern Europe, who were supposed to make their nation prosper unfortunately thought that this prosperity would come within the Marxist-Leninist framework. They conducted a coup, kicking out the modernizing Musahibans, who in their opinion, were too slow with their modernization. The PDPA (the Afghan Communist Party) proved itself to be horrible at governance, riddled with factionalism, and its own leaders assassinating each other to gain power. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan under the Brezhnev Doctrine to stabilize the country, and as they say, the rest is history.
Today, the extremism, chaos, and terror in Afghanistan are direct consequences of the almost ten-year Soviet-Afghan War which gave birth to the Islamist Mujaheedins funded and armed by America, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.
Unlike the early 20th century, the interlude between one Great Power withdrawing (the Soviet withdrawal in 1989) and yet another invading (America in 2001) saw no progress in the state-building project. In fact, all gains made under the House of Dost Mohammed were wiped clean, giving birth to the Taliban, who took religious fundamentalism to a whole new level. America entered to capture the dreaded Osama Bin Laden, the perpetrator of 9/11, who unfortunately managed to flee to neighboring Pakistan, saddling America with a war-torn, damaged country. As I write this in 2021, the Taliban have returned to rule Afghanistan yet again, making it clear that any ostensible state-building that Americans and their proxies in Afghanistan conducted from 2001-2021 turned out to be worthless. A lot of recent news articles deal with their failures, making it unnecessary for me to recount them here.
As Ansary makes it clear, any successful state-building in Afghanistan can only occur with Afghans at its forefront, driving Afghanistan to be a successful modernized nation. America's attempt at state-building, and the Soviet Union's attempt in stabilizing the country from chaos failed because they were foreigners who have no knowledge of the history, customs, and practices of the Afghans. More often than not, they'll be seen (and have been seen) as foreign infidels trying to reconfigure the culture of Afghanistan. This is not blind idealism, governance of Afghanistan under the House of Dost Mohammed has shown that Afghanistan will progress as long Afghans themselves are at the helm.
The best America and other Great Powers of the world can do is to leave Afghanistan alone and not make it subject to their depredations in the quest for global power. For Afghanistan to prosper, it needs to be given the status of a "central Asian Switzerland".
August 24, 2021
The author is an American of Afghan descent. From his description, he should have spent most of his childhood in Afghanistan, so even though he is a foreigner now, he still knows his home country quite well. What's more, his family seems to be a famous family in Afghanistan.
The author has a good grasp of the structure of the entire book. From the "Father of the Nation" Ahmed Shah to today's Afghanistan, the historical framework of more than 200 years that Afghanistan has truly formed is described in the author's pen. It is very exciting. . Although in terms of brushwork, the text in this book is closer to historical prose rather than serious official history. On the one hand, there is no quotation at all. It seems that all the content comes from the legends that the author has heard or read. On the other hand, based on his Afghan-American identity, the author sometimes expresses his emotions from the perspective of caring about his homeland, and sometimes From the perspective of understanding Western readers, I will give some examples that Western readers are easy to understand but not completely reliable. However, in general, for Chinese readers who do not know much about the history and current situation of Afghanistan, this neighboring country, this book is still very suitable as an entry-level reading.
As the author said at the beginning, the real formation of Afghanistan may be attributed to Ahmed Shah more than two hundred years ago. Therefore, the author's assertion in the preface—the "Empire Cemetery" is a cliché that does not conform to the facts, and I do not fully agree with it. The conquerors such as the Aryans, Greeks, and Turks listed by the author were long before Afghanistan took shape. They—as the author himself admits—have become part of the Afghans. The facts described in the "Imperial Cemetery" are more aimed at empires like Britain, Tsarist Russia, the former Soviet Union, and the United States, which are trying to conquer this land after Afghanistan has taken shape.
And why did Afghanistan become the graveyard of these empires? A large part of the reason, as the author has analyzed throughout the book, is that Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic tribal society that is deeply dependent on agriculture. "An official position does not represent corresponding power", even if it is a nominal king. Power is scattered in the personal network of tribes, especially in the vast rural areas. But outsiders can never guess the secret of this power (or can't find the correct answer if they guess), and have repeatedly supported the puppets, but the ruled area is largely beyond the border of the city of Kabul.
Therefore, a group of outsiders came and brought disasters time after time, leaving behind a corpse of his own and Afghans; a group of rulers, from the civilized king to the so-called "Marxist-Leninist" in the Soviet Union The political parties from the Northern Alliance to the Taliban are rotating in a reckless manner. They reluctantly pulled Afghanistan, a backward agricultural country, into the 21st century, so that even remote Afghans can learn about the information society such as TV, the Internet, and e-mail, but they can never change the culture of Afghanistan.
Irregular multi-ethnic tribal culture. Maybe, add a little bit of Islamic fundamentalism.
In fact, such a country is far more than Afghanistan. Perhaps, Afghanistan is still one of the more historic ones. For example, Iraq, its formation was at least after World War I; for example, Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan, its formation was even after World War II, and it was entirely man-made.
If a country like this does not actively change its own culture—as some people have asserted, “modernization is Westernization”—even if it is only a small part of it, relying only on the promotion of outsiders, the so-called "idealistic" America There is really a big question mark about how the so-called returnees from Afghanistan can integrate with modern society.
You can compare it with another neighboring country of Afghanistan-the Heavenly Dynasty. After being beaten for more than a hundred years after the Chinese dynasty fell behind, the "rabbit" used the method of encircling the city from the countryside to gain the right to rule. There is a two-part theory here.
In the first paragraph, the structure of the celestial dynasty is actually comparable to that of Afghanistan. To put it in an exaggeration, it is also an "irregular multi-ethnic tribal culture." One big difference is that Han peasants accounted for the vast majority of the population in the heavenly dynasty. Therefore, mastering the Han farmers is close to mastering the country. For Afghanistan, it seems that even if you master the majority of the population, but not an overwhelming majority of Pashtuns, it does not mean that you can master Tajiks or Hazaras. Therefore, "rural surrounding the city" in Afghanistan first means to truly control the countryside. At this point, successive kings, even the Northern Alliance, and even the once mighty Taliban, seem to have failed to do so. The author who seems to have a good understanding of the rural and urban areas of Afghanistan also has no answer.
In the second paragraph, after the mud legs enter the city (assuming that the mud legs can actually enter the city), of course the way of doing things cannot continue to be mud legs. The affairs of the celestial dynasty are too sensitive to unfold. Speaking of Afghanistan, extreme fundamentalist mud-legs like the Taliban not only do not adjust their thinking and behavior, but instead develop mud-legs thinking to the extreme, and are everywhere against the general trend of the world. The book-burning pit is inconsistent with their own teachings. It’s hard to imagine such a regime. (Recommend a cartoon about the story after the Taliban took power-"The breadwinner", which tells how the underage daughter of an Afghan intellectual was captured by the Taliban after his father was taken away. The story of propping up this family and trying to save my father) what bright future can it bring to the country.
Judging from the above logic, the author's final answer to the Afghanistan problem-"For the US government, the real problem is how to let go"-is obviously too optimistic, and optimistic is a bit absurd. To quote Trump's remarks against Saudi Arabia, "Without the support of the United States, they will not last for two weeks." This is true in Saudi Arabia. Why is the author so confident that the current puppet regime in Kabul will be able to control the rural areas of Afghanistan after the United States has let go?
The hardest thing to change is oneself. Whether it is before or after the countryside encircles the city and the mud legs enter the city.
The author has a good grasp of the structure of the entire book. From the "Father of the Nation" Ahmed Shah to today's Afghanistan, the historical framework of more than 200 years that Afghanistan has truly formed is described in the author's pen. It is very exciting. . Although in terms of brushwork, the text in this book is closer to historical prose rather than serious official history. On the one hand, there is no quotation at all. It seems that all the content comes from the legends that the author has heard or read. On the other hand, based on his Afghan-American identity, the author sometimes expresses his emotions from the perspective of caring about his homeland, and sometimes From the perspective of understanding Western readers, I will give some examples that Western readers are easy to understand but not completely reliable. However, in general, for Chinese readers who do not know much about the history and current situation of Afghanistan, this neighboring country, this book is still very suitable as an entry-level reading.
As the author said at the beginning, the real formation of Afghanistan may be attributed to Ahmed Shah more than two hundred years ago. Therefore, the author's assertion in the preface—the "Empire Cemetery" is a cliché that does not conform to the facts, and I do not fully agree with it. The conquerors such as the Aryans, Greeks, and Turks listed by the author were long before Afghanistan took shape. They—as the author himself admits—have become part of the Afghans. The facts described in the "Imperial Cemetery" are more aimed at empires like Britain, Tsarist Russia, the former Soviet Union, and the United States, which are trying to conquer this land after Afghanistan has taken shape.
And why did Afghanistan become the graveyard of these empires? A large part of the reason, as the author has analyzed throughout the book, is that Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic tribal society that is deeply dependent on agriculture. "An official position does not represent corresponding power", even if it is a nominal king. Power is scattered in the personal network of tribes, especially in the vast rural areas. But outsiders can never guess the secret of this power (or can't find the correct answer if they guess), and have repeatedly supported the puppets, but the ruled area is largely beyond the border of the city of Kabul.
Therefore, a group of outsiders came and brought disasters time after time, leaving behind a corpse of his own and Afghans; a group of rulers, from the civilized king to the so-called "Marxist-Leninist" in the Soviet Union The political parties from the Northern Alliance to the Taliban are rotating in a reckless manner. They reluctantly pulled Afghanistan, a backward agricultural country, into the 21st century, so that even remote Afghans can learn about the information society such as TV, the Internet, and e-mail, but they can never change the culture of Afghanistan.
Irregular multi-ethnic tribal culture. Maybe, add a little bit of Islamic fundamentalism.
In fact, such a country is far more than Afghanistan. Perhaps, Afghanistan is still one of the more historic ones. For example, Iraq, its formation was at least after World War I; for example, Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan, its formation was even after World War II, and it was entirely man-made.
If a country like this does not actively change its own culture—as some people have asserted, “modernization is Westernization”—even if it is only a small part of it, relying only on the promotion of outsiders, the so-called "idealistic" America There is really a big question mark about how the so-called returnees from Afghanistan can integrate with modern society.
You can compare it with another neighboring country of Afghanistan-the Heavenly Dynasty. After being beaten for more than a hundred years after the Chinese dynasty fell behind, the "rabbit" used the method of encircling the city from the countryside to gain the right to rule. There is a two-part theory here.
In the first paragraph, the structure of the celestial dynasty is actually comparable to that of Afghanistan. To put it in an exaggeration, it is also an "irregular multi-ethnic tribal culture." One big difference is that Han peasants accounted for the vast majority of the population in the heavenly dynasty. Therefore, mastering the Han farmers is close to mastering the country. For Afghanistan, it seems that even if you master the majority of the population, but not an overwhelming majority of Pashtuns, it does not mean that you can master Tajiks or Hazaras. Therefore, "rural surrounding the city" in Afghanistan first means to truly control the countryside. At this point, successive kings, even the Northern Alliance, and even the once mighty Taliban, seem to have failed to do so. The author who seems to have a good understanding of the rural and urban areas of Afghanistan also has no answer.
In the second paragraph, after the mud legs enter the city (assuming that the mud legs can actually enter the city), of course the way of doing things cannot continue to be mud legs. The affairs of the celestial dynasty are too sensitive to unfold. Speaking of Afghanistan, extreme fundamentalist mud-legs like the Taliban not only do not adjust their thinking and behavior, but instead develop mud-legs thinking to the extreme, and are everywhere against the general trend of the world. The book-burning pit is inconsistent with their own teachings. It’s hard to imagine such a regime. (Recommend a cartoon about the story after the Taliban took power-"The breadwinner", which tells how the underage daughter of an Afghan intellectual was captured by the Taliban after his father was taken away. The story of propping up this family and trying to save my father) what bright future can it bring to the country.
Judging from the above logic, the author's final answer to the Afghanistan problem-"For the US government, the real problem is how to let go"-is obviously too optimistic, and optimistic is a bit absurd. To quote Trump's remarks against Saudi Arabia, "Without the support of the United States, they will not last for two weeks." This is true in Saudi Arabia. Why is the author so confident that the current puppet regime in Kabul will be able to control the rural areas of Afghanistan after the United States has let go?
The hardest thing to change is oneself. Whether it is before or after the countryside encircles the city and the mud legs enter the city.
April 6, 2021
Games Without Rules provides a satisfying overview of the basic history of Afghanistan. The book has several redeeming qualities. First, it is told in an accessible, subjective, and conversational style by Tamim Ansary, and the book is an absolute breeze to go through. There is not a moment where one feels bored. Ansary avoids giving his readers either too much or too little context. Second, the volume fills a lacuna in the literature that is otherwise inundated with accounts of/about/by/with the Taliban -- a morass in which the broader history of the country from where the Taliban first emerged is usually relegated to a few expository footnotes.
Third, Tamim Ansary tells the story of Afghanistan that is often laden with adjectives and his own subjective assessments of what was desirable or undesirable in Afghanistan's historical trajectory. On the flip side, this can, in some instances, become a rather frustrating exercise. Often, readers are presented with assertions without the evidence to back up such claims. But I guess the exculpatory evidence against such a charge can be that the book was never meant to be a serious work of history, but a subjective story, telling the modern history of the regions encompassing Afghanistan. In this more modest aim, the book does an excellent job. Finally, in the adjective-laden epic told by Ansary, readers may be surprised to find the conspicuous lack of a sympathetic adjective for the country that housed much of some 6 million Afghani refugees following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. An omission that, at least for this writer, sat uneasily.
Third, Tamim Ansary tells the story of Afghanistan that is often laden with adjectives and his own subjective assessments of what was desirable or undesirable in Afghanistan's historical trajectory. On the flip side, this can, in some instances, become a rather frustrating exercise. Often, readers are presented with assertions without the evidence to back up such claims. But I guess the exculpatory evidence against such a charge can be that the book was never meant to be a serious work of history, but a subjective story, telling the modern history of the regions encompassing Afghanistan. In this more modest aim, the book does an excellent job. Finally, in the adjective-laden epic told by Ansary, readers may be surprised to find the conspicuous lack of a sympathetic adjective for the country that housed much of some 6 million Afghani refugees following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. An omission that, at least for this writer, sat uneasily.
August 29, 2021
History often repeats itself or so goes the proverb that often comes to life in Afghanistan, a country that cannot be painted with just black and white colors on the canvas of time.
This well-researched and detailed book provides a sharp bird’s eye-view of Afghan history beginning with Ahmed Shah Baba, the founder of the Durrani Empire in 1747 leading up to the American invasion and the Obama Presidency.
Despite the intensity of the subject matter the author writes with occasional humor making this an easy-to-follow book about the past, present, and future state of this landlocked country, and the political power-play of countries that have been for a very, very long time now, treating Afghanistan as a pendulum between them.
He explains with a lot of clarity the appeal that this land has held for many foreign powers (namely the British, the Soviets, the US, and Pakistan), and its significant mineral wealth.
The book ends with an eerie prediction that has hit the bullseye in the last few days with the Global Super-power abandoning its promised goals with a hasty retreat, leaving the Country in shambles, further pushing it back into darkness.
It is a shame then, that it costs only 3$ to place a landmine but a 1000$ to remove it and therefore, not very surprising that in the current age of capitalism, human life has become very cheap indeed.
“Every foreign force that comes crashing in thinks it's intervening in a country, but it's actually taking sides in an ongoing contest among Afghans about what this country is.”
This well-researched and detailed book provides a sharp bird’s eye-view of Afghan history beginning with Ahmed Shah Baba, the founder of the Durrani Empire in 1747 leading up to the American invasion and the Obama Presidency.
Despite the intensity of the subject matter the author writes with occasional humor making this an easy-to-follow book about the past, present, and future state of this landlocked country, and the political power-play of countries that have been for a very, very long time now, treating Afghanistan as a pendulum between them.
He explains with a lot of clarity the appeal that this land has held for many foreign powers (namely the British, the Soviets, the US, and Pakistan), and its significant mineral wealth.
The book ends with an eerie prediction that has hit the bullseye in the last few days with the Global Super-power abandoning its promised goals with a hasty retreat, leaving the Country in shambles, further pushing it back into darkness.
It is a shame then, that it costs only 3$ to place a landmine but a 1000$ to remove it and therefore, not very surprising that in the current age of capitalism, human life has become very cheap indeed.
“Every foreign force that comes crashing in thinks it's intervening in a country, but it's actually taking sides in an ongoing contest among Afghans about what this country is.”
February 6, 2022
The history of Afghanistan is one of those subjects that I have tried to learn at least broad strokes about but still perpetually feel like I don't know anywhere enough about. This engaging history of the country over more than two centuries, including repeated ill-fated attempts by foreign invaders to seize and retain control, proved a great source of information. Since its publication in 2012 Afghanistan's history has taken yet another consequential turn - I'd be interested in seeing an updated edition including the events of the past decade as seen and interpreted through the author's eyes.
March 6, 2022
a history of afghanistan the first half of the book is a quick overview of the different kong’s and ruler that Afghanistan had, and the second half of the book focuses on the 1980s to now
June 28, 2022
As someone who did not know a lot about the history of Afghanistan, or the politics in the Middle East, this was a very informative book. As someone who did not know a lot about those things... it was a lot to take in all at once. There is so much information and I had little prior knowledge to cling onto, so it was difficult to digest in one sitting. This would be a book that I would need to sit down with again in order to piece together everything.
September 18, 2021
Truly a masterpiece. The personal stories intertwined with the grand history really made the story come to life in a compelling way. Superbly narrated by the author. Written in colloquial that made its stories seem less distant. Loved that. Two Afghanistans are introduced. The tribal and the federal. So much to understand. Enjoyed its comparison with Switzerland. Afghanistan really just wants to live in peace as a central Asian neutrality. 5 stars.
May 4, 2022
Great overview once again by Tamim Ansary. Sometimes however I felt like there was some important information not mentioned. Maybe because I have knowledge on some Afghan history there was times where I was like Okay but why did that happen?
June 6, 2014
Ansary tells the story of Afghanistan as it tries to coalesce into a single nation. while it is dealing with internal struggles between the rural/tribal and the urban/progressive populations, it is repeatedly invaded by foreign powers.
afghanistan's spot on the globe has long made it of strategic interest to powers who have no love for the people who live there. Britian thrice, the soviet union, and the US have all kept armies there, and they have all been harried by tribal and guerrilla warriors.
the author is suprisingly even handed as he relates the story of superpower after superpower 'becoming involved' in his country's affairs. read this book to get an afghan-centered perspective of two centuries of progress amid 5 foreign invasions and near constant meddling with its internal affairs.
i loved this book for its clear, concise history, and its highlighting of how the customs of the region contribute as much or more than the soldiers always on the ground.
with elections coming in afghanistan in several days, some of the major players in this book are still either campaigning for power as an elected official, or orchestrating insurrections behind the scenes. it's as if, at the end of this book, the pages spilled out into real life in the present. the next chapter will be written next week, so go get caught up on the back story!
afghanistan's spot on the globe has long made it of strategic interest to powers who have no love for the people who live there. Britian thrice, the soviet union, and the US have all kept armies there, and they have all been harried by tribal and guerrilla warriors.
the author is suprisingly even handed as he relates the story of superpower after superpower 'becoming involved' in his country's affairs. read this book to get an afghan-centered perspective of two centuries of progress amid 5 foreign invasions and near constant meddling with its internal affairs.
i loved this book for its clear, concise history, and its highlighting of how the customs of the region contribute as much or more than the soldiers always on the ground.
with elections coming in afghanistan in several days, some of the major players in this book are still either campaigning for power as an elected official, or orchestrating insurrections behind the scenes. it's as if, at the end of this book, the pages spilled out into real life in the present. the next chapter will be written next week, so go get caught up on the back story!
August 21, 2016
As an American, I feel it's only courteous to learn about a country my country has invaded. This is a fascinating and accessible introduction to the history of Afghanistan, beginning in the 1700s and concluding in the latter half of Obama's presidency. I knew practically nothing about the material before reading this except that Afghanistan has been invaded many, many times because it has the rotten luck of being perpetually in the way of the strategic interests of Great Powers, sort of like Ukraine. Ansary begins by laying out a handful of insights that he develops throughout the book into pretty convincing arguments. First, that the place is, despite its reputation, not "un-conquerable", it's just that everyone who has successfully taken over the country are now called "Afghans." His main point, however, is that the country is, in fact, on its way to becoming a successful state with a own national identity and valuable role to play in global politics and cultural exchange. Afghanistan simply needs everyone to stop invading it ("for its own good") periodically to achieve that end.
January 23, 2013
My earliest memory of Afghanistan was shaped by war, and it remains so. That is why, at some point, I became desperate to know what the country looked like before the Soviets came in. The first glimpse I got of pre-war Afghanistan was a documentary called Afghan Star. Tamim Ansary's book adds by leaps and bounds what little I saw in that film. Several times Games Without Rules felt like it was describing a country that existed far away in history, and in fact in some parallel universe. So often I had to remind myself that just the other day, there was a bombing in Kabul. How did it all come down to this? Ansary's book provides some, if not all, the answers. It's not some stiff academic piece of work, but therein lies its appeal and accessibility. I would recommend this book to anyone who requires an understanding of Afghanistan. That certainly includes the movers and shakers in Washington DC.
January 19, 2016
"Despite the Soviet destruction of Afghanistan and American fumbling in the past decade, not all is lost. There is some hope of uniting the rural and urban elements of Afghanistan into one culture that holds together in a relatively free modern nation while simultaneously clinging to its traditional Muslim roots. Ironically, according to Ansary, this hope comes primarily from… the Taliban."
Read the rest here: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/schaeffe...
Read the rest here: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/schaeffe...
June 24, 2019
Tamim Ansary is a marvel; he makes the history of Afghanistan interesting, intelligible, and relevant for the American reader. Born in Afghanistan, he moved here in 1964 and has a deep understanding of both cultures. We should pay a lot more attention to this man.
July 18, 2013
Ansary writes an accessible and engaging narrative about a country whose history is frequently misunderstood or ignored, even by the nations that invade it.
September 18, 2019
This is my third Ansary book. He's a great writer and historian.
September 25, 2021
This was not an easy book to read, and I feel like it took me a long time to read, and I am not sure how much I will retain. However, it was fascinating and illuminating, reminding me of how much I do not know about the world and history. The book also helped me understand current events in Afghanistan, although the book was published in 2012. I liked that the author, who was born in Kabul, but came to the U.S. as a teenager and has mostly lived in America, inserted bits of his own personal history, and that of his family members. The author also sucessfully ties in world events. I have added some of Ansary's other books to my tbr. And I want to reread The Kite Runner.
The country of Afghanistan is approximately as old as the United States. However, in the country's life (so far), various outside nations have tried to control and/or guide Afghanistan. Included are Great Britain, Soviet Russia, Pakistan/Taliban, and the United States. None it seems learned from the mistakes of its predecessors, seeming to ignore the history and customs of Afghan natives.
There are many things I want to remember from reading this book, indicated by the referenced quotes.
Around 1880, "Counting colonized subjects, the British government ruled about a quarter of the people on Earth." (73)
"But how could any king assert day-to-day authority over a people who honored over a people who honored only the dictates of religion, custom, culture, tribe, clan, village, and family? This was the problem that preoccupied Afghan rulers over the next half century, a quest that divided Afghanistan into two cultural worlds." (86)
"The Iron Amir set the parameters of a struggle in Afghanistan, between forward-looking change led by a central government and an urban elite, and backward-looking stasis vested in the villages and traditional leaders of the country, a struggle that would have profound consequences not just for Afghanistan itself but for attempts by foreign powers to intervene in the affairs of the country over the next century." (99)
"For the most part, the Family's [Musahibban - Nadir Shah: King 1929-1933; Zahir Shah, his son: King 1929-1973] combination of repressive brutality, cultural grace, and domestic diplomacy kept Afghanistan remarkably calm for the remainder of the thirties, throughout the forties and fifites, and deep into the sixties." (137)
"As a rule, however, Afghan peasants didn't see their life in terms of class interests. They saw their world layered and compartmentalized by ethnic, tribal, and religious factors. Peasants were often the poor relations of wealthy local khans. Even leaving blood ties out of account, rich and poor were commonly bound together by mutual obligations and ties embedded in centuries of family history, personal interactions, and emotions." (183)
"The regime was inviting them into a framework where affiliations would be based on policies rather than blood, history, and personal connections. It has no chance of working." (184)
"The Taliban espoused the same doctrine as the Mujahideen [Islamic resistance who fought the Soviets in the 1980's], only more so. On every point, they were more literal, more simplistic, more extreme. In their own view, what they were was more pure." (238)
In 1998 - "But US policy makers went the other way. They narrowed the scope of their approach, excluding social, political, cultural, and economic factors from consideration to focus tightly on Islamism as a military problem. They also narrowed down their definition of the military problem finally to one man: Osama Bin Laden. By implication, neutralizing him would end the threat." (249)
"In the decades of turmoil, the smartest move for any Afghan had been to trust in guns, distrust neighbors, and cluster under the protection of the nearest strongman of familiar ethnicity." (275)
In the early 2000's - "In short, one unit of [foreign] technical expertise roaming the Afghan landscape represented nearly $1 million on the hoof. [salary, lodging, security, vehicle, interpreter, etc.] Meanwhile, locals hired to do the physical labor were paid on the local scale of forty to seventy dollars a week. So million-dollar units were managing the work of people breaking rocks for five to ten dollares a day. That's a prescription for trouble." (296)
"Today, the term 'Taliban' casually lumps together all sorts of figures from drug-mafia captains to local religious zealots to foreign Jihadists radicals to former honchos of the Mujahideen movement that fought the Soviets." (315)
"The Talibanist insurgency thus came to present the same challenge to NATO and the United States as the Mujahideen insurgency had posed for the Soviet Union in the 1980's and as Afghan tribesmen had posed for Britain in the Anglo-Afghan war of a century earlier. The British gave up on trying to defeat the insurgency of their time and simply pulled out of Afghanistan the moment they found someone to whom they could hand the reins, a man tough enough to dominate the country yet canny enough to act as Britain's partner of international, strategic matters. America would be wise to do the sam if only it could find a man like Abdu'Rahman [The Iron Amir, reigned 1880-1901], but no one on the Afghan political scene right now seems to fit that description." (322)
"The real problem for NATO was that its troops couldn't distinguish the people they were fighting against from the people they were fighting to protect. This wasn't their fault. One had to be on the inside to know the difference, and even there the boundaries were often blurred." (328)
"The killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, should have marked a turning point, given that when the United States went into Afghanistan in 2001, capturing Bin Laden and defeating al Qaeda were the avowed purpose of the war. The Taliban came into it only because they had abetted Bin Laden. As for the Afghans in general, they were defined as the intended beneficiaries of the intervention. Bin Laden's mysterious escape in 2001 and his subsequent silence left the War on Terror in Afghanistan without a marker than could define victory." (329)
"The world's greatest powers have a choice. They can take turns trying to conquer Afghanistan, or they can act together as neutral referees to promote Afghan reconciliation." (348)
"The real question for the United States, then, is not how America can forge true democracy in Afghanistan or end corruption in Afghanistan or change the status of Afghan women: those questions are for Afghans to settle, and Afghans will settle them if left to their own devices. The real question for the United States is how to liberate Afghanistan from the United States - and all other outside powers." (348)
The country of Afghanistan is approximately as old as the United States. However, in the country's life (so far), various outside nations have tried to control and/or guide Afghanistan. Included are Great Britain, Soviet Russia, Pakistan/Taliban, and the United States. None it seems learned from the mistakes of its predecessors, seeming to ignore the history and customs of Afghan natives.
There are many things I want to remember from reading this book, indicated by the referenced quotes.
Around 1880, "Counting colonized subjects, the British government ruled about a quarter of the people on Earth." (73)
"But how could any king assert day-to-day authority over a people who honored over a people who honored only the dictates of religion, custom, culture, tribe, clan, village, and family? This was the problem that preoccupied Afghan rulers over the next half century, a quest that divided Afghanistan into two cultural worlds." (86)
"The Iron Amir set the parameters of a struggle in Afghanistan, between forward-looking change led by a central government and an urban elite, and backward-looking stasis vested in the villages and traditional leaders of the country, a struggle that would have profound consequences not just for Afghanistan itself but for attempts by foreign powers to intervene in the affairs of the country over the next century." (99)
"For the most part, the Family's [Musahibban - Nadir Shah: King 1929-1933; Zahir Shah, his son: King 1929-1973] combination of repressive brutality, cultural grace, and domestic diplomacy kept Afghanistan remarkably calm for the remainder of the thirties, throughout the forties and fifites, and deep into the sixties." (137)
"As a rule, however, Afghan peasants didn't see their life in terms of class interests. They saw their world layered and compartmentalized by ethnic, tribal, and religious factors. Peasants were often the poor relations of wealthy local khans. Even leaving blood ties out of account, rich and poor were commonly bound together by mutual obligations and ties embedded in centuries of family history, personal interactions, and emotions." (183)
"The regime was inviting them into a framework where affiliations would be based on policies rather than blood, history, and personal connections. It has no chance of working." (184)
"The Taliban espoused the same doctrine as the Mujahideen [Islamic resistance who fought the Soviets in the 1980's], only more so. On every point, they were more literal, more simplistic, more extreme. In their own view, what they were was more pure." (238)
In 1998 - "But US policy makers went the other way. They narrowed the scope of their approach, excluding social, political, cultural, and economic factors from consideration to focus tightly on Islamism as a military problem. They also narrowed down their definition of the military problem finally to one man: Osama Bin Laden. By implication, neutralizing him would end the threat." (249)
"In the decades of turmoil, the smartest move for any Afghan had been to trust in guns, distrust neighbors, and cluster under the protection of the nearest strongman of familiar ethnicity." (275)
In the early 2000's - "In short, one unit of [foreign] technical expertise roaming the Afghan landscape represented nearly $1 million on the hoof. [salary, lodging, security, vehicle, interpreter, etc.] Meanwhile, locals hired to do the physical labor were paid on the local scale of forty to seventy dollars a week. So million-dollar units were managing the work of people breaking rocks for five to ten dollares a day. That's a prescription for trouble." (296)
"Today, the term 'Taliban' casually lumps together all sorts of figures from drug-mafia captains to local religious zealots to foreign Jihadists radicals to former honchos of the Mujahideen movement that fought the Soviets." (315)
"The Talibanist insurgency thus came to present the same challenge to NATO and the United States as the Mujahideen insurgency had posed for the Soviet Union in the 1980's and as Afghan tribesmen had posed for Britain in the Anglo-Afghan war of a century earlier. The British gave up on trying to defeat the insurgency of their time and simply pulled out of Afghanistan the moment they found someone to whom they could hand the reins, a man tough enough to dominate the country yet canny enough to act as Britain's partner of international, strategic matters. America would be wise to do the sam if only it could find a man like Abdu'Rahman [The Iron Amir, reigned 1880-1901], but no one on the Afghan political scene right now seems to fit that description." (322)
"The real problem for NATO was that its troops couldn't distinguish the people they were fighting against from the people they were fighting to protect. This wasn't their fault. One had to be on the inside to know the difference, and even there the boundaries were often blurred." (328)
"The killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, should have marked a turning point, given that when the United States went into Afghanistan in 2001, capturing Bin Laden and defeating al Qaeda were the avowed purpose of the war. The Taliban came into it only because they had abetted Bin Laden. As for the Afghans in general, they were defined as the intended beneficiaries of the intervention. Bin Laden's mysterious escape in 2001 and his subsequent silence left the War on Terror in Afghanistan without a marker than could define victory." (329)
"The world's greatest powers have a choice. They can take turns trying to conquer Afghanistan, or they can act together as neutral referees to promote Afghan reconciliation." (348)
"The real question for the United States, then, is not how America can forge true democracy in Afghanistan or end corruption in Afghanistan or change the status of Afghan women: those questions are for Afghans to settle, and Afghans will settle them if left to their own devices. The real question for the United States is how to liberate Afghanistan from the United States - and all other outside powers." (348)
June 7, 2020
"Games Without Rules" was an enlightening book to listen to. Tamim Ansary deftly chronicles the tumultuous history of Afghanistan from it's pre-modern to current times. I say deftly because he wishes to convey two important messages about Afghanistan-
1. The inherent dichotomy of Afghanistan makes it a difficult country to govern in the modern sense. Rural vs urban, traditional vs modern, conservative vs liberal - the pendulum swings along these dimensions ever so often throughout Afghan history. Westerners try to understand and failing that, manipulate the structure of Afghan society to fit a model they're more familiar with. This squaring of a circle never works.
2. The "natural" progression of Afghan politics was often disturbed by foreign powers seeking to use Afghanistan as a playground in their geo-strategic games. First the British, then the Russians and now Pakistan. The disproportionate power these assailants had compared to the native Afghans meant that they could wreak disastrous damage on Afghanistan whose fragile socio-political system could not sustain the damage.
You might be surprised that I haven't listed the United States as one of the playground nations. That's because one can't be accused of nefarious intent if one doesn't have any clue what their intentions are. There are a number of books that describe the blundering US policy in Afghanistan in more detail. What Ansary does is describe it's impact on the day-to-day lives of Afghans; a refreshing though saddening perspective.
You might also be surprised that I have included Pakistan alongside Great Britain and the Soviet Union, in the list of nations that destructively interfered in Afghanistan. Stephen Coll's "Directorate S" makes an indubitable case in this regard. But while Coll explains Pakistani interference in Afghanistan as a product of an Islamized, India-fearing, unaccountable military leadership, Ansary hints at Pakistani goals to expand it's sphere of influence towards Central Asia. However, Ansary doesn't go into as much detail as I would've liked.
For achieving an understanding of Afghan society and its historical context, this book is a must read for Americans since American soldiers have been fighting in Afghanistan longer than they did in Germany or Korea or Vietnam or even Iraq.
1. The inherent dichotomy of Afghanistan makes it a difficult country to govern in the modern sense. Rural vs urban, traditional vs modern, conservative vs liberal - the pendulum swings along these dimensions ever so often throughout Afghan history. Westerners try to understand and failing that, manipulate the structure of Afghan society to fit a model they're more familiar with. This squaring of a circle never works.
2. The "natural" progression of Afghan politics was often disturbed by foreign powers seeking to use Afghanistan as a playground in their geo-strategic games. First the British, then the Russians and now Pakistan. The disproportionate power these assailants had compared to the native Afghans meant that they could wreak disastrous damage on Afghanistan whose fragile socio-political system could not sustain the damage.
You might be surprised that I haven't listed the United States as one of the playground nations. That's because one can't be accused of nefarious intent if one doesn't have any clue what their intentions are. There are a number of books that describe the blundering US policy in Afghanistan in more detail. What Ansary does is describe it's impact on the day-to-day lives of Afghans; a refreshing though saddening perspective.
You might also be surprised that I have included Pakistan alongside Great Britain and the Soviet Union, in the list of nations that destructively interfered in Afghanistan. Stephen Coll's "Directorate S" makes an indubitable case in this regard. But while Coll explains Pakistani interference in Afghanistan as a product of an Islamized, India-fearing, unaccountable military leadership, Ansary hints at Pakistani goals to expand it's sphere of influence towards Central Asia. However, Ansary doesn't go into as much detail as I would've liked.
For achieving an understanding of Afghan society and its historical context, this book is a must read for Americans since American soldiers have been fighting in Afghanistan longer than they did in Germany or Korea or Vietnam or even Iraq.
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