George Packer Recommends My Life with the Taliban

The current issue of Foreign Affairs asked experts to suggest essential recent books pertaining to U.S. foreign policy. Contributors include Madeleine Albright, Fouad Ajami, and New Yorker writer George Packer, who recommended three books on Afghanistan, including My Life with the Taliban, by Abdul Salam Zaeef.

Packer writes:

Dozens of reports appear every year on the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but they rarely convey the essential truths of how the militants live and think. Three new books take you as deep inside as any Western reader is likely to get. One is My Life With the Taliban, by Zaeef — the autobiography of a Pashtun who was an early recruit to the movement, then a top official of the Taliban regime in the 1990s, and afterward a prisoner at Guantánamo….

Zaeef — now “retired” in Kabul and considered to be a moderate and an intermediary to hard-line commanders — betrays the severe narrowness of his and his comrades’ world. The leaders of the Taliban were always parochial in the extreme, saturated with religiosity, and the years since their fall from power have only intensified these qualities: globalization makes them more ideological but not more worldly…..

Whatever the future of Afghanistan, a deal with the Taliban will make life a nightmare for anyone who falls under their power.

.