cover image The Long Way Back: Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace

The Long Way Back: Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace

Chris Alexander. Harper, $25.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-06-202037-6

Alexander, a former ambassador and U.N. deputy who served in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2009, delivers a remarkably thoughtful portrait of the ravaged country, chronicling its search for political stability in the years after the American invasion. He begins by tracing Afghanistan’s epic history to show how its current troubles reflect its tumultuous past. He describes the country’s initial euphoria at the rapid fall of the Taliban regime and Hamid Karzai’s inauguration, the period of its neglect when the world’s attention focused on the Iraq War, and the resurgence of the Taliban and the myriad other problems plaguing the country’s fragile stability. These include drug warlords, a “culture of payback and vengeance,” corrupt or incompetent government officials, Karzai’s growing distrust of foreign intervention, and most importantly, Pakistan’s duplicity in subsidizing al-Qaeda and other anti-Western mujahideen at the risk of its own security. Highlighting positive developments—government ministers who are true reformers, clerics providing a bulwark against extremists, Kabul reclaiming its mercantile history, a new road system, and a reviving economy—he urges other countries, such as the U.S. and his native Canada, not to give up advocating higher troop levels and drone attacks against sanctuaries in Pakistan. Evoking Afghanistan’s history, culture, architecture, peoples, and pastimes, he provides an insightful, firsthand look at a chaotic country. (Nov.)