The making of the Taleban.(Book Review)

Publication: Spectator

Publication Date: 28-DEC-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)

THE SEWING CIRCLES OF HERAT: MY AFGHAN YEARS by Christina Lamb HarperCollins, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 338, ISBN 000714251X

I saw the first tourists arriving in Afghanistan this summer. I saw their incredulity at the graveyard of crumpled aeroplanes at Kabul airport and at the Hazara suburb of the city that looks like Berlin in 1945. The question everyone asked was: how did this happen? How did a country famous for its hospitality and poetry sleepwalk back into the Middle Ages? In future the tourists will be carrying this book. As an account of how the country got into its present state, and of the making of the grotesque regime of the Taleban, it could not possibly...

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