After the Taliban
The struggle for the future of Afghanistan and Pakistan, as seen through Western eyes.

Reviewed by Pamela Constable
Sunday, April 2, 2006

KABUL IN WINTER

Life Without Peace in Afghanistan

By Ann Jones

Metropolitan. 321 pp. $24

THREE CUPS OF TEA

One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations . . . One School at a Time

By Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

Viking. 338 pp. $25.95

The harsh beauty of Afghanistan has always lured a certain hardy breed of Westerner, and the few who linger there inevitably become both addicted and disillusioned. Despite the overthrow of the repressive Taliban and the advent of democracy in 2001, the country continues to vex as much as it inspires -- and the continuing deep U.S. involvement in its rebirth compels us to examine why.

In her aptly titled Kabul in Winter , Ann Jones, a journalist and women's rights activist, presents an especially bleak portrait of post-Taliban Afghanistan, depicting a cruel and opportunistic place where foreign aid money vanishes into a thousand tunic pockets, where women are trapped in prisons of family and cultural tradition, and where concepts such as accountability and the rule of law are often viewed as naive, foreign abstractions.

Much of what Jones writes rings true, especially about the thick barriers that thwart her attempts to promote the legal rights of Afghan women. And some of her descriptions approach poetry: "Kabul in winter is the color of the dust . . . a fine particulate lifted by winds from old stone mountains and sifted over the city like flour . . . . Dust fills the lungs, tightens the chest, lies in the eyes like gravel, so that you look out on this obscure drab landscape always through something like tears." Unfortunately, Jones, who writes frequently on women and violence, tends to veer into sarcastic, semi-vulgar and unsubstantiated diatribes against the Bush administration and U.S. foreign policy, thus undermining the power of her argument. She repeatedly refers to the current president as "Bush the Lesser" and glibly tars all U.S. officials as people who "knew nothing about Afghanistan and cared less," except as a potential venue for an oil pipeline.

Despite these lapses, Jones's book gathers power as it goes on, and her anger serves her increasingly well as she compiles a painstaking litany of frustrations and failures in her mission to help Afghan women. She skewers the hypocrisy of a culture that forces women to "keep themselves under wraps" as a protection from the "uncontrollable God-given sexual appetites of men." Imposing the burden of "honor" on women, she points out, "frees men to live as they please" but makes them fearful and cruel. A Muslim woman, she concludes, "wears the whole weight of the Islamic world." Jones visits girls in hospitals who have tried to burn themselves to death rather than face the shame of not having proven their virginity by bleeding on their wedding nights. She visits a prison where young women are confined for such sexually related "crimes" as running away from abusive husbands. Many recount tangled tales of forced marriages, family rejection and sexual enslavement. The common theme is the powerlessness of human property. "Murder a favored wife," Jones notes grimly, "and you owe her family . . . four new copies of the Quran, four women, and one fat sheep."

Most depressing of all are her efforts to get the local legal establishment to defend women's rights. Even female lawyers at the brand-new Ministry of Women's Affairs treat her with indifference, suspicion and bafflement. "In my country it is against the law for a husband to hit his wife," Jones tells them. "In Afghanistan not," they reply, in halting English. "In my country it is against the law to force a young girl to marry an old man she doesn't want to marry," Jones says. The lawyers shake their heads. "In Afghanistan not. In my country is custom," one says.

Toward the end, the book relapses briefly into a sputtering indictment of red tape and corruption in foreign aid programs. But Jones's bitterness is eminently understandable. Afghanistan is a fledgling democracy, backed by Western money and might, but it is still often a society of survivors without pity that blames the victim and steals what it can from those who try to help. We are left with the indelible image of a winter night in Kabul as Jones listens impotently to the howls of chained dogs freezing to death in backyards, their owners too poor and beaten down to heed them.

Greg Mortenson is another American drawn to the same forbidding region, determined to make a humanizing mark. After a failed attempt to climb the deadly K2 peak in 1993, Mortenson was taken in by a poor Pakistani village -- and taken with the idea of building that village a school. Despite its pinky-raising title, Three Cups of Tea is a swashbuckling, sprawling adventure tale in which we accompany the former "climbing bum" across mountain passes and wobbly bridges on a mission to open schools for village children in northern Pakistan. Like Jones, he encounters obstacles at every turn -- from Muslim clerics who forbid girls to attend his school, to tribal militiamen who kidnap him, to wily local leaders who attempt to divert his largess for their own ends.

Mortenson is surely right that education is key to the battle with jihadists for Muslim minds. But unlike Jones's sharply observed, frequently lyrical memoir, Mortenson's book is full of self-indulgent digressions, clunky prose and odd, hagiographic references to himself. In one passage, we learn that "thousands of people likewise sang Mortenson's praises," while one villager thanks "Almighty Allah and Mister Greg Mortenson" for a new school. There's even a highlighted quote from a profile in Parade magazine that describes him as "quietly waging his own campaign against Islamic fundamentalists."

The problem stems in part from the awkward construction of the book, which is written as an admiring, extended third-person interview by its co-author, journalist David Oliver Relin. He acknowledges being in awe of Mortenson, but his efforts to build him up often fall flat. And Relin's metaphors often seem like parodies: "Mortenson sat on a boulder and drank from his water bottle . . . but he couldn't drink in enough of this setting." We also learn far too much about Mortenson's domestic life and fundraising travails back in the States -- none of which is nearly as interesting as the characters and situations he encounters in the remote tribal regions of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Here, Relin's prose gains both altitude and insight. When a Muslim guide kneels to pray in a parking lot, "the belief rippling around him was . . . powerful enough to convert a gas station into a holy place." Among some tribes, patience is a way of life: Just as a hunter from Pakistan's Balti people "would stalk a single ibex for days" to save a precious bullet that he could not afford to squander, "a Balti groom might wait years for his marriage" until his betrothed child bride was old enough to leave home.

Mortenson's mission is admirable, his conviction unassailable, his territory exotic and his timing excellent. His story would have been better served, though, by a tougher editor and a book that was shorter, leaner and freer of fawning. ·

Pamela Constable, a deputy foreign editor at The Washington Post, was the paper's South Asia bureau chief from 1999 to 2002 and its Kabul correspondent from 2002 to 2004.