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This is a clear, readable, and thoughtful account of recent Afghan history that will be of interest to the expert and general reader alike. It covers the period from 1880, when the "Iron Amir" Abdur Rahman Khan came to the throne, to 2001, with two chapters added to take account of developments after 11 September.
The early historical background is well presented; here Rasanayagam has had the benefit of material collected by the late Louis Dupree, whose encyclopedic book Afghanistan remains an essential reference work, and of the Tarzi family's knowledge of events under the monarchy. For the later chapters, he has drawn on his own experience as director of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office in Peshawar in the 1990s and contacts established with Afghans, Pakistanis, and U.N. personalities. Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan has contributed a foreword.
While the book follows a generally chronological sequence, in the second chapter there is a discussion of the Afghan monarchy from the time of Abdur Rahman to the coup that unseated Zahir Shah in 1973. Here the basic political forces in Afghanistan--the state and the tribal and ethnic groups--are introduced, and reference is made to the new urban, educated, and increasingly Westernized social group that had its heyday in the 1960s. Like those in Paris and elsewhere in the West, students at Kabul University were...