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AFGHANISTAN Revolution Unending, Afghanistan: 1979 to the Present, by Gilles Dorronsoro. Translated from French by John King. New York, NY: Columbia University Press in association with the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Nationales, Paris, 2005. xxiii + 356 pages. Maps. Chron. Gloss. Sel. bibl. to p. 362. Index to p. 370. $29.50.
Revolution Unending is an excellent and very thorough study of the formation and evolution of social, organizational, economic, and religious segments of Afghan society since 1979. It is grounded in Gilles Dorronsoro's extensive field research in many regions of Afghanistan and provides particularly balanced and objective discussions of topics, such as Taliban policies, that are rarely tackled objectively elsewhere. Its main weakness is an underspecified theoretical perspective.
The introduction briefly discusses a number of perspectives on Afghan conflicts (systemic, ethnic, tribal and even organizational), poses some broad questions about social and political orders, and provides the author's hypotheses without much attention to alternative ones. This, however, is not a book about rigorous and sustained hypothesis-testing, even if we find scattered instances in the text where the author engages in such an exercise. This is regrettable because the socio-economic thread that unifies the narrative, if articulated more trenchantly, would have been a worthy competitor for Barnett Rubin's excellent political...