Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

Summary

Today, most Westerners still see the war in Afghanistan as acontest between democracy and Islamist fanaticism. That war is real, but itsits atop an older struggle between Kabul and the countryside, between orderand chaos, between a modernist impulse to join the world and the pull of anolder Afghanistan—a tribal universe of village republics permeated by Islam.

Now, Tamim Ansary draws on his Afghan background, Muslimroots, and Western and Afghan sources to explain history from the inside outand illuminate the long, internal struggle that the outside world has neverfully understood. It is the story of a nation struggling to take form, a nationundermined by its own demons while, every forty to sixty years, a great powercrashes in and disrupts whatever progress has been made. Told inconversational, storytelling style and focusing on key events andpersonalities, Games without Rules provides revelatory insightinto a country at the center of political debate.