Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is a thorough analysis of how Western policy towards the region has made things worse since 2001. It is pretty bleak. Rashid joked to me while he was writing it that the working title was, What A Fucking Mess. This is an extensive analysis – he has tremendous contacts in Western governments and in the Pakistani and Afghan governments, and he details what a difficult situation this is.
Your last book, Descent Into Chaos, is less optimistic.
This is a thorough analysis of how Western policy towards the region has made things worse since 2001. It is pretty bleak. Rashid joked to me while he was writing it that the working title was, What A Fucking Mess. This is an extensive analysis – he has tremendous contacts in Western governments and in the Pakistani and Afghan governments and he details what a difficult situation this is. I think his work is very readable and I like his bestseller on the Taliban too. It’s the kind of thing that a regular person with no explicit knowledge of the region can pick up and read through and it’s going to make sense. It’s over 400 pages so it isn’t a light read but it is organised well and written in a way that takes you through the issues. It’s such a complex region, even more so than the Middle East because there are so many factors.
What are they?
There are wider geo-political struggles like the rivalry between India and Pakistan, the long-standing tensions between Iran and the US. He discusses how these geo-political issues are played out in Afghanistan. Then there is the drugs trade, which plays a role in the destabilisation of Afghanistan. Rashid walks you through the policies that have failed here. He paints a bleak picture but, again, he ends on a note of optimism. The Pakistani people came out on the streets in 2007 to protest at the firing of the Supreme Court Chief Justice and ended up unseating Musharaf, and then they elected a moderate political party. In my experience, Pakistan is a country of moderates at its core that is being destabilised by a minority of extremists, who are increasingly funding themselves though enormously profitable criminal activity.
Obviously you feel it is important that we understand what is going on there.
It is vitally important to the West to understand what is going on there. Every terror attack that happens in the world has some link to the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Drugs are the largest moneymaker for the Afghan Taliban, but the various extremist groups operating in the border areas also make money from kidnapping, extortion and gemstone smuggling and all sorts of other illicit activity. They behave more like Mafiosi than holy warriors. People think they are fanatics living in caves, and while this may be true of some of the foot soldiers, at the top of the chain of command is an enormous amount of criminal money and it is clear that some of them live very well. In my research I would hear of rich warlords and insurgent commanders spending the weekend living it up in Dubai in ways that hardly make them look like pious Muslims. But, to be honest, there is no real sign that anybody is living like Pablo Escobar, so there is a real concern here – what are they going to do with all this money?
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Award-winning journalist Gretchen Peters has covered Pakistan and Afghanistan for more than a decade, first for the Associated Press and later as a reporter for ABC News.
