For her generation, Marie Colvin exemplified the trade as she covered combat from one end of the globe to the other, famously wearing La Perla underwear and designer clothing under her body armour. As a result of a grenade attack in Sri Lanka, Colvin wore an eyepatch after losing the sight in one eye, something that further distinguished her. She wrote brilliant copy and proved her bravery — but the Sunday Times correspondent’s own story came to a harrowing end when she was reporting on the siege of Homs in Syria. She was killed by the Assad regime, according to her family. She was never going to die in her bed.

Her death brings up a host of questions that dog editors and other journalists. How far do you go to get a story, what price should you pay for a scoop, and is it ever worth dying for a page lead?

The question is relevant because six  years after Colvin’s death her fellow war correspondent Lindsey Hilsum has written Colvin’s biography, In Extremis (Chatto & Windus, £20). The title is how Colvin explained what she did: “It has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars.”

War photographer Paul Conroy’s 2014 book about his final mission with Colvin, Under the Wire (Quercus, £9.99), has been adapted into a gritty documentary directed by Chris Martin, and the Oscar-nominated star Rosamund Pike plays Colvin in the Hollywood film, A Private War, which was released last month.

We glamorise and lionise the ultra-elite who cover war, in much the same way that the femme fatale assassin is glamorised in the BBC series Killing Eve. Colvin’s mystique captures our imagination for obvious reasons, illustrated by Conroy’s description of coming across the larger-than-life reporter in a war zone, popping out of a pile of rubble smoking a cigarette. No wonder Conroy said that they had “the time of our lives” working together.

I’m not sure I’ve ever had a more fantastic adventure than the days and nights I stayed in Siloppi, a small town in south-east Turkey, waiting to cross into northern Iraq on the eve of the war in 2003. The two male journalists I spent the most time with acted as if the whole thing was a lark.

It’s perhaps no surprise that war correspondents guard their exclusive club jealously. It is a magic circle into which few are admitted.  Colvin created herself in the image of the ideal war correspondent. She crafted a one-of-the-boys persona: she was tougher than the toughest.

It’s a macho culture, full of bravado, camaraderie, fulfilment, excitement and, inevitably, ego. During one breakfast on the trip into Iraq I sat between two warring parties: the BBC’s John Simpson and ITN’s Julian Manyon. In the battle of the big ego, I felt lucky to escape unscathed.

But there are lots of war reporters who work for no recognition. TV journalists go into war zones in teams with a ton of equipment and paid security. Footage of them in their helmets and flak jackets doesn’t show the support crew, the boom mike, the satellite dish.

Hilsum refused to go to Homs because it was just too dangerous. While Colvin clearly knew the risks and she and Conroy made difficult, informed decisions every step of the way, she also broke some rules, and breaking them is perhaps what got her killed. She should not have given broadcast interviews to the BBC and CNN which allowed Syrian government intelligence to monitor her position.

As any seasoned war correspondent will tell you, listen to the locals, take security advice and never double back on yourself. Colvin, determined to tell the story of the people in the suburb of Baba Amr, went back to report on the siege and died there.

Colvin was tough. One photographer said she was scarier than the war they were covering and refused to work with her. When two French journalists appeared (one was seriously injured in the attack that killed Colvin), she suggested leaving as the “Eurotrash” had arrived.

An example of pushing too far is the tale of journalist Nick della Casa, his wife of six months, Rosanna, and his brother-in-law Charlie Maxwell, who were killed in the mountains of Kurdistan in 1991. It’s an initially romantic story full of adventure in which Rosanna navigated by the stars and cooked wild grasses when they were lost. According to those who knew them and their situation, della Casa failed to make a rational analysis of the danger. He was regarded by colleagues as a loose cannon and an accident waiting to happen — part glorious intrepidness, part pure insanity, which is how Conroy summed up his final mission with Colvin.

It’s the myth surrounding Colvin that sits uncomfortably with me because there are so many other journalists, including in this instance Syrians, who deserve the same plaudits.

So was it worth it? Was Colvin foolhardy or brave? The people in Homs regard her as a hero, but many journalists will say that getting out alive and uninjured is the ultimate  goal.

The post Marie Colvin’s myth appeared first on Standpoint.

When the Wall fell in 1989 and the Cold War ended, the consensus went that the spy novel was as dead as communism and in its wake a new world order would flourish. Almost three decades later, a reality exists in a way most of us could never have imagined — Trump as president, Brexit on the cards, fake news, as surreal a turn as in any dystopian novel.

Perhaps the recent raft of this genre of novel helps us to deal with our not-so-brave new world, although none of them seem remotely cathartic. A funtastic future rather than a Handmaid’s Tale reality seems more inducing in these fraught times. Let’s fill the future with Jetsons-style flying cars and weekend trips to Mars. After all, the future did bring us the worldwide web; the eradication of smallpox; hand sanitiser and AI. But the Orwellian Big Brother society haunts us, and Tom Wolfe’s “social X-rays” from The Bonfire of the Vanities are still the aspiration.

While very different novels, neither Rachel Heng’s Suicide Club nor Shaun Prescott’s The Town maps out worlds that seem in any way inviting, although the better book of the two by a country mile is Heng’s debut novel. Both, however, catch the zeitgeist of our troubling times.

Heng’s cautionary tale explores New York society in the not too distant future. In this world people aspire to live to 300. Longevity and immortality are the central themes. The subtext is: if you could live forever, would you want to? What price immortality?

The main character is Lea Kirino, a human organs trader, who has a perfect set of genes that could grant her the chance to live forever when the imminent Third Wave of new technology arrives. At 100, she has the body of a 50-year-old.

“Lifers” like Lea reap the rewards provided they play by the rules. In their hermetically sealed universe of sanitised fabulousness, Lea is a happy and unquestioning participant. She has a relationship with Todd, her mannequin-like fiancé with Stasi tendencies, and both he and Lea follow the “healthy mind, healthy body” tenets of the omnipresent and powerful “Ministry”.

Lea’s on track until her beloved father, missing for 88 years and on the wanted list, mysteriously reappears, which starts Lea on her trajectory of self-discovery and brings us to the core of the unfolding drama and directly into the beating heart of the secretive Suicide Club. Here, people choose to live and die on their own terms, shunning immortality in an act of defiance and the chance to live life as they wish. Her unorthodox behaviour alerts the Ministry, which puts her under “observation”, and she is sent to the equivalent of reform school where she meets Anja Nilsson, a woman at the other end of the social scale.

Anja, like Lea, has a secret. She nurses a mother who cannot die, a former opera singer who, like Lea’s father, has lived off-piste, so to speak. She hovers in a state somewhere between life and death because she is not eligible for the organs needed to keep her alive. As Lea’s life unravels, she discovers what living is really about. Heng writes beautifully about letting go, having control over your own destiny and knowing when to say goodbye. “Death,” she writes, “is the best invention life had to offer.”

Heng explores the complicated mother-daughter relationship between Lea and Uju and the sense of loss when Lea’s brother, Samuel, who does not have the requisite gene composition, dies. Their rebel father, Kaito, who ultimately has the life sucked out of him, opts for “trad food” — hamburgers and fried chicken, both on the banned list — instead of the prescribed tasteless, life-enhancing liquid nutripacks.

Singapore-born Heng, who is not yet 30, explores her real-life obsession with loss, fear of death and mortality in Suicide Club, and takes a long, hard look at the American obsession with the wellness culture, the notion of perfection, and the social hierarchy where the chosen are thin, beautiful, privileged, competitive and antiseptic.

Suicide Club is a very good story, and Heng writes like a dream about of the triumph of love and the benefit of not playing by the rules. In their search for meaning, her characters reject conformity for individuality and freedom.

Perhaps our world is not so bad.

While Suicide Club engages the reader until the last word, The Town’s final sentence is one of the few that engaged me at all: “No town continues to be just a town. No answer remains true to the end.” There is something lyrical in those lines but the story, the characters and the message fall short. The final paragraph was the highlight of the book and not only because it marked the end.

The Town is Australian writer Shaun Prescott’s first novel and from the opening page I didn’t care. I didn’t like Prescott’s style of writing. I found it pedestrian, prosaic and repetitive. It’s a dull story whose characters I hoped would disappear into the epidemic of multiple holes that mysteriously appeared in the nameless town where the nameless narrator arrives to begin  research for his book on the disappearing towns of the central west of New South Wales.

I get the existential overtones, the philosophical questions, the intellectual prying and the metaphysical entreaties, the angst and ennui, and agree with the character who says that no one is interested in disappearing towns. I read the book twice to make sure I didn’t like it, and channelled my inner Kafka to boot. Still no luck.

The narrator meets a cast of unengaging characters, including Ciara, a sort of love interest who runs a radio station that no one listens to where she plays music no one wants to hear. When Ciara remarks that “she didn’t live among the people, only witnessed them like through a pane of glass,” it just seemed to have overt overtones of Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott.

Jenny runs an empty pub that no one other than the narrator ever frequents, which makes me think it should just close. Then there is the ill-fated Rick, who struggles with growing up. He tries valiantly not to engage in adult life, and then does. What happens to him is the most interesting, empathetic and dramatic part of the story. I warmed to pathetic Rick for his love of the safety he finds within the confines of supermarkets, “unable to see life beyond them”. Rick likes them for their lack of uniqueness. “Woolworths was an embassy for nowhere and everywhere.” Another character, Tom, drives an empty bus around and around the town in pointless absurdity.

It is a novel about belonging, about who belongs, about colonial genocide, resistance, arriving, finding your place in society. Frustratingly, Prescott writes some truly wonderful sentences: “They all thought themselves as belonging to this cherished destitution, via the frayed threads of a mysterious continuum.” You end up wishing the whole book was written with such flair. “But it was another town on the road to some other town, or maybe a city, in one of the directions.”

Perhaps The Town will appeal to adolescents struggling with understanding their world and their place in it, or to those who live on the fringes of society like the principal characters.

Both books have redemption as a theme, searching for what lies underneath the surface in shadowy worlds and the need for truth — but these are the only things they have in common. I wish I liked Prescott’s book, which would have made a better short story, but then I would have given Game of Thrones a thumb’s down too — so, perhaps, de gustibus non est disputandum.

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As the paradigm shift hits, the UN is looking to change a policy that after 25 years is no longer sustainable. With increased domestic pressure in donor countries to justify spending, the focus has transformed from providing cradle-to-grave aid to empowering refugees to find solutions for themselves.

TEDx, the elite media organisation that posts aspirational online talks, showed refugees as agents of positive change and valuable members of society, not simply a drain on host country resources. 

At the same time the UNHCR is under fierce pressure to reduce its expenditure and is making millions of dollars of savings with staff being moved to where they are actually needed.

The UNHCR’s mandate is to protect refugees, safeguard their fundamental human rights and help to build a better future. But critics said the Kakuma event was a waste of money which could have been better spent on a new hospital or a school. Those in favour said that by raising the profile of the issue, it did incalculable good.

Former UNHCR head Antonio Guterres, now UN Secretary-General, is trying to reform a system with which he is intimately acquainted, but there doesn’t seem much reason to be positive. Refugees are big business, and subliminal pressure exists to keep the system going. That’s one reason refugees have been made into needy victims, who need supplies of tarpaulins, non-food items, sanitation, water and tents, all of which translates into money. If people are seen as capable of standing on their own feet, those contracts aren’t needed, and without victims, there’s no business. Why find a solution if it threatens livelihoods?

Spending power in Kakuma, whose regugees are mainly Christians from South Sudan, amounts to $56 million a year. The current notion that you can turn refugees into Einsteins and entrepreneurs is simply unrealistic, because only about 15 per cent have that kind of potential, while many of them will remain vulnerable.
For the most part, refugees are kept outside mainstream Kenyan society. For them to be integrated, the most viable solution, laws need to change. In this regard TEDx was preaching to the converted. Few Kenyan MPs outside those representing the affected areas attended. The global issue of who is Kenyan is key because Kenyan nationality is by only descent or long marriage. Despite being born in Kenya or living here since the early 1990s, many refugees remain without documentation, meaning they can’t work, access government buildings or travel freely within the country. While there are no fences or barriers around the camps, and people come and go at will, their futures remain limited.

Kenyans see refugees from countries like Somalia as having much more than they themselves do. Local communities look on as they are provided with shelter, food and daily allowances. So in Dadaab, once the largest refugee camp in the world, Kenyans have taken to registering as refugees. Considering the needs of the host community is part of the paradigm shift. Kenyans think: why not milk the system, as the Kenyan government and the UN do? Those who work in and understand the UN system can take sick leave for years on full pay while their post remains vacant. These are some of the excesses donor countries are aware of: others include UN protocols where it can take half a year to buy a pen or organise an event. It costs thousands more in paperwork simply to buy a car. A few months ago, a three-day sexual misconduct workshop was hastily assembled in Naivasha after it was found staff had extorted money from refugees by promising them resettlement in the US and Canada, something only the host countries can offer. At the out-of-town resort, many rooms were left empty after UN staff told participants they couldn’t stay overnight.

With donors focused on other conflicts, they are also getting wise. EU countries are providing aid to at-risk countries in order to keep potential refugees at home. Until the root causes of the problems are addressed, the refugee crisis will continue and less than one per cent of over 65 million refugees worldwide will be resettled. It can take more than a decade to get through the resettlement pipelines. Repatriation is the number one solution — getting people back to their homes where they have land and family — but in many places, it will take decades, if ever, for peace to be established.

In the new landscape, the new buzz-phrases are “dramatic shifts in our mindset” and “taking account of the host community”. The UNHCR has spent $1.5 billion on refugees in Kenya over the past seven years; it hasn’t benefited the host community much at all.

These days when the global question is “who belongs”, refugees need to  be considered as “legitimate children of the land”. For that to be realised the political landscape needs to change — and not just in Kenya.

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I certainly didn’t fall in love with the country at first sight. As the plane landed, I looked down on a mud-coloured blanket of nothingness. No high-rises, no lights, no colour, a bleakness hanging from the sky. When I went to retrieve my luggage the cases were buried in a pyramid of bags, stacked in a darkened corner. The electricity didn’t work, wires hung from the ceiling. The place was bombed out, prehistoric, freezing and frozen in time, grey and disturbing.

My first night in the field set the scene for some of my most indelible memories. I went to a French restaurant called L’Atmosphere, one of many businesses started by canny foreigners or entrepreneurial expats. As you walked in, a sign read “No Afghans” and another indicated a place to store your gun. L’Atmo had foie gras on the menu, grilled fish, baguettes and red wine, which was a miracle in 2007. The attorney general had gone on a rampage and confiscated alcohol, which was illegal. But the authorities often turned a blind eye when it involved the international community and they were sufficiently bribed. It was a large compound with a bar and a swimming pool where in the summer foreign women would swim in bikinis. Outside, just beyond the bamboo barrier, Afghan women, covered in blue burqas with their tiny pleats and mesh face covers, walked on mud streets unpaved since Soviet days.

Spring arrived. The light changed and had a cut-crystal magic to it. Flowers bloomed everywhere, and there were roses, roses and more roses — and marijuana plants that popped up on roadsides and in people’s gardens alongside almond, apricot and walnut trees. Houses that looked sad and decrepit had an integral beauty if you looked intensely and with imagination you could almost see their past glory. As my eyes began to adjust to this new paradigm, I felt I was walking down the grand tree-lined boulevards of the Sixties when Kabul was part of the Hippie Trail.

For old movie fans, compare the so-called “Kabubble” to the 1954 film Brigadoon, a city that appeared out of the mists of Scotland once every 100 years and lasted for only 24 hours. While Kabul has been at the intersection of the Silk Road for thousands of years, the Kabubble appeared only in 2002 and consisted of, mostly, foreigners. It was a fascinating intersection of people, ideas and possibilities and was why I wrote my book Dispatches from the Kabul Café, a series of stories of how we lived then.

By the time I arrived, the Afghans had experienced 30 years of war: the decade-long Soviet occupation; the subsequent civil war; the Taliban takeover. After 9/11 came Nato and with it the influx of expats, armies from 28 countries, contractors, all of whom created a new world of restaurants and cafés. With donor donations the museum was rebuilt, with entrepreneurial spirit a skate park gave young Afghans a place to have fun, an art café was established, and a nightclub lasted very briefly. It was suggested that a new capital would be built alongside the old one.This 13-year-long mission moment brought together an astonishing assortment of people — men and women at the top of their game in a place that was the focus of the world and where history was being made.

There were generals, diplomats, journalists, aid workers, artists, mercenaries, chancers, princes, toffs, spies, medics, lunatics, expats and circus-trainers. People who wanted to reinvent themselves, people who wanted to find themselves, and people who wanted to make the world a better place. I was one of them and we all had one common thing: Afghanistan. There was a sense of hope as well as an exhilarating sense of purpose and clarity.

People stayed and established new lives. It was a new Afghanistan and the epicentre was Kabul. As a journalist, it was an extraordinary experience. Everything was intriguing, intellectually challenging and mesmerising, a (war) journalist’s fantasy — the people, the parties, the stories, the news, the new world, the dilemmas, the conflicts. And the dreadful excitement of living on the edge of someone else’s war.

Falling in love with Afghanistan wasn’t unique to me; the country had cast its spell over many of my colleagues and contemporaries as well as legions of travellers over the centuries. The charm is difficult to unravel and explain. The country gets a hold of you, gets under your skin and into your psyche, and much like an addiction, you just want more. It is the most visually sumptuous country I know. Everything was either beautiful, unique, awe-inspiring or amusing — the mountains ringing the capital, the light, the quirky things that I loved, like the shop that sold grass or the shiny silver fish tacked on to boards for sale. You could buy peacocks on the street corner; wonderful garish fake flower shops lined Flower Street. The green valleys in Bamiyan, where the Buddhas used to stand, the magical turquoise Lake Band-e-Amir and the rushing rivers were some of the most incredible sites I have seen. The people and the hospitality are unique in the Muslim world. Afghans are tribal, family is all important, things Europe left behind in the Middle Ages.

As the snow and ice melted after that first harsh winter, so did my heart. Not only did I fall in love with Afghanistan but I fell in love in Afghanistan. It’s an occupational hazard that comes with the territory and is known as “the locationship”. One of the expressions that sums up the syndrome is, the odds are good but the goods are odd. The ratio of men to women was about 14 to one in that warzone. Parallel lives and loves developed in parallel universes, ones suspended in time, ones that had sell-by-dates when men and women, whose contacts had ended, returned to their real lives. That moment offered people the opportunity to explore other dimensions of themselves, sometimes ones they were happy to forget. These liaisons were a large part of what made the Kabubble the Kabubble.

In my book, I write about Paul, who trained as a sniper in the army and left to make money as a mercenary.  Of course, he didn’t fit into normal life. He lived off the grid when he wasn’t in Afghanistan. If we had met in London, we would never have hooked up. I am not quite sure how he won me over, however briefly, but Afghanistan was, without question, a powerful connection. We met in the queue for the plane to Dubai and he started to talk to me. I saw him again at the luggage carousel, where we chatted for a moment and exchanged numbers before heading to our different destinations. I went back to London and for the next 18 months he would call every time he passed through and I would say I was busy. One November evening, I agreed to meet him. In retrospect, it was all a bit mystifying. We went to the States on a strange road trip that started in Las Vegas and went via Colorado, Texas and the Grand Canyon before it ended back in Las Vegas, along with the relationship.

Nothing contrasted the two cultures in Afghanistan more than relationships, and nothing could turn you into a feminist faster once there. It’s a confrontation with frontline feminism where theory hits reality. At first, I was all gung-ho about the fabulous projects and new laws that the foreign community was implementing. I wanted to help fix Afghanistan just as much as others did, to help create a more modern state and do away with some of the injustices, especially towards women — forced marriage, women being given away to settle debts, an epidemic of domestic violence, women who have no rights and no place to go to escape.

Graham Greene captured the end of a louche era in The Quiet American, about colonial Indochina. The Kabubble evoked that same languid atmosphere, despite the war that ebbed and flowed outside the capital’s shrinking boundaries. The bubble eventually had to burst. That became more and more apparent as the years rolled on. When President Obama announced the US drawdown in 2014, the good times were put on notice. When American troops pulled out and the Nato-led Isaf mission ceased its combat operations the narco-economy, already on its knees, collapsed.

Over the previous decade security had deteriorated and the war against the Taliban had revived. Then it intensified. Its leaders were holed up in Pakistan and hard to locate. The theatre of war changed entirely as Syria’s brutal civil conflict topped the news agenda and Afghanistan was relegated to the inside pages. Afghanistan had to fight off the political agendas of its neighbours, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and China, all backing their own factions and actors.

Food insecurity affects huge swathes of the population. Most people are illiterate, ultra-conservative, and  live in small closed societies where women belong to men and are bought with dowries. We can’t imagine such a thing. Cultures take a long time to change and our timelines were wrong. We needed decades, not three-year instalments, and we needed the commitment to stay the course. We needed experts who understood the complexities of the culture and not bureaucrats without field experience whose policies ticked boxes. There was no coordination. Projects were duplicated and triplicated. Nothing was backed up by security, and lack of security meant it became, for example, more difficult to keep girls in school past the age of ten.

When the war kicked off in Iraq, we took our eye off the ball and that led to the resurgence of the Taliban. As the security situation worsened so did every aspect of nation-building. Providing social amenities in the midst of civil war was impossible. One of the biggest failures was not to build an indigenous economy which could sustain the largely rural population.

Patronage, corruption, the weak rule of law, poor governance, the ongoing divisions between President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, and infighting between the warlords in parliament also continue to dim the flickering hopes of progress. While thousands of refugees flee the country, Iran, Pakistan and many European countries are deporting illegal Afghan migrants back to where they started.

Initial dreams and hopes evaporated in the chaos of blunders and ill-conceived plans. Hope springs eternal but is also the road to hell, which seems the direction America’s longest war is heading.  

The post The Bursting Of Our ‘Kabubble’ Fantasies appeared first on Standpoint.

Not long after we started came a sound like a herd of elephants stomping down the corridor. The meeting continued as normal until the news broke by text: there had been an incident at the palace. “The Arg in Kabul?” we assumed.

Cloistered as we were inside one of the womb-like committee rooms, the drama unfolding outside seemed surreal. A female staff member arrived and asked us to stay in the room as we were now locked down. She told us she would escort us out of the building when we needed to go. As the following meeting couldn’t take place she brought in the chopped egg and cress finger sandwiches that the next group had ordered, saying they shouldn’t go to waste. After a few more minutes, Baroness Hodgson, organiser of our group, proposed that we break, have the sandwiches and watch the news.

The police responded quickly, coming in periodically to give us updates about staying put. Four officers guarded the door, including a heavily-armed member of the Swat team. A couple of hours passed, with no panic, no drama. The meeting continued on and off until the guards collected us and corralled us into the Central Hall, where we remained for a few more hours.

Two things struck me: the spirit of the Blitz and the diversity of the people. I went looking for water: a young woman stopped me to say she had two bottles and insisted I take one, which I first declined, then gratefully accepted.

Later, the staff distributed water and biscuits to the hundreds of people in the hall. Everyone shared. It felt as I imagine in a bomb shelter during the Blitz must have been, despite the horrific events outside. One of our group, an Afghan surgeon who works at University College Hospital, texted her husband to say she was safe. She accidentally texted the governor of Nangarhar, an eastern province in Afghanistan and centre of Taliban activity, who replied to say he hoped we were all OK.

After the five-hour ordeal, we left in an orderly fashion through the historic passages, past the flag flying at half-mast, onto the deserted streets, where the tragic events of the afternoon began to feel real.

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Walking around the old Soviet factory in Narva, Estonia, recently, yards from the border with Russia, I saw her. Stuck on a pillar, Olga gazed out from an old propaganda poster. Grey and grainy, she typified hearty, hefty Soviet womanhood. She was built like the tractor she drove with one hand, harvesting the wheatfields of the motherland with a sickle or scythe in the other and singing patriotic songs. She had a broad face, no makeup and rosy cheeks, with a three-pointed kerchief holding her short hair in place while she furthered the cause of the revolution. Nothing could be further from any bourgeois ideal of beauty.

All was good for Olga until Nikita Khrushchev, who wanted to kick-start the Soviet fashion industry. In 1959 Yves Saint Laurent, then head of the house of Dior, travelled to the Soviet Union at Khrushchev’s invitation. YSL inspired one of the most powerful Soviet women, Yekaterina Furtseva, who was only the second woman to be admitted to the Politburo. She had immense influence over culture. “Furtseva approved Dior’s collection,” says Mariana Haseldine, an expert in Russian cultural history who grew up in Soviet times, “because Dior’s famous grey was suitable for Soviet working women and the lines were modest enough so they looked proper on decent women.”  

Olga made a comeback in the Brezhnev era, but then came Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa with her Western style. The final blow came in 1991 when the Soviet edifice crumbled. Like a nightmare version of living matryoshka dolls, out popped a never-ending phalanx of supermodels, each more gorgeous than the last. Where the hell did these women come from? And whatever happened to Olga? I am quite sure she did not marry an oligarch.

This phenomenon has puzzled me for 25 years. John Lloyd, the Financial Times Moscow bureau chief from 1991 to 1995, has an explanation. “During the Soviet era, the internal propaganda was to emancipate women. The emphasis was on equality and the masculinisation of women. And, of course, there was little access to good makeup and decent clothes.” Yet most Soviet women were having none of this officially-imposed dowdiness. While no luxury industry existed, women set enormous store by looking beautiful. “The feminist revolution never happened in Russia,” continues Lloyd, “because if, for example, you came from a Siberian village all you wanted to do was get out. Men drank themselves to death by 40 and the rest were thugs. There were not many options and marrying well was one of them.”

Haseldine remembers her mother, a chemist, and her friends reading the German fashion magazine Burda and setting great store by dressing immaculately. Some would make their own clothes, while the wives of the powerful men of the Politburo had access to their own dressmakers. Soviet women listened to their grandmothers: they kept slim by avoiding potatoes and white bread, they exercised, and used beetroot to rouge their cheeks and lips. After all, there were few men left after the war.

In the Nobel Prize-winning journalist Svetlana Alexievich’s new book Second-Hand Time (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £14.99) she quotes the manager of a Russian advertising agency: “Women aren’t looking for their knight in shining armour to come galloping in on a white horse — they want him on a sack of gold. Money rules the world!” The oligarchs’ bimbos say as much about Putin’s Russia as the tractor-driving Olgas did about Stalin’s or Khrushchev’s. It’s time to Cossack-dance back into the giant matryoshka whence they came, which may have been from Russia but not with love.

The post Do Svidaniya, Olga! appeared first on Standpoint.

In an attempt to resolve this issue conclusively, I scientifically polled a few friends. A 21-year-old who considers herself a feminist said she needed the man to pay. A 55-year-old said if a man paid it undermined her credibility as a professional and a feminist. A 30-year-old woman said if a man didn’t pick up the tab he crossed a red line, terminating any future prospects. When she split the bill, it indicated friendship, not romance. One married couple, who share a joint account, went out to lunch, she paid the bill as her husband had forgotten his wallet. They both felt it was strange. A British-Nigerian princess never paid and never offered to pay, on principle. Anyone who wanted the pleasure of her company didn’t get it for free (and they probably didn’t get much else). A 40-something, left-leaning feminist just likes to go Dutch.

For men, the minefield is littered with the corpses of potential relationships and weeks of indecision and mental flip-flops. One man, having grown up in a house of strong feminists, froze on dates like the proverbial deer in the headlights — afraid to violate the sacred equality code, but equally, as a romantic at heart, happy to pay.

While old-fashioned rules may have been dispatched unchivalrously into oblivion, it seems that this is something still deeply encoded in our genes, as there is no rational explanation of why a man should pay and why a woman should want him to, except for the half-dead romantic notion that men protect and provide, and that money is linked to love, even if we know it isn’t. And despite women being fully self-sufficient and in many cases earning more than their partners.

The first time a brilliant Englishman took a (very beautiful and posh) girl out to a restaurant in Chelsea, it cost him everything he had in the bank at the time, but he would have been mortified if she had offered to pay. She didn’t, but she sensed that he was broke and he never got another date. As she said: “If he’s not better off than I am, then why am I dating him? And don’t quote me. It might ruin my chances of marrying a rich man.”

So here’s a safe piece of advice, boys. When in doubt, forget Hamlet and pull out the credit card.

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Across the First Nation communities, the authorities are on suicide alert. That same month, in the nearby Attawapiskat First Nation, the federal government declared a state of emergency after 11 teenagers attempted suicide. In the previous month, there had been 28 attempts: almost one a day.

This spate of attempted suicides has reignited the festering debate about the problems stalking the First Nations and Canada, the crux of which is whether it is time to call time on the Native lands. This is as contentious an issue as you can find — akin, said Dr Matyas Hervieux, to asking everyone in Greece to leave because there are no jobs.

People who live and work on First Nation lands emphasise the very many positive aspects of life there, especially in the face of enormous hardships. “These people are resilient, kind, warm, and caring,” says Hervieux, who has had ten years of experience working with First-Nation people in urban and northern-reserve settings. In north-western Ontario, many communities don’t have drinkable water.  In some areas the water is so bad it can’t even be used for showers. There is also an enormous housing crisis with acute overcrowding: as many as 15 people live in one room. Many First Nation people experience racism, and there has been an epidemic over the past two decades of women and girls who have gone missing or been murdered. Corruption, lack of transparency, child abuse, violence, drug and alcohol dependency, unemployment, isolation and lack of purpose are also significant problems, as is the haunting legacy of residential schools.

Residential schooling began in the 19th century. Funded by Canada’s federal government and administered by Christian churches, they took aboriginal children away from their parents to educate and “civilise” them in substandard conditions. A majority suffered sexual, mental and physical abuse. More than 3,200 children died in the care of the schools and the toll may be much higher. The last one closed in 1996.

While it is a polarising debate in Canada, it’s important to remember that you shouldn’t blame the victim. But how do you find a solution? For Jonathan Kay, one of Canada’s most prominent (right-wing) political commentators and editor of the Walrus, a sort of Canadian New Yorker, “There is little hope for places like Attawapiskat, and the solution for this isolated community, and others like it, is to move south.”

At the heart of Canada’s official policy toward the First Nations, believes Kay, “sits a great institutionalised lie that we can put in place some bright, shiny plan of action that will transform all our Attawapiskats into healthy, vibrant productive communities”. Last month, Jean Chretien, Canada’s former prime minister, said to great opprobrium: “There is no economic base there for having jobs and so on, and sometimes they have to move, like anybody else.”

Others would say that these opinions fail to live up to Canada’s responsibility to its First Nations and their culture. “It’s too easy to default to eliminating a culture rather than supporting First Nation people,” says Hervieux.

As Kay sees it, only politicians like Chretien, once Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs, who are out of the game, can express these controversial views. “In most communities that have no jobs, people pack up and relocate. But the Indian Act created a system that perversely discourages residents from leaving even the most appallingly impoverished reserves, without actually giving them any of the capitalist tools (such as the right to own private property) necessary to prosper. This paradox lies at the heart of the cruelty we have inflicted on aboriginal peoples. And it is why places such as Attawapiskat are doomed to exist in a hellish limbo.”

When Justin Trudeau became prime minister last year, he put the First Nation policy at the heart of his government vowing. “It is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples, one that understands that the constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations in Canada are not an inconvenience but rather a sacred obligation,” he said.

According to Kay, who worked on Common Ground, Trudeau’s memoir, the prime minister campaigned “on an agenda of being more conciliatory to First Nations, which generally is expected to mean more generous funding, and less accountability in the way federal cash transfers are spent. This is problematic because almost all First Nations communities get the majority of their funding from what are in effect government welfare programmes.”

What is that obligation and at what price? Some taxpayers feel their money is ill-spent, but it’s the aboriginal people who pay the price. Cathy Wright, who ventured north after graduation at a time when jobs were scarce and her classmates were moving to the US, has seen the changes but hasn’t lost hope.  She remembers the grateful residents and patients of the ten-bed cottage hospital who took her duck hunting and welcomed her into their community in the late 1970s. “I see a lot less violence but more despondency, which has contributed to the rash of suicides.” In the past, pow-wows, sweat lodges and story-telling were important parts of the community but today they seem less relevant to the young generation, not unique to the north. In the south, a myriad of programmes and resources exist to address those needs, which is not the case in the north.

Wright doesn’t recognise the stories of drunkenness (some areas are dry) that have come to characterise the most troubled reserves, but what she does know is that “suicide is contagious, and it has to do with attention. People, including teenagers want and need help and the only way they can get it is by doing something drastic, but I’m sure they don’t want to die. What they want is to find a way to talk to someone, which is very difficult in a community where there is no privacy and everyone knows everyone’s business.”

While Hervieux agrees that it may be difficult to feel safe talking about your problems in small communities, he sees the cause differently. “The notion that people knowing your business is an issue is a modern, liberal-individualist view and does not reflect how humans have interacted throughout most of their history. Instead, the problem is that there have been many generations of trauma and it is hard for any traumatised person to support those around them. So it is not the lack of privacy that is the issue but the effects of multigenerational trauma on the ability of many community members to effectively support those who are more vulnerable.”

With the weight of historical baggage, it is no wonder that it is such a dangerous, polarising issue, although still startling to hear it defined in terms of “colonialism” and “the settler community,” as Meghan Young, a passionate First Nation advocate and social worker, does. “Change needs to come from the First Nations in nation-to-nation discussions,” she adds, questioning the appropriateness of making decisions for independent nations.

Much has to do with resources and personnel on the ground, and the shocking disparity between what is available in the territories of northern Canada as opposed to the federally-funded First Nations in the northern regions of the provinces. All First Nation communities shouldn’t be lumped together. Some work well and prosper, but many others suffer from third world conditions and a very high cost of living which contribute to these intractable problems. Wright illustrated this by sending a picture of a small  watermelon to her friends and family down south for which she paid $47 (£25).

In northern Ontario, 175 communities aren’t connected to the electrical grid. “Many of these along the James Bay coast and in the north were forcibly relocated so they could be ‘better serviced’ by the barges,” says Young. “They were placed there by the federal government of the time, and they are on a flood plain, which is the reason they experience extreme flooding every spring, and which is why historically they did not live in these locations.” Thousands of well-intentioned people across Canada are acutely aware of these issues and have spent many hours thinking about how to make the situation better, but solutions are proving elusive. There are no easy answers to complex and nuanced problems, with questions about what is the end point and what is success?

Being politically correct might not necessarily be the wrong thing, allowing these communities have a right to self-determination. “We need to support this right, to ensure that generation after generation no longer needs to live in these conditions,” says Hervieux. “It is only through First Nation-led initiatives that First Nation people will ever have the chance to heal. It is surprising to see the attitude of imperialism that continues to be imposed on the First Nation people.”

One solution considered by Wright and some friends would be to invest in greenhouses which would also provide employment and provide cheap and nutritious food. Having chickens for eggs and meat, and goats and sheep would add protein to the diet when they can’t hunt for moose or fish.

The people who Wright works with are caring, loving and concerned about their community. “They love and want the best for their children and want to work out a productive and sustainable answer to staying put,” she says.

In the wake of the April events, Susan Bardy, a member of the Tyendinaga Mohawks of Bay of Quinte Territory, Ontario, wrote an opinion piece for the Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s leading papers. She summed up the issues as seen from the First Nation perspective and the reasons First Nations don’t want to “catch up with modernity”, as Chretien said. These go beyond, but include, a connection to the land and culture, to traditions and places, to homes and people they love. To Bardy, moving south means leaving friends, family and a tranquil rural environment, where her mind is at ease, for the chaos of an unsettling urban landscape. Leaving isn’t the answer, she says. “We need to better our situation — politically, financially, emotionally, mentally. We need to feel supported by our fellow Canadians.”

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It’s no wonder that we think soldiers are damaged goods. Legions of them are said to return from deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We read about homeless veterans living on the streets of Britain, unable to cope after the trauma of combat, the walking wounded powerless to adapt to civilian life. The situation has become so distressing that senior military staff worry because more than 90 per cent of the public regards the armed forces as a charity. These “narratives of distress” are bought into by the public and the media alike, engaging popular interest and sympathy. Yet soldiers don’t want to be seen as victims and do not appreciate the stereotyping. They consider themselves professionals, not heroes, not villains, and not victims.

Professor Nicola Fear, Director of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research at King’s College London, is concerned because so much focus is put on PTSD, which is not the most prevalent disorder among service personnel. She thinks it obscures the bigger picture, part of which is the high level of alcohol misuse. While young men drink, young men in the military drink more than their civilian counterparts, and that has nothing to do with combat. Most mental disorders have multiple causes and there is rarely a straightforward link. Fifty per cent of PTSD is not related to deployment but other experiences, factors associated with background and alcohol abuse as well. 

The vast majority of soldiers just get on with the job. We no longer have a conscript army, for which attrition rates were horrendous, but a volunteer force that is well-trained and well-maintained. “The reason the British military exists is to deliver fighting power,” says retired Major General Tim Cross, a veteran of three tours in the Balkans and two tours in Iraq, “not to be nice. There are no prizes for coming second on a battlefield. We need a tough military organisation able to operate in demanding, brutal environments like Iraq, the Balkans and Afghanistan. Men and women join to be part of a tough organisation.” They are trained to deal with difficulty, and there is a rigorous selection process. The statistics for PTSD seem to bear this out: 4 per cent of the army as a whole suffer from it, and 7 per cent of front-line units, compared to 3 per cent of the entire population.

As Fear points out, the media contributes to the problem by portraying soldiers as mad, sad or bad, concentrating on the ones who have fallen through the gaps. Last month, the Express ran a story claiming a 44-year-old “war hero” who served in the British Army from 1989-1993 and was a veteran of the Falklands and Cyprus campaigns, was forced to sleep in his car. Unfortunately, the Falklands War took place in 1982 and there was no conflict with Cyprus.

Over time the narrative in films, which frames these paradigms for each generation, has changed. In response to the genre of war movie in which everyone had a good time, “now movies portray soldiers as victims who return damaged, and no one comes back happy,” says Dr Lisa Kingstone (my cousin), also of King’s College London, who has written about trauma and war in literature and film.

“Movies and the media create these tropes of masculinity because how many people talk to soldiers and know them intimately any more?” she asks. “These tropes are about grace under fire, justice and glory. John Wayne’s films were shown to the military to model patriotism, loyalty to your comrades, and selflessness, characteristics that men were supposed to embody. In film, combat either makes you a man or it unmans you. There is not much in between.” 

War continues to be great movie material. In both The Hurt Locker and American Sniper, the protagonist is portrayed as someone who was exceptional as a soldier but couldn’t function in civilian life and had to stay in a war context. “The conclusion,” says Kingstone, “is that war ruined men for anything but war.” Back in 1946, the Oscar-winning The Best Years of Our Lives had the same message: three soldiers return from war and can’t reintegrate into society (but want to be like everyone else). What helps spread this image is that many of these were popular and award-winning films. Going back even further, Hemingway’s novels glorified war but in his short stories soldiers fell apart. You have to read both to see both sides.

When soldiers returned with parades after the Second World War, people expected veterans to tell them entertaining adventure war stories, but Tim O’Brien wanted to expose “the true war story” after Vietnam. It took O’Brien 20 years to write about his experiences in The Things They Carried, a book that explores the brutality in the theatre of war with his band of brothers and the fiasco that unfolds. “A sensitive writer, O’Brien wanted to go to Canada but his family and community pressured him to go to war and it destroyed him,” says Kingstone. “Born on the Fourth of July, and The Deer Hunter tell a similar story of disillusioned and devastated Vietnam vets. Apocalypse Now shows men falling apart during the war.”

The “culture of trauma” clearly exists, and there is no question that some people need help and genuinely suffer, but the epidemic of PTSD that is portrayed on our screens and in our newspapers is widely exaggerated, according to Hugh Milroy, who served 17 years in the RAF and fought in the Gulf War in 1991. He is now CEO of Veterans Aid, a charity looking after street homeless and socially excluded veterans. He has been involved with the charity for 20 years and has a PhD on homeless veterans. Exaggeration about veterans in crisis from various sources is part of his daily life. One concern is the constant claim that there are thousands of veterans living on the streets.

Some media outlets and charities have made wild claims over the years. “I’ve heard shocking numbers like 5,000 to 10,000 homeless heroes living on the streets,” says Milroy. “The internet doesn’t help, as people read these numbers and once said often enough it becomes a truth. Yet the government data indicates that at the moment on any given night, around 3,500 sleep rough in all of England, and around 2 per cent of those might have a military connection.” 

However, there are more than 2,500 military charities in “a very crowded space”, says Fear, and there are many other initiatives by government agencies including the NHS. The British armed forces employ approximately 140,000 people.  Each year about 20,000 leave, including 5,000 untrained staff; 2,000 receive a medical discharge; and 150 have mental disorders, including about 20 with PTSD. According to the Ministry of Defence, there are 385 military charities catering for mental health issues, primarily PTSD.

As Fear points out, the military has a very effective mental health capacity with its own in-service provision staffed by nurses, psychologists and psychiatrists. “It is much easier for soldiers to get seen by mental health professionals in the military than for the general public. The services place a lot of emphasis on making it as easy as possible to access and try to remove any stigma.”

That hasn’t stopped some charities and media outlets promoting sad stories that give an impression of “an ocean-going disaster” as Milroy says. He is dismayed watching people exploit the veteran community and public with what is virtual “sadness pornography”.

Milroy gets three to four approaches from the media each week, and believes the script, like a movie, has already been written: “Journalists want the story of the homeless vet, grossly let down by the military, suffering from PTSD with no one to help and nowhere to go.” The reality is that once a soldier is discharged he is part of general society in Britain. However, the government initiative the Armed Forces Covenant should in theory ensure that the wounded, injured and sick are cared for.

“I am totally convinced that if you are in crisis in the UK, you are lucky if you are one of the military family as there is additional cover from the veteran charity world,” says Milroy.  “That said, I am increasingly uncomfortable that the Government may be abrogating its responsibility towards veterans under the guise of its Covenant by off-loading responsibility to the Third Sector.”

What VA deals with is the impact of poverty, not damage as a result of military service, and poverty goes hand in glove with mental health issues. A recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation report concluded that 13 million Britons live in poverty: 6.5 million are working poor. The charity Mind reported that one in four people will have mental health problems. Inevitably, some will be veterans. “People talk about veterans as if they are a sub-species and trot out phrases like ‘failed transition’,” says Milroy, “but veterans need to be like everyone else, and the problems they have are nearly all unrelated to military service so that really calls into question the huge sums spent on ‘research’.”

Another urban myth is that many veterans are in prison. Milroy is working with a major prison looking at inmates claiming to be veterans. “Shockingly,” he says, “on checking over 50 per cent had never served.” The Ministry of Justice recently confirmed that numbers of vets in prison continue to be small. “That hasn’t stopped yet more charities being created to deal with the problem,” he says. The recent briefing by Forces in Mind Trust confirmed this. “It is very rare for us to come across clients with a formal diagnosis of PTSD,” says Milroy, “but we see many “chancers” making false claims of about the scars of war.

While there is still a long way to go, treatments, resources, understanding and attitudes are light years ahead of where they once were, thankfully, and while stigma still exists it is far less pervasive. The issue now is what happens when the love affair with the military fades and the veterans who need help are forgotten.

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I first went to Kabul as a journalist in 2007, the year of the “tipping point”. The post-2001 invasion optimism had evaporated. People were beginning to question what Nato’s mission was really achieving. Was it reforming the miserable state of Afghan women’s lives? Was it state-building? Was it finally on track to defeat the Taliban? Through all this we watched as the poppy crop grew exponentially while the US spent $7 billion to combat opium production.

All those questions remain unanswered today. Fourteen years and more than $1 trillion later, it is still unclear whether the situation is getting better or worse.

Saad Mohseni, dubbed the Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan, launched his empire after the fall of the Taliban when he returned from Australia and invested the family fortune in a new media venture. Last November, he gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal in which discussed the many gains that had been made in his troubled country. It is true that there are more children in school, a lively and liberal media landscape,  more women in the workforce and in parliament, more paved roads and more electricity. But that is only part of the picture. Often women MPs are just mouthpieces for male relatives, and most girls leave school when they reach puberty; 87.4 per cent of women are illiterate. Even among those aged 15-20 the figure is 80 per cent, and only 2 per cent of women are economically independent.

In January, two months after Mohseni’s interview, a suicide bomber targeted a bus taking 40 of his employees home. Seven were killed and 24 injured. It brings home the reality of Afghanistan: one step forward, several steps back.

Gloom is the overwhelming sentiment. Lieutenant General John W. “Mick” Nicholson Jr, the next US commander in Afghanistan, believes the security situation is worsening. It is difficult to find anyone who is positive. But it would also be a mistake to write the country off.

A generation of young Kabulis feel there is hope. The internet and social media have connected them to a world that the Taliban shut out. These men and women invest in their country with their hard work, but I sense a part of their optimism is a by-product of the fact that they have nowhere else to go. Afghanistan is their future. On the other hand, I remember an interview I did with a young liberal in 2009 shortly before the presidential elections. I asked him how likely he thought real reform was in his country. “Oh, yes,” he said, “it’s possible. You just have to wait 200 years.”

All the issues that existed in 2007 remain today, and the list is long. Corruption and warlordism eat away at this beautiful place like cancer. Despite laws enshrined in the constitution that grant equal rights to all citizens, women have virtually no protection. The controversial Elimination of Violence Against Women law (EVAW) that came into force in 2009 is rarely invoked. Judges either don’t know about the law or don’t believe in it, and many lawyers have no legal training. Barely a week passes without some crime perpetrated against a wife or mother, a sister or daughter, making headlines. 

It doesn’t stop there. Isis are gaining ground and infighting in the Taliban ranks after the death of Mullah Omar has left a deadly vacuum at the top of the organisation.

None of that detracts from the spell Afghanistan has cast over people for centuries. I was enticed back on and off until 2012, when I left for the last time, hardened and more cynical. We foreigners lived an exhilarating parallel existence in the “Kabubble”. The restaurants, the parties — those were heady days when the work was exciting and full of possibility. As aid money has dried up, and Nato troops have been withdrawn, that world has largely disappeared.

Afghanistan may have fallen off the front page, but the fascination continues. It’s like an addiction to heroin; we can’t seem to get enough of the “exotic” land, and the “barbarity” of its customs. Two recent non-fiction books, a new play and a new film all deal with Afghanistan. Pink Mist, at the Bush Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush, London, tackles the aftershocks of life in the military for three British soldiers who were deployed to Afghanistan. In the Danish film, A War, we follow the complexities of command in the theatre of war. The books, Rod Nordland’s The Lovers (Ecco Press, £16.99), and Robert D. Crews’s Afghan Modern (Harvard, £22.95), relate two very different stories about the country. Both touched on my own experiences, which I tried to capture in my Dispatches from the Kabul Café (Advance Editions, £10.99), about life in a war zone. Women and war — always intoxicating.

Nordland, a former New York Times Kabul bureau chief, writes about a young couple known as Afghanistan’s Romeo and Juliet. They are poor and illiterate and from a remote part of the country, and they defied their family, social custom and punishment by death by marrying for love. The story gripped the nation as well as international audiences and has given many young Afghans hope. Nordland crafts the romance of Ali and Zakia into a bleak parable on the status of women. He spells out in no uncertain terms the dire landscape of misogynistic laws and a culture that treats girls and women as commodities to be bought and sold, married off, given away to settle debts, enslaved and murdered. They are rarely cherished, loved or respected. He believes that the mujahideen fought against the Soviet invaders with such fierceness because the Russians wanted to educate and liberate women. Reform has always been a thorny and contentious subject throughout Afghan history and has brought down many a leader.

In his stark and detailed portrait of Afghanistan’s incomprehensible inhumanity, Nordland, a Pulitzer Prize winner, highlights the Sisyphean task of changing things while men possess all the power.

That brutality and absurdity affected me when I worked there. I could never comprehend that an Afghan could want to kill their daughter, sister or niece and not suffer any guilt or sense of loss, because blood washes shame away. It’s not only men who kill their relatives. Women are also part of this, and in Zakia’s case her mother was the more voracious in wanting her daughter’s death. As Nordland writes about Zakia and Ali, “It was a love story as well as a look into the dark heart of a deeply disturbed society and the social and cultural obstacles that had prevented much meaningful progress on women’s rights in Afghanistan.”

One of the women I met while I was there (who is called Hasina in my book), struggled with these issues herself. She had overheard her parents talking about her un-Islamic behaviour, which they felt threatened the family honour now that her sisters were engaged. Once she had been carefree, willing to take on society and fight for the rights of women, but her formerly Communist-leaning family slowly strangled her spirit. She was no longer able to meet me at the Flower Street Café, where we would drink coffee and chat about everything, including sex. Instead of going out after her classes at the University of Kabul,  she had to go straight home. And when she did go out, it was under the watchful eye of her American-university-educated chaperone.

Nordland’s story brought back all the conflicting feelings that I faced when I lived in Afghanistan and re-examined the eternal and ongoing question of whether life would ever get better for women, especially without Western pressure. That the situation has not improved is a sad testament to all the Afghan women, and some men, who risked — and continue to risk — their lives. Nordland spells out in unstinting detail the impossible situations women find themselves in. If they want to go to the police to report abuse, they can’t lest they are raped by the police themselves. If they are raped, they will be regarded not as the victims but as the perpetrators, and be accused of adultery. Nordland retells the infamous story of Breshna, a 10-year-old girl who was raped by a mullah whom she was forced to marry. Even she knew this was insane. Her fate is unknown.

Robert D. Crews, a Stanford University historian, takes a different tack in Afghan Modern, a comprehensive history of the country. He looks at Afghanistan not as an isolated “hermit kingdom” but as an ancient land that has always seen itself as a global player and not a pawn in the Great Game of superpowers. He depicts it as a country that has always been “engaged and connected with a wider world”. He dispels the clichés that have attached themselves to our language and imagery of the country — that Afghans are “barbarous” and “war-like”, “wild” and “treacherous”, stereotypes from centuries ago.

Reading Crews’s description of Afghanistan between the 1940s and the ’70s almost made me weep. It was as if history was repeating itself. He writes about how landlines enabled young Afghans to be in touch with each other, which was exactly what mobile phones did after 2001, and how cinema, Indian movies in particular,  brought the outside world in. Afghans love Bollywood. They developed a dependence on foreign aid in the 1950s when the country was awash with technocrats and foreign advisers, and rivalries broke out among donors which led to “delay, duplication and confusion”.

These are the same issues that have dogged the country in recent years, making Afghan Modern required reading for generals, policy-makers, NGOs and journalists. It reminded me of one of the most bizarre schemes that US aid has funded, and that Nordland writes about: a lovely French woman got a grant to teach yoga to Afghan politicians and prisoners, including Taliban militants, in the hope of bringing inner harmony and world peace.

As Nato exits as fast as it can, desperate to leave the débàcle of Afghanistan behind, Crews cautions that we ignore the country’s wider role at our peril: “Indeed, the world would be well advised to listen to this strand of Afghan globalism and to recognise the many ways global processes have made Afghanistan what it is today, a place that occupies a pivotal position in the highly interconnected world we all share.” 

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