I is for Infidel
By Kathy Gannon
Public Affairs Books, 2005
REVIEW BY BILL NEVINS
Kathy Gannon is an "old Afghan hand" and her book on Afghanistan is crucial reading. Four years after 9/11 and well into the third year of the US-led occupation, Iraq is indisputably in a melt-down. The only valid question seems to be: "How and when do we get out of this mess?" However, there's a widespread notion that Afghanistan has gone a lot better for us. Wrong! Gannon tells us why in no uncertain terms.
Gannon was the AP correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1986 until earlier this year, when her posting changed to Iran. She has excellent sources, an in-depth grasp of Afghan history, a direct writing style and invaluable first-person experience. Despite reporting from within a war-torn, notoriously macho and often misogynist society, this journalist gained the trust and cooperation of insiders to a degree that many of her male counterparts can only dream of.
Gannon's gift to readers of I is for Infidel is her ability to bring the sweep of the prolonged, tragic battle-epic that is modern Afghanistan down to the personal level. She recounts sipping green tea with a proud, bearded and turbaned warlord while listening to his regrets. At another point in her book, Gannon gives witness to the unbearable pain of a quiet villager who finds his own wife's bloody hair among a pile of scalps left behind after a raid by Northern Alliance thugs. Gannon makes a point of informing readers that the commander of those raiders is now a valued US ally. Gannon does not indulge in rhetoric or cant. She just states the facts, horrid as they may be.
The news aspects of Gannon's book include her revelation that Osama bin Laden was invited to Afghanistan not by the despised Taliban but by their enemies, mujaheedin warlords whom the US funded and armed and who are now prominently involved in the US sanctioned post-Taliban government. Furthermore, Gannon traces the intricate links between the present Pakistan military leadership and Bin Laden's terrorist operation. She raises the strong likelihood that Bin Laden is being sheltered within Pakistan by the US's supposed anti-terrorist military allies there. Stir in, as Gannon does, the history of Pakistan's acquisition of both Islamic fanaticism and nukes and you have a picture of one dangerous boiling mess in South Asia.
Gannon traces the covert US money and weapons trail that ultimately fed the savage and armed-to-the-teeth Taliban regime. That murderous Afghan junta fell only under a rain of US bombs. She points out that the Northern Alliance were reluctant and inept anti-Taliban warriors, far more skilled in rape, pillage and opium selling. When invading US forces listened to their Northern Alliance "friends" for guidance on where and who to bomb, the results were often innocent deaths, as "our" warlords settled old scores by falsely identifying their rivals as "Taliban".
The ironies of this tale are so sharp that they might be funny if they weren't so horrible. The US intervention in Afghanistan, as Gannon convincingly portrays it, is a disaster teetering on the edge of an apocalypse. This is an important, highly readable, and frightening book.
From Green Left Weekly, December 7, 2005.
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