A year ago there was still some real optimism about Afghanistan’s future based on President Hamid Karzai’s popularity both at home and abroad, the flood of returning refugees and the millions of girls and boys starting school for the first time. That optimism is evaporating. In December 2005, 77 percent of Afghans polled by ABC News said their country was going in the right direction. When asked again one year later, only 55 percent felt the same way.
What went wrong? The books under review supply pieces of that puzzle. Former British diplomat Rory Stewart describes his epic walk across Afghanistan in the winter of 2001, American author Ann Jones recounts the time she spent living in Kabul as an aid worker following the overthrow of the Taliban and American journalist turned aid worker Sarah Chayes writes of the years she lived in Kandahar following the American invasion.
