Heroes of the Age

"David Edwards wrote two books. The first book, Heroes of the Age , looks at the competition within Afghanistan between tribe, state and Islam . I remember I finished this book flying from Herat to Mazar-e-Sharif in the summer of 2009. The conclusion is haunting. Edwards writes, “I contended that Afghanistan’s central problem was Afghanistan itself, specifically certain profound moral contradictions that have inhibited the country from forging a coherent civil society. These contradictions are deeply rooted in Afghan culture, but they have come to the fore in the last 100 years since the advent of the nation-state, the laying down of permanent borders, and the attempt to establish an extensive state bureaucracy and to invest that bureaucracy with novel forms of authority and control.” That was a very sobering thing to read, especially as we were trying to design a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign in order to increase the legitimacy of the government of Afghanistan. Centralised authority and a strong state is something that Afghanistan has never really had. Yes, he traces a person’s story and shows how that person says something about Afghanistan. For example, he traces the story of Amir Abdur Rahman, who was able to forge a strong state. But then, when he died, his body had to be smuggled out of the capital in order to be buried, because people were so enraged by his heavyhandedness. It was one of the more sobering books that I read on Afghanistan and the tension that exists between various different centres of authority."