Travels into Bokhara

"Alexander Burnes was an officer at the time, and he travelled to Central Asia. He was a truly brilliant linguist, unlike Lawrence of Arabia, who was a bad linguist. This book plunges you into Afghanistan , in particular, and the tribal areas of Pakistan. He covers that whole area from Peshawar through to Bukhara, and it is an intelligence nightmare. He brings this out very graphically in his wanderings through those regions. It’s the geography, and it’s a stubbornness you find amongst these people in confiding in outsiders, or anybody not in their tribe. They have this ability to carry on a war forever. If you go back to Burnes, you will understand that changing this area on our terms will never happen. There is a guy who wrote a Pashto dictionary for the British army, and he talks about the British army not having any Pashto speakers. And that is exactly what is happening now. These days the British and Americans are all using Dari speakers, so they are already taking sides in a civil war. It is impossible to try to occupy a place where you can’t communicate with the people in any sense. The truth is out there for anyone to pick up, and one of the truths about Afghanistan is in Burnes’s book."