A friend of mine, whose husband was head of UNESCO's Book Development Programme, in Kabul, gave me Caravans a long time ago. They had thrown up their hands in frustration at the utter futility of bringing humanist values to the Afghan culture, such as it is. Indeed, the idea of an Afghan nation, much less a discrete Afghan culture, is, as they found out, absurd. Of course, not absurd to our too-clever-by-half policymakers who, from our response to the Soviet invasion, to arming the mujahideen, to "nation building," got it woefully wrong.
If they had only read this book!
It's an easy read (and perhaps that's why the policymakers didn't read it -- pop fiction is beneath them). Typical Michener formula of exhaustively researched history as the setting for a family chronicle or a romance. The fictional shell is good enough, but it's Michener's ability to make history exciting that makes Caravans so enjoyable. Michener was always the summer read that you came away having learned something from. And this one is no exception.
Afghanistan is not a failed state. It never has been a nation state the way we think of it. It's an inchoate conglomeration of tribes, clans and ad hoc alliances, usually in service to murder, smuggling and banditry, and surrounded by a meaningless border, which is why foreign intervention has always been a fool's errand. No, it's not a state -- beyond the fancy of Western map-makers -- but neither is it a vacuum, as the British, the Russians and the Americans have learned to their chagrin.
Go in there, get bin Laden and his henchmen, kill as many Taliban as we can, and to hell with borders (that's what you get when you let lawyers run a war), then get out and let them resume murdering and pillaging each other as they have for millennia. If we had read Caravans, we would have known, after 9/11, that this was our only recourse
