I did not intend to read Tamim Ansary’s “West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Reflects on Islam and the West” from cover to cover. Indeed, before I picked up his book, I had thought that I had already read all that Ansary had to say that mattered.

Like anyone who was paying attention in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I had read the poignant letter from Ansary, which circulated broadly on the Internet and argued well and wisely against the “bomb-them-back-to-the-Stone Age” attacks on Afghanistan.

Ansary is an Afghan-American immigrant who came to the United States 35 years ago for an education, stayed, and eventually became a widely read and respected San Francisco-based author of educational materials. He did more to educate Americans about Afghanistan in the days immediately following Sept. 11 than the entire international press corps. After hearing radio discussions about how the United States needed to “have the belly” to obliterate Afghanistan, Ansary sent a letter to 20 friends in which he calmly destroyed the argument that Afghanistan as a whole should be made to suffer for the Taliban’s ties to Osama bin Laden.

“Some say, why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan - a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban,” wrote Ansary, at a time when dissent from the “let’s bomb something” attitude was dangerous indeed.

He penned a letter that skillfully dismantled preconception after preconception until he finally got to the big one: “We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that’s been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already suffering. Level their houses? Done.
Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely.”

“In today’s Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They’d slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don’t move too fast, they don’t even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn’t really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban by raping once again the people they’ve been raping all this time.”

It was powerful stuff, to be sure. And it had an impact. Because of the wide circulation of Ansary’s letter on the internet, and because of the ensuing television interviews he did, it can reasonably be argued that any sensitivity the United States and other Western governments showed Afghan civilians was in no small part a byproduct of Ansary’s efforts.

But when “West of Kabul, East of New York” came across my desk, I do admit that I wondered whether Ansary had not already made his contribution to the discourse.

How wrong I was.

Ansary has as much to say about America as he does about Afghanistan. And “West of Kabul, East of New York” is a book that ought to be placed next to Benjamin Barber’s “Jihad vs. McWorld” and Chalmers Johnson’s “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” on the shelf of necessary reading for those who would try to understand the complex global circumstance in which America now finds itself.

Ansary’s book is not a polemic of globalization or imperialism. ln fact, it is essentially an autobiography. Yet, in his exploration of the Afghanistan he knew as a youth and of the practice of Islam to which he was exposed there, he opens vast horizons of understanding.

It is impossible to take seriously those who portray Islam as an inherently threatening religion after reading Ansary’s warm reflections on the sights, the sounds and the tastes of his youth. The Islam Ansary recalls is nurturing, kind, humane and humanistic and radically distinct from the hard fundamentalism practiced by the Taliban, bin Laden or the current rulers of Saudi Arabia.

It is equally impossible to avoid feeling immense sorrow and a good deal of humility after considering Ansary’s review of the human costs that Afghans experienced when the great powers of the planet began to play violent war games on their nation’s soil.

Perhaps most importantly, however, an honest reading of “West of Kabul, East of New York” provokes questions that have nothing to do with Afghanistan, Islam or geopolitical posturing. When Ansary writes about the sense of community and connection he knew as a child growing up within the family compound in Kabul “our group self was just as real as our individual selves, perhaps more so” - he conjures a world that is dramatically appealing. In a time when Americans are bombarded with entertainment, it is refreshing to read of a time and a place where, “instead of television, we had genealogy.”

“West of Kabul, East of New York” will be consigned by many to the growing stack of books about Afghanistan, Islam and all things Sept. 11. It does not belong there. It belongs to the broader library in which are considered the big questions about the price of progress in this perhaps too modern world.