Lost souls inside Afghanistan's graft-riddled narco state

Opium Nation
by Fariba Nawa
Harper Perennial

In her prologue to this gripping narrative, veteran American-Afghan journalist and author Fariba Nawa describes the mixture of 'aching nostalgia and lingering survivor's guilt' that first drew her back to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in 2000.

It is this potent emotional mix that compels her to return again and again to Afghanistan, the land she fled at the age of nine, together with her parents, during the Soviet occupation. She eventually moves to Kabul in 2002 to report on the US-led war on al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but still the guilt and nostalgia linger.

So, in the process of dealing with her unresolved emotions, she decides to tell the world just how the Afghan drug trade is providing funding for terrorists and for the Taliban who are killing Americans and assisting in corrupting Afghan government officials whom the US supports.

The result is an insightful, occasionally beautiful, invariably tragic narrative that takes the reader inside not just the labyrinthine complexity of the opium trade, but also that of Afghanistan itself. Part personal memoir and part history, part account of a crippled, war-torn economy addicted to opium and part investigation of the trade's effect on women, Opium Nation travels deep into layers of Afghan society rarely glimpsed in the West. Herat-born Nawa is indefatigable in her efforts to traverse the length and breadth of the country, travelling with considerable difficulty. She talks to poppy farmers, corrupt officials, drug lords, smugglers, policemen and women, addicts and those trapped in the seams of this trade.

Moreover it is as if we are compelled to enter her narrative, just as Nawa was forced to re-enter her homeland, under the stifling weight of a burqa, and with a male chaperone, a mahram, without which no Afghan woman can go anywhere. It's a unique, intense perspective, yet surprisingly frank and intimate, as women open up to her in ways they don't to others.