Another Afghanistan: A Pre-Taliban Memoir

Another Afghanistan: A Pre-Taliban Memoir is set in the mid-1970s, when Julie Hill was posted with her husband, a United Nations Development Program Representative in Kabul, in between the fall of the old monarchy and the takeover of the country by the Taliban in the 1990s. The book fills a void in what most people know about that country, which has been largely defined by the excesses of the Taliban and the politics of the US and the old Soviet Union.

While the Taliban do not enter the picture until 20 years after her departure, in the popular mind, they create a clear demarcation line between the old and new Afghanistan. Besides, given the country's millennial history, a 20-year interlude is of little consequence. For the ordinary reader, only the Taliban has coherence as a concept, so she has used them in her title.

In any case, Afghanistan remains very much in the news, albeit perhaps for all the wrong reasons, and the author would like to balance the network news with a more personal and engaging chronicle of that country and its people.

Afghanistan half a century ago was at peace with itself, with its neighbors, and even with its warlords. The politics of the region was stable, education was encouraged, women were being liberated slowly, and the country was moving in the direction of becoming a modern secular state.

The book offers a view of Afghanistan and of its people--including the foreign community--on an intimate level, afforded by the fact that she was involved both in the diplomatic wife's organization and in conversations with ordinary citizens in the country' s remote corners.

Representing the UN at the Diplomatic Wife's Organization, she witnessed firsthand the tension between East and West during the peak of the Cold War, albeit in a more informal but no less interesting arena. As an Alexandrian Greek she was neutral in the balance that pitted diplomatic wives from the West against those from the Soviet or Eastern bloc and the non-aligned nations. Significant, memorable, and often humorous exchanges occurred at the diplomatic events she attended.

Speaking Dari with women cloistered in their homes in the countryside, the author gained insights into their country and its culture. She was exhilarated and yet also perplexed to meet such a generous, gracious, and handsome people, and yet to find some of them--too many of them--caught up in violence of both a very public and very personal kind.

Afghanistan emerges in her book as a country both stunningly beautiful and bewildering, immensely rich in archaeological remains. The book tries to awaken a lost interest in remnants of civilizations and in the country's fabulous bazaars and creates a vivid tableau of traveling adventures based on first-hand observations.

Given her origins, the author has always been fascinated by the exploits of Alexander the Great and the vibrant cities the Greeks left behind, which included Ai Khanum in Afghanistan. She was privileged, as it was a rarity for a foreigner to gain a permit, to visit the legendary city on the border of the Amu-Darya River. Completely destroyed few years later by the Taliban, the area has reverted to a field of opium poppies.

The book takes the reader into places where life bustles with bargaining and gossip in bazaars and teahouses, into places where there was no road at all, traveling without a map or land mark in sight. She encounters nomads on their annual pilgrimage to higher mountains and grapples with the dilemma of their way of a life, and their cultural extinction with the emergence of the Taliban and the widening impact of globalization.