Matthew Leeming

The Oxus, that vast central Asian river that rises somewhere in the Afghan Pamirs, has fascinated explorers for centuries. Its name gives us the land of Oxiana. Yet few Europeans had set eyes on it before the second world war. Robert Byron’s 1937 book, The Road to Oxiana, is an account, among other things, of a failed attempt to find it. What most gripped the handful of 19th-century explorers, diplomats, spies and sportsmen who did make the perilous journey, however, was identifying its source. While the sources of other great rivers were being more or less accurately traced, that of the Oxus was fiercely contested, owing to the unusually difficult terrain.

The saga of the First Afghan War, one of the greatest disasters ever met by the British army, has been told many times before, and I had vowed to throw any book that told it again away in the bin. But Ben Macintyre has found a wholly original angle on it by turning the spotlight on a mysterious American, Josiah Harlan, whose story briefly crosses other accounts of this period. In doing so, he has produced a riveting book and a valuable contribution to Great Game literature. It is the story of the American adventurer who has passed into the folklore of the North-West Frontier and was almost certainly Kipling’s inspiration for ‘The Man Who Would Be King’. Some of the story has been told before in the comparatively obscure journal Afghanistan (July-September 1947).

I really thought I had made it when I went to give a talk at my old Oxford college. But when I got there I discovered that there had been an attempt to have me banned. I was accosted by a dusky beauty in the quad who, practically incoherent with indignation, told me that this was because I produced ‘the worst kind of neo-colonial travel writing’. In other words, I had once described an arranged Afghan marriage between a 14-year-old girl and a 38-year-old man as ‘legitimised rape’. I thought I had rather understated the horror of it. My thought-crime was ‘Orientalism’, the depiction of eastern cultures as strange and inferior to the West, rather than portraying them as both equally bad. In future I will give any cultural relativist this book.

I have to declare an interest. In the late 1980s, I travelled with the author of this book. After university we went to run the bulls in Pamplona together, while our neighing contemporaries were being strapped into their first pinstriped suits. Then we went to Africa, where his family had lived since the 1930s. That Grand Tour was the beginning of the rape of ideology by reality for both of us, a lurch to the right, an end to half-baked student leftyism. Then our paths diverged and I have not seen him for many years. But Aidan Hartley’s subsequent odyssey is much more frightening. He has continued to use his experiences to question theory but has seen, in Somalia, humanity in Hobbes’s state of nature and, in Rwanda, the utter evil of our species.

I saw the first tourists arriving in Afghanistan this summer. I saw their incredulity at the graveyard of crumpled aeroplanes at Kabul airport and at the Hazara suburb of the city that looks like Berlin in 1945. The question everyone asked was: how did this happen? How did a country famous for its hospitality and poetry sleepwalk back into the Middle Ages? In future the tourists will be carrying this book. As an account of how the country got into its present state, and of the making of the grotesque regime of the Taleban, it could not possibly be bettered.