Taliban: Militant Islam, oil, and fundamentalism in central Asia.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: The tragedy of Afghanistan

Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid Yale Nota Bene. 279 pages. $14.95 (paper).

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."--Ambrose Bierce

Afghanistan is further confirmation of Bierces pithy observaion. This country was thought to be so distant from the United States -- even after the Soviet invasion when the CIA was running a covert war there--that some journalists came up with the term "Afghanistanism" to refer to stories that were too remote from American lives.

Not anymore. After September 11, books about Afghanistan and the Taliban are flying off the shelves. Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia has reached the top of The New York Times paperback bestseller list. Its print run has expanded from an initial 2,000 in March to a current 200,000. Maps of Afghanistan are visible everywhere, from local newspapers to Mapquest.com. The one center of Afghanistan studies in the country--located at the University of Nebraska at Omaha--has been receiving almost nonstop requests for interviews. People with fluency in Afghan languages such as Pashto and Dari, which almost no one in this country knew existed, are now greatly in demand by U.S. intelligence services.

The people of South Asia know that being in the global headlines is not necessarily a good thing, as the Indian scholar Partha Chatterjee pointed out in a recent conference held in Madison, Wisconsin. But at least Americans are beginning to educate themselves about Afghanistan. These two books should be helpful in that regard.

Rashid has a huge advantage over Michael Griffin, author of Reaping the Whirlwind, in that Rashid is a native of Pakistan, as well as a Muslim, and has for two decades covered Afghanistan for Pakistani and Western publications. He has an intricate knowledge of the country and its politics, and a strong grasp of Islam and its various forms, including the extreme variant that the Taliban practice. Griffin, a freelance journalist and associate editor of Index on Censorship, has spent three two-month stints in Afghanistan and is not a scholar of Islam.

Griffin tries to tell the story of the Taliban in the style of a yarn to please the Western reader. He strains to include Western cultural references, and these are sometimes a bit of a stretch, as when he writes: "If Kabul was Afghanistan's Sarajevo in early 1994, Kandahar could lay reasonable claim to being its South Bronx." Or, "Mad Max. Meet the motorized mullahs."

However, Griffin begins his book with words that are uncannily prescient in light of September 11.

"The accession in the U.S. of President George W. Bush, a man with a strong political interest in disinterring the secrets of his predecessor, may shed yet fresh light on at least two of the central mysteries of...