This is an intensely personal encounter of the author with old friends and some not-so-friendly people in Afghanistan. A must read for understanding the deep cultural roots of conflict in the region.

There are many good books now offering us insight into Afghanistan and Pakistan, but even the best of them -- like Carpet Wars -- are by men and almost all the people they meet and talk about are men -- not surprisingly, given where they are. Christina Lamb has been in Afghanistan and nearby Pakistan over a period of decades. Her writing is clear, direct, and sympathetic to the people she's known there for many years, including Hamid Karzai. The people she meets -- and re-meets -- along the way become part of her story which humanizes the the local situations she describes. Top notch!

Ms Lamb seems to have very little understanding of the complex melee that makes up Pakistan. Her observations are superficial and generally lacking great insight. She starts with preconcieved biases and nowhere in the book does she try and test these preconceptions. This is a truly disappointing book given the amount of time the correspondent has spent in the region.

The above review opinions and the contents of the book itself all prove the circumstances of Pakistan's reality. Its common people aren't worth the faeces they make: they allow tyrants to play around with them, their rights and their fate, and let them rob them openly. It is only when such people emigrate to Western societies that they manage to find some self-worth. This proves the hollowness of their claim to legitimacy, and tells us that they are an inert, spent culture fit for destruction only, since they can not manage to better their lot in their own societies and lands where they really belong, on their own. Anybody who has the guts to point out such basic realities in today's strayed-off-the-path world, promptly gets labelled as a "racist". These "immigrants" have the nerve to leave their own failing societies by hook or by crook and parasitically latch on to their Western host societies. When they find enough breath after recovering, they start extolling the virtues of Islam, and denigrating their hosts' culture. If they were so much in love with their own religion and culture, why did it need the "enemy" Western environment for them to be able to express their true sentiments? Instead why didn't they stay behind in their own country where such circumstances truly belong and freely prevail? (This basic discrepancy is often overlooked by Westerners due to "political correctness"). Such pestilent, deceitful types need to be eradicated. On the other hand, the Pakistani ruling classes are among the largest and the worst organised crime syndicates in the world (and America knows this very well). There are many who would like to fudge the truth about these matters for various reasons, but I am a Pakistani, well versed in the affairs of where I live, and nobody can contest the veracity of my assertions.

Though it does suffer the flaws of most modern (especislly english language) books written on such subjects, such as misspelling many place and people's names, this book, in my opinion, remains a "classic" narrative of events and trends at the particular, very critical time of Pakistan's history, when it was written. It illustrates very well the (my) contention that the bourgeois/middle class/modern cultures have long since supersded the state of affairs prevailing--and decaying--in Pakistan's society and culture today; and that this contorted "system" could not exist here without the active support of first the British and now America, which helps it live on artificially, and has confined bourgeois reality unfairly to the (feudal) minority elite of this social setup, whose people are inert, uneducated and passive (even if they were capable of overthrowing this setup, they could not replace it with anything but chaos. They need "help from above"). So the elites end up in enjoying "the best" of "both worlds", while the poor writhe on in their self inflicted wretchedness. Of course this doesn't mean that tension and explosive disintegration are not present. It is just that the "masses" don't know the right way to go about asserting themselves. They are more inclined to view things in the "two wrongs make a right" manner. Apart from all this, the basis for the existence of the reality of the Pakistani entity is nonsensical and ridiculous, being put together like something out of "Alice in Wonderland".The nature of its name reflects that.