Mud crabs in trenches and Eid cakes for tea

Trevor Mostyn

The Sewing Circles of Herat: My Afghan Years
By Christina Lamb
HarperCollins, 338pp.

This review first appeared in the TLS on 30 May 2003

THE FEARLESS WAR CORRESPONDENT Christina Lamb, formerly of the Daily Telegraph, now of the Sunday Times, has had a colourful history. At the end of last year she was deported from Pakistan after apparently uncovering evidence that rogue elements of Pakistan's notorious secret service, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), were supplying arms to what remained of the Taliban. Press reports claimed that two months earlier she had tried to fly from Quetta to Islamabad in the name of Osama bin Laden in a misguided attempt to prove his presence in Pakistan. Lamb's character trait which has so angered the Pakistanis is also one which, since she first arrived in Afghanistan, has led her into a series of adventures, winning her the Young Journalist of the Year Award.


   Christina Lamb, war correspondent: christinalamb.net

"It was a gold-inscribed invitation landing on my mat on a dark rainy November morning in Birmingham", an invitation to Benazir Bhutto's wedding, which opened up Afghanistan to Lamb although we learn little more about this friendship. By the time she reached Kabul in 1988 it was already massively damaged by Soviet bombing.

Twenty-one years old, just out of university, she was soon crouching with the US-supported mujahidin in trenches as Soviet rockets whistled overhead. These Islamic "warriors" included Hamid Karzai, today's American-backed Prime Minister, whose presence throughout the book is like a golden thread. He is old fashioned, calling her "maam" and referring to "turning turtle" and "miscreants". Lamb speaks of "a tick vibrating in his neck", and there are other infelicities such as "Dusk was falling and the cold felt like a dentist's drill on my gums".

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Karzai's decision to leave his country was abandoned when he visited a refugee camp near Quetta and was surrounded by doting members of his Popolzai tribe. Karzai blamed the ISI and, in particular, its director General Hamid Gul, who is the protagonist of a riveting chapter at the end of The Sewing Circles of Herat, for manipulating Afghan politics in favour of the Taliban. Benazir Bhutto is quoted as having mysteriously told her Law Minister, worried that real power was with the ISI and not with her government, that this power could not and must not be challenged.

In the trenches, the mujahidin shared everything, including sought-after mud crabs. Lamb says that she joined them because "I was young enough to believe I could change the world by writing about the injustices that I saw and foolish enough to think that I could be a witness without bearing any responsibility".

Lamb's laughing "Mullahs on Motorbikes" (preferred transport because the Soviet planes could not easily spot them) will later become cruel and humourless Taliban (Islamic "students") whom she meets again in Pakistan after the fall of their regime. Lamb left Afghanistan in 1989, following the crucial battle of Jalalabad after the departure of the Soviets. She did not return until after September 11, 2001.

Lamb is a true reporter, always pushing to be at the front line. When, during the battle of Jalalabad, an Afghan woman shows Lamb her daughter with her entrails hanging out, and begs her to take her with her, Lamb admits that she starts to write in her notebook, then walks off, towards what she regards as the real story, ignoring the woman's pleas. She says she has felt guilty ever since, but from her account it is hard to decide whether her callousness or her remorse held most weight. Yet it is clear that, on some level, she does feel compassion. Her chapter-linking device is a series of extracts from the beautiful diaries of a thirty-year-old Kabul teacher called Marri, from September 2001 until Lamb eventually tracks Marri down in a grey, unlit high-rise in Herat. "You see us now in our burkas like strange insects in the dust", writes Marri, who was among the brave teachers who taught Shakespeare and other subjects secretly to 29,000 women and children in Afghanistan under the Taliban at secret "sewing" classes. Lamb's search for Marri illustrates the kindness of the Herati families who, despite their suspicions, invite Lamb for tea and Eid cakes in the Soviet-style buildings in one of which she eventually finds Marri.

She interviews Khalil, the Taliban torturer, who tells her how he tortured and crucified the Shiite Hazaras. Their bodies were left to be eaten by wild dogs and the Taliban sealed their dying Hazara prisoners in aluminium containers.

Though incensed by the Taliban's dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which for millennia were regarded throughout Asia as one of the wonders of the world, she reminds her readers that, in Herat in 1885, only nine minarets and a mausoleum escaped demolition by the British. Lamb devotes a chapter to the Taliban destruction of Kabul's exquisite museum, with the Culture Minister leading the vandals as they hacked off the heads of priceless statues. After the liberation the Kabulis show their contempt for the Taliban, telling Lamb that Mullah Omar would sit at the wheel of one of his cars, making engine noises while his Education Minister scoffed at the thought that the sun is many thousands of miles from the earth on the grounds that there is no tape measure long enough to reach it.

Lamb's personal tale is powerful, frightening and human but the history with which she unites her experiences has been rehashed ad nauseam since September 11. Black-and-white photos printed straight onto the written page are less than clear; some are not captioned and the head of the Saudi secret police is called Prince Turki bin Abdul (without the crucial Aziz) and here the Muslim rosary (masbaha) is called "worry beads", the derisive term used by Greeks for the holy beads inherited from Ottoman Muslims. But, mainly, this is a profoundly touching memoir. 

© Trevor Mostyn 2007 - www.trevormostyn.com