My Life with the Taliban, Abdul Salam Zaeef, edited by Alex Strick van Linscholen and Felix Kuehn (Hurst & Company, London, 2011, first published 2010) xlix, 331pp., hardback £20.00, ISBN 978 1 84904 0266.

This is an important and indeed unique book.  It is the only insider account of the Taliban.  It is of the greatest interest to people in the UK as our sons and daughters expose their lives in Afghanistan.  Zaeef demonstrates the nature of the world of the Taliban and the deep-routedness in the society of southern Afghanistan as well as the impact of war, displacement and the Pakistani refugee camps of the 1980s. 

The editors supplement Zaeef's work by a word portrait of Kandaha City, maps showing the location and distances of places mentioned, a considerable character list, some 38 pages of notes, a bibliography, a chronology, a glossary, suggestions for further reading and an index - no mean effort of editing.  There is also a foreword by Barnett R. Rubin of New York University which draws attention to Zaeef's extraordinary life - his childhood of deprivation, his imprisonment without charge in Guantanimo, his career in the service of the Taliban and his present life in Kabul.  The work offers a personal and indeed privileged insight into the rural Pashtan village communities which constitute the Taliban's bedrock.  Much of Zaeef's epilogue describes how Afghanistan has again been transformed into an arena in which world powers lock horns.  As he remarks, the Afghan people suffer from uninformed decisions by the powers that be and have serious economic as well as political problems.

The book really is compulsory reading as an antidote to the general view given by the media.