Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan

By Tamim Ansary

Book Overview

By the author of Destiny Disrupted: An enlightening, lively, accessible, history of Afghanistan from 1840 to today, from the Afghan point of view, that illuminates how Great Power conflicts have interrupted an ongoing, internal struggle to take form as a nation.

Five times in the last two centuries, some great power has tried to invade, occupy, or otherwise take control of Afghanistan. And as Tamim Ansary shows in this illuminating history, every intervention has come to grief in much the same way and for much the same reason: The intervening power has failed to understand that Afghanistan has a story of its own, a story that continues to unfold between, and despite, the interventions.

Games without Rules tells this story from the inside looking out. Drawing on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, and Western and Afghan sources, Ansary weaves an epic that moves from a universe of village republics--the old Afghanistan--through a tumultuous drama of tribes, factions, and forces, to the current struggle.

Ansary paints a richly textured portrait of a nation that began to form around the same time as the United States but is still struggling to coalesce; a nation driven by its high ambitions but undermined by its own demons, while every forty to sixty years a great power crashes in and disrupts whatever progress has been made. A compelling narrative told in an accessible, conversational style, Games without Rules offers revelatory insight into a country long at the center of international debate, but never fully understood by the outside world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1610393198
• ISBN13: 9781610393195
• Release Date: March 2014
• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Most engaging nonfiction I've ever read

I'm not normally a big history person, but I had to read this for a college class and it's stuck with me ever since. It's really engaging, giving life to historical figures and getting you wholeheartedly invested in their fates. And it's uniquely enlightening, coming from an Afghan perspective and telling you not just what happened, not just why it happened, but also why it matters. It's a few years old now, but I still wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in Afghanistan or the current events going on there.