Today, most people in the West still see the war in Afghanistan as a contest between Western democracies and Islamist terrorism. That war is real; its happening; but it sits atop an older struggle, between Kabul and the countryside, between order and chaos, between a modernist impulse to join the world and a reactionary impulse to retreat toward inward-looking localism. In Games Without Rules, Tamim Ansary draws on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, long study of the history in question, and Western and Afghan sources to explain Afghanistans history from the inside out, and foreground that long, internal struggle that the outside world has never fully understood. It is the story of a nation struggling to take form, a nation undermined by its own demons, while every 40 to 60 years, a great power crashes in and disrupts whatever progress has been made.
