Akbar, Said Hyder, and Susan Burton. Come Back to Afghanistan

This American Life, on NPR, broadcast the audio diary of Said Hyder Akbar as he visited Afghanistan over the summers of 2002, 2003, and 2004. He was 17, and had lived in California for as much of his life as he could remember; his Afghan parents had become refugees, first in Pakistan and then in the U.S. Because his father was involved in the resistance against the Russians, and a friend of Afghanistan's new president, Hamid Karzai, he left California to go back to Afghanistan, eventually becoming the governor of the province of Kunar, and Hyder visited him during the summer.

It certainly is an educational book, detailing tribal conflicts in Afghanistan and obstacles to reconstruction. The trouble is, it can't decide whether it wants to be a book about Afghanistan or a book about Hyder himself, and it doesn't do either part very well. At times it is self-centered to the point of being ludicrous:

I had loud, brand-new headphones, through which I was listening to U2. I was getting really pumped up. Then I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back, I managed to break the little plug you stick into the jack on your CD player. That kind of killed my mood.

Issues of identity and loyalty, as Hyder tries to find or make a place for himself, are brought up, but only in the most shallow way. I still don't feel like I know anything about the guy.

The book does a little better when it comes to Afghanistan itself. I certainly know more about its geography, its people, and its challenges than I did when I started reading. But Hyder is young, and doesn't seem inclined in a literary direction; unsurprisingly, there's not much sense of a narrative being held together, and the book becomes an uncohesive sequence of "first this happened, then this happened." It seems as if almost no time has elapsed between the book's writing and its publication, and I wonder if the publisher skimped on editing in order to get it out in a more timely manner.

Said Hyder Akbar founded an NGO for the development of Afghanistan. Good for him; from reading the book, he seemed far more interested in improving Afghanistan than in writing about it. And I'm sure he'll be better at it, too.