Afghanistan is a foreign land about which we knew little before 9/11 but which intruded on our attention with sudden urgency, like Vietnam in the 1960s or, in a different context, Egypt in the 1920s. And as in those earlier instances, alas, we have continued to know very little without fully realizing the extent of our ignorance. That is a dangerous combination. It is the perfect recipe for what Edward Said famously called "Orientalism"—westerners' fabrication and imposition of identity onto "easterners" to fill the vacuum of our ignorance. I dislike making such a charge: Said opened a Pandora's Box of postmodernist criticism in the social sciences and made it too easy for lazy graduate students to dismiss good scholarship. Yet who can deny that westerners sometimes say the dumbest things about non-western countries?

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Into this milieu, almost like a miracle, comes Thomas Barfield's Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History. Barfield, an anthropologist at Boston University, studied Afghanistan before it was cool. He did ethnographic fieldwork in Afghanistan in the mid-1970s, years before the Soviet invasion made the country important to U.S. policymakers and an attractive career choice for scholars. Over the years he returned to Central Asia, including to Xinjiang, Peshawar, Kunduz, and Samarkand, to study nomads, refugees, and post-conflict reconstruction. He is among the three or four most knowledgeable American experts on Afghanistan living today, and his book is one of the first major scholarly treatments of Afghanistan since Larry Goodson's commendable Afghanistan's Endless War (Univ. of Washington Press, 2001) and Barney Rubin's The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (Yale Univ. Press, 2nd ed., 2002). Goodson's and Rubin's volumes focused heavily on the Soviet war and its aftermath, while Barfield takes a much, much longer view.

That is the first of many strengths in Barfield's book. Another is that he writes accessibly. For example, he illustrates the difference ...

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