Lost Kingdom

...Most Afghans didn’t live remotely well in 1800, in 1900, or in 1950...

...Klass is preoccupied with others rather than herself, and always ready to see the good side of the people she meets, when there is one...

...In fact, the diagnosis she made in 1964 still stands: “Pride and self-contempt mingled are a cruel burden to bear...

...today their granddaughters aren’t allowed to ride bikes (“unfeminine”) and their skirts reach the fl oor...

...Most of the colony thought it surprising . . . if a foreigner and an Afghan became close friends...

...I can’t measure the losses, since I fi rst visited Afghanistan in 2002, but neither can Klass be fully aware of the gains...

...It feels of a piece that Klass manages to get through the whole book without discussing the husband with whom she went to Afghanistan (and from whom she was soon to be divorced) and that she visits Jews in Afghanistan without ever saying that she is Jewish (though it can be inferred from her surname and a disAnn Marlowe is the author, most recently, of The Book of Trouble: A Romance...

...She edited and contributed to an essay collection—Afghanistan: The Great Game Revisited (1988) published by Freedom House—which is still worth reading...

...Such numbers remind us that the notion that Afghanistan is undergoing “reconstruction” to bring it back to some acceptable prewar condition is a fantasy...

...But she has not written another book with the fl air and poetry of her fi rst...

...Now, Afghanistan is a “war zone” in everyone’s eyes, and a sense of its granularity has been lost in the clich?s...

...it had fallen to 3,070 per 100,000 in 1978 and a still-appalling 1,600 per 100,000 today, the highest in the world...

...It was on the whole as unexpected to really like an Afghan personally as it was improper to dislike him personally...

...The upper class lost its sense of noblesse oblige, yes, but the lower orders also lost the habit of deference...

...they reminded me of the college kids I taught for a couple of weeks at a time in Mazar-i-Sharif a few years ago, in their very un-American combination of deference, earnestness, and fecklessness...

...I don’t only mean Afghanistan’s astounding recent economic growth, with GDP growing an average of 9.375 percent a year from 2003 to 2007—more than the 8.9 percent growth rate of Russia, India, and China in a similar period...

...Maternal mortality in Afghanistan in 1950 must have been astronomical...

...Abdul Kayeum (who went on to become vice-president of the Helmand River Authority, a provincial governor, minister of education, and, eventually, an exile in America—he also appears in Tamim Ansary’s West of Kabul, East of New York...

...This is the high old practice, and has its merits...

...Older Afghan women have told me that, in provincial capitals in the 1960s, they used to ride bicycles to school and wear miniskirts with their headscarves...

...BY ANN MARLOWE Land of the High Flags is an artifact of a time when a foreigner could unabashedly enjoy being in Afghanistan the way one enjoyed Kenya or India or Sicily, even while going there to do good...

...She hasn’t been to Afghanistan in decades...

...Of course, Klass was aware that the society she lived in was fl awed...

...The book was fi rst published in 1964...

...Klass went back to Afghanistan as a reporter in the 1960s, joined Freedom House in 1980, and founded the Afghanistan Information Center, heading it from 1980 until 1991...

...Another major character is Klass’s boss at the time, Dr...

...Praise change, and you might be understood . . . as implying . . . ‘Your own uniqueness was nothing very much worth having.’” But perhaps out of affection, and the optimism of the postwar years, she lets Afghan society off the hook too easily...

...The number was 165 in 2001 and 135 in 2006...

...Like Gul Baz, he can seem too good to be true, but I lay that up to Klass’s youthful goodwill...

...Klass—still a feisty Afghanistan expert in New York—chronicles this love affair in a burnished, formal style that was slightly antiquated even in 1964...

...Perhaps for this reason, her characters live...

...Klass’s portraits of her students could have been drawn yesterday...

...He is an individual, not a representative of a social class or ethnic group, as are all the other household servants Klass depicts...

...Xenophobia grows from such twisted roots as these...

...creet reference to a Succoth of her youth...

...The past two decades that dispersed the elite and its ancient culture also opened this most hidebound of societies to social mobility...

...But the society Rosanne Klass saw was dysfunctional and heartbreakingly poor...

...Perhaps she was infl uenced by Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell, and other well-born lady travelers in the Muslim world, or by the Victorian novels she must have read in her childhood...

...Most of the country wasn’t destroyed in the war, for the good reason that there was little infrastructure to destroy outside of the few cities...

...She was one of the founders of the Afghanistan Relief Committee and knew everyone who mattered in Afghanistan before, during, and after the jihad...

...She donated her papers to the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins in 2005...

...The one criticism that leaps out at this reader, on her second tour through Land of the High Flags, is that Klass seems a bit too infatuated with the good old days...

...Today, Afghans of all backgrounds and in almost all regions have some awareness that they have opportunities and choices in life—they have, at least, dipped their toes into the confusing, entrancing, cynical larger world...

...That makes this reissue of Land of the High Flags a poignant, as well as happy, event...

...The Afghan-Australian historian Amin Saikal in Modern Afghanistan tells the unsparing truth: From the Mohammadzai ascendancy in 1747 until the Soviet invasion of 1979, Afghan society was characterized by “highly repressive administration” and elites that denied many major groups access to power, relying on support from foreign powers...

...In sum, one did everything short of meeting them as individuals...

...It didn’t help that Afghanistan is impossibly mountainous, with only 14 percent arable land, or that it is in a bad neighborhood with aggressive neighbors...

...Its emphasis on the degree of Soviet success in dominating Afghanistan and destroying its society has been lost in today’s eagerness to portray insurgencies/resistance movements as history’s “winners...

...Life expectancy today for Afghans is 43 years, but in 1970 it was 38, and God knows what it was in 1950...

...If she had visited in the last few years, she might not have selected the subtitle “Afghanistan When the Going Was Good...

...The time is gone when one could write chapters on one’s bearer, but Klass’s portrait of the Peshawar Pashtun Gul Baz is a joy...

...Affection does not blunt her keen eye for the fault lines of expat society, and the irrelevance to it of Afghans: One made a point of liking them, and was, indeed, politely deferential, because it was, after all, their country which one was there to deal with, to instruct or to improve...

...It is true that, in the cities, ugly cement boxes have replaced lovely and comfortable mudbrick homes, crude new carpets are now preferred to the masterworks of the past, and many traditional crafts live on only in the pallid form of charity projects for Afghan women...

...But most of Afghanistan’s poverty can be blamed on a long line of terrible governments and the absence of civil society...

...It’s true that an ancient culture has been weakened, its upper class scattered and shorn of its confi dence and sense of responsibility...

...In 1960, 245 out of every thousand Afghan children died before their fi rst birthday...

...It is also true that imported religious extremism and politicized Islam have replaced what was once a fairly tolerant culture, at least in the larger towns and cities, and at least for the prosperous...

...The 1950s Kabul that Rosanne Klass entered as a novice high school teacher was a poor country which Westerners were trying to modernize, and which some fell in love with...

...Given that everything in Afghan society conspired against risk-taking or experimentation, this is no small advancement...

...Any nostalgia applies more to the lifestyle of expats— today they are called “internationals”— than to Afghans, who now enjoy a much higher standard of living, more legal rights, a much larger chance of seeing their children grow up, and many more opportunities than in 1951 (or just about any time in history...

...That they might simply like each other was scarcely considered...

...By comparison, around 1900, the American rate was about 900 out of 100,000...