Voices of the Taliban

Sun Tzu is responsible for the age-old cliché about knowing your enemy. I wonder, then, what he might have made of Poetry of the Taliban, edited by Alex Strick Van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn. This is a new collection of verses translated from Pashtun and Urdu. The poems originally appeared on Mujahedeen websites, in newsheets or on scraps of paper.

You might expect the poems to be reactionary or propagandistic — and, for sure, there is blood and thunder. But reviewers also talk of empathy, aesthetic sensibility and the familiar worries of young men in love. Michael Semple, the EU’s former representative in Afghanistan, said:

‘This is an essential work. The book holds its own as an apolitical work of aesthetics, but actually is full of political meaning. It delves into the Afghan imagination and discovers aesthetic wealth that those content with the superficialities of press releases or think tank reports could not dream of.