This page is where you can find posts, articles, book chapters and books on Afghanistan by Nancy Lindisfarne, Jonathan Neale and Richard Tapper.

Click here for CLIMATE DISPATCH FROM AFGHANISTAN by Jonathan Neale, written in March 2024. This reports on an International Conference on Climate Change at Nangarhar University, where he was a keynote speaker. Many things were surprising about the conference. One of them was that six or seven ministers from the new government attended, so they could tell their people that climate change was the most dangerous challenge the government had ever faced.

Click here for AFGHANISTAN: THE END OF THE OCCUPATION by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, written in August 2021. This is by a long sight the most popular post on Anne Bonny Pirate. It begins: ” A lot of nonsense about Afghanistan is being written in Britain and the United States. Most of this nonsense hides a number of important truths. First, the Taliban have defeated the United States. Second, the Taliban have won because they have more popular support. Third, this is not because most Afghans love the Taliban. It is because the American occupation has been unbearably cruel and corrupt. Fourth, the War on Terror has also been politically defeated in the United States. The majority of Americans are now in favor of withdrawal from Afghanistan and against any more foreign wars. Fifth, this is a turning point in world history. The greatest military power in the world has been defeated by the people of a small, desperately poor country. This will weaken the power of the American empire all over the world. Sixth, the rhetoric of saving Afghan women has been widely used to justify the occupation, and many feminists in Afghanistan have chosen the side of the occupation. The result is a tragedy for feminism.

Click here for AFGHAN WOMEN, UNIVERSITIES, HUNGER AND CLIMATE CHANGE by Nancy and Jonathan, from January 2022.

On Dec 19^th the Taliban government announced that women would no longer be allowed to attend universities. On Dec 24^th they announced that women would no longer be allowed to work for foreign funded NGOs. These are ugly developments. As so often before, both the Taliban and the Western powers are playing with women’s lives for their own political ends. This note explains how and why.

Click on Oil Empires 16Nov2015 FIN5 for Nancy and Jonathan’s history of OIL EMPIRES AND RESISTANCE IN AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ AND SYRIA. First published in 2015, and 25,000 words long, it will give you solid background to the ongoing wars today.

Click here for AFGHANISTAN: THE CLIMATE CRISIS by Nancy and Jonathan, from September 2021. “In many parts of the world people see climate change as a terrible threat in the future. In Afghanistan that threat has been eating away at the fabric of the economy and society for half a century.”

Click here for MY FIRST DAY IN CAMP WITH THE PIRUZAI by Nancy Lindisfarne. “In 1971 and 1972 Richard Tapper and I lived with Afghan villagers for nearly a year. The Piruzai, some 200 families, lived in two small settlements near the town of Sar-e Pol in northern Afghanistan. They were Pashtu-speakers, pastoralists and peasant farmers, poor people, working very hard to survive in a vicious feudal system. The people, the setting, and even the division of labour between Richard and myself seemed to conform to every stereotype about the Middle East. There were veiled women, men on horseback, camel caravans, stunning scenery and dramatic lives. These were stereotypes shared by the Afghan officials, politicians and urban professionals we met in Kabul. But the people we met were not two dimensional.

Click on Maryam FAIR COPY to download MARYAM’S STORY by Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper and Richard Tapper. “In the early 1970s we made more than 100 hours of tape recordings, as part of ethnographic fieldwork among the Piruzai, Pashtun farmers and semi-nomadic pastoralists in northern Afghanistan. These village voices create a remarkable community self-portrait of a social world now lost and irretrievable.

“Maryam’s story is the perfect exemplar of an unconventional form of auto-ethnography. Maryam was married some thirty years before, as part of a series of marriage exchanges intended to settle a feud between two main Piruzai families. Her husband, Tumân, became village headman, a Haji, and in 1971 our host. Later, Pâkiza, Tumân’s second wife and Maryam’s co-wife, became the bane of her life. Her account captures something of the depth and colour of people’s lives. It gives voice to the ensuing silence over the past nearly fifty years and offers a radical challenge to the gendered stereotypes which have dominated the global and Afghan media during the past forty years of war and occupation.

Click here to order Afghan Village Voices: Stories from a Tribal Community by Richard Tapper with Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper, Bloomsbury, 2020. “This is a book of stories told by the Piruzai, a rural Afghan community who farmed in northern Afghanistan and in summer took their flocks to the central Hazârajât mountains. It is a collection of remarkable stories, folktales and conversations and provides unprecedented insight into the depth and colour of these people’s lives. Recorded in the early 1970s, the stories range from memories of the Piruzai migration to the north a half century before, to the feuds, ethnic strife and the doings of powerful khans. There are also stories of falling in love, elopements, marriages, childbirth and the world of spirits. It is a remarkable document of Afghanistan at peace, told by a people whose voices have rarely been heard.

No one on the left, or anywhere else, writes much about the class basis of the Taliban. The exception is Nancy Lindisfarne. This is her chapter on EXCEPTIONAL PASHTUNGS: CLASS POLITICS, IMPERIALISM AND HISTORIOGRAPHY. Starting from the example of the Pakistani Taliban in Swat, and working outwards, she presents some inconvenient facts. Nancy lays out evidence that the Taliban particularly on support from landless and small peasants, and that when they take control in a valley they drive out the landlords. Moreover, their leadership comes much more humble backgrounds than almost any other Islamist movement.

Click here for Jonathan Neale’s chapter on RANTING AND SILENCE: CONTRADICTIONS OF WRITING FOR ACTIVISTS AND ACADEMICS. Most of it is advice for activists and radicals trying to survive in an academic world, but it begins with the example of his fieldwork with poor yoghurt peddlers in Afghanistan and his struggles in writing about them.