If you tried to tell the political history of Afghanistan using only its flags, you would get a surprisingly accurate picture.

Few countries have changed their flag so often. The exact count varies depending on whether short-lived and transitional versions are included, but overall, during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Afghanistan changed its flag almost 30 (!) times.

And almost every time, it meant the same thing:

a new regime had come to power and wanted to show that a new Afghanistan was beginning.

First, There Was Black

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the flags of the Afghan emirs were mostly black, often with a white state emblem showing a mosque, weapons, and other symbols of monarchy and Islam.

Religious inscriptions had already been used on Afghan military banners in the nineteenth century.

And then came King Amanullah Khan.

It was under him that, after the war of 1919, Afghanistan achieved full independence in its foreign policy.

Amanullah wanted to modernise the country, and after his major tour of Europe he set about changing not only the state itself, but also its symbols.

In 1928, the Loya Jirga approved a black-red-green tricolour.

This was a radical departure from the old black monarchical flag and a deliberate move towards the European model of a national flag.

Amanullah himself explained the colours roughly like this:

• black - Afghanistan’s past;

• red - the blood shed for independence;

• green - prosperity and hope for the future.

There is even a version of the story that Amanullah was additionally inspired by the German flag, which he saw during his European journey.

But one thing can be said with confidence: for the king himself, the new flag was part of a much larger project to modernise the country.

And although Amanullah was overthrown the following year, black, red and green outlived him.

A Mosque in the Middle of the Flag

Under the next monarchy, the tricolour returned, but traditional Afghan symbolism reappeared in the centre.

The most recognisable element became a mosque with a mihrab and minbar, surrounded by sheaves of wheat.

The details, inscriptions, and shape of the emblem changed in different versions, but this image proved remarkably durable.

For a long time, then, Afghanistan’s flag was a kind of combination of two worlds:

European in the form of the tricolour - and Islamic in the content of the central emblem.

Then Came the Communists

In 1978, after the Saur Revolution, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan seized power.

And the flag changed again.

For a time, Afghanistan had an almost entirely red flag with a golden emblem - symbolism that was openly revolutionary and clearly resembled the flags of other socialist states.

Later, black, red and green returned, but the emblem now included a red star, a cogwheel, a book, and other elements of socialist symbolism.

Toward the end of communist rule, some of these symbols were gradually removed.

The Mujahideen

When the communist government fell in 1992, the victorious mujahideen abandoned the old tricolour.

The new flag became horizontal:

green - white - black.

It carried Allahu Akbar and the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith:

“There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.”

Later, a golden emblem was added in the centre, featuring a mosque, wheat, and crossed swords - a symbol of the mujahideen victory.

But this flag did not last long either.

And Then the White Banner Appeared

In 1996, the Taliban captured Kabul.

Its first flag was almost shockingly simple:

a plain white banner.

In 1997, the shahada was added in black.

This was the flag used by the first Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from 1997 to 2001.

In Taliban symbolism, white was interpreted as a sign of purity of faith and rule.

But something else is even more important: almost everything that recalled the Afghan monarchy, the republic, ethnic identity, or historical state symbols disappeared from the flag.

What remained was only a religious formula.

That captures the Taliban’s political concept very well: the legitimacy of the state should come not from the nation, revolution, or constitution, but from Islam as the movement understands it.

And Then the Tricolour Returned

After the fall of the first Taliban regime in 2001, Afghanistan once again returned to the black-red-green flag.

The final version used by the Islamic Republic had three vertical stripes and a white emblem in the centre.

It included:

• a mosque with its mihrab facing Mecca;

• the shahada;

• a wreath of wheat;

• the name Afghanistan;

• the number 1298 - the year in the Solar Hijri calendar corresponding to 1919, the year of Afghan independence.

In this way, the republic’s flag tried to contain Islam, independence, and modern Afghan statehood all at once.

So What Is Afghanistan’s Flag Today?

After the Taliban captured Kabul again on 15 August 2021, it restored the white flag of the Islamic Emirate:

a white field with the shahada in black.

This is the flag that today flies over government buildings in Afghanistan.

But this is where an interesting legal and political contradiction begins.

The Taliban effectively controls the country, but as of August 2026 its government remains almost entirely unrecognised internationally.

Russia became the first - and so far the only - state to formally recognise the Taliban government in July 2025.

At the same time, the Taliban still does not hold Afghanistan’s seat at the United Nations; there, the country continues to be represented by a diplomatic structure originating from the previous republic.

And the old black-red-green tricolour has not disappeared.

It continues to be used by Afghans in exile, opponents of the Taliban, and in many international contexts.

After 2021, it effectively became a symbol of another idea of Afghanistan as well.

So today there are, in a sense, two Afghan flags:

white - the flag of the authority that actually controls the country;

black-red-green - the flag of a state that no longer exists, but whose idea has not disappeared.

And perhaps this constant change in Afghanistan’s state symbols reflects the broader tragedy of Afghan uncertainty.

Every new regime tried not merely to change the flag - it tried to answer again the question of what Afghanistan is and who has the right to speak in its name.

So the history of these flags is not really a history of colours.

It is the history of an endless struggle over the identity of the country itself.

If someone asked me, “What is the one book you would recommend reading to understand Afghanistan?” I would not hesitate for a moment.

My answer would be: Qais Akbar Omar’s A Fort of Nine Towers.

And I say this having already read around thirty books in my “literary journey” through the country, including the international bestsellers of probably the best-known Afghan author in the world, Khaled Hosseini.

Hosseini is undoubtedly a compelling and deeply moving writer. But if you truly want to see and feel Afghanistan “from the inside,” do not hesitate: this is the book that will immerse you emotionally in the country - and stay with you for a long time afterwards.

In form, it is the memoir of an Afghan boy recalling roughly thirty years in the life of his family - from around the beginning of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the war waged by the United States and its allies against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

But this is not simply another chronicle of foreign interventions and civil war that brought so much horror and suffering to the Afghan people.

It is, rather, a vivid story of an ordinary family’s life, seen through the eyes of an ordinary Afghan boy.

At times, this account is genuinely terrifying and painful. But it is also so emotional and open that you begin to feel almost physically present beside the people in the book.

You will witness not only cruelty, radicalism, aggression, and violence - things that have almost become synonymous with Afghanistan - but also deeply human qualities such as courage, generosity, empathy, hospitality, and self-sacrifice.

You will see how humanity becomes the decisive, perhaps even the only, value when material possessions have lost all meaning.

When respect, friendship, and love become stronger than hatred and cruelty.

Together with Qais’s family, you will cry and laugh, witness deaths and births, travel in an old Soviet Volga across mountain passes, sleep under the open sky beside a mountain river, and escape from a sudden flood.

You will find shelter with complete strangers who share their roof and their last piece of bread with you, live with nomads in their tents, and travel alongside a caravan of camels.

You will sleep in caves above the heads of the giant Buddha statues carved into the cliffs of Bamiyan, weave carpets alongside Turkmen craftsmen, fly in a Soviet helicopter, hide from mujahideen snipers, endure beatings in a Taliban prison...

And still hope for something better.

And sometimes you will simply sit together as one large family over dinner, look up at the stars, and enjoy the simple fact that you are together.

The emotional message of the book is perhaps best expressed by the author himself:

“I have long carried this load of griefs in the cage of my heart. Now I have given them to you. I hope you are strong enough to hold them”.

The book has won numerous prizes and distinctions and has been translated into more than twenty languages.

But for me, its greatest value is the opportunity it gives us to check the settings of our own system of values once again - and to see how wide a range of feeling our emotional intelligence is still capable of:

how much we ourselves are still able to sympathise, fear, love, lose, and hope together with another human being.

I really love maps.

I can spend a long time looking at them, especially old ones, where the borders do not yet quite resemble the ones we know today.

But what I enjoy most are those moments when some strange line on a map suddenly turns out to hide an interesting and unexpected story.

There is one such line on the map of Afghanistan.

From the country’s northeast, a long narrow “tail” stretches out between Tajikistan and Pakistan. It runs through the Pamirs all the way to China.

This is the Wakhan Corridor.

And the first question that comes to mind when you look at the map is:

where did it come from?

First There Was Wakhan

One important clarification: Wakhan itself was not invented in the nineteenth century.

It is an old historical region of Badakhshan through which routes connecting Central Asia, Kashgar, Badakhshan and the Indian subcontinent had passed for centuries.

The Wakhi people lived there and still do today, while farther east, high in the Pamirs, live Kyrgyz pastoralists.

So:

Wakhan is ancient.
The Wakhan Corridor in its present form is relatively new.

And its appearance is connected to the Great Game.

When Two Empires Began Moving Towards Each Other

During the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire was gradually expanding southwards through Central Asia.

The British Empire watched this from India and became increasingly nervous.

For London, India was one of the empire’s most important possessions, so Russia’s advance towards its northern frontiers was seen as a potential threat.

This gave rise to a long rivalry between Russia and Britain for influence in Central Asia, which later acquired the rather elegant name the Great Game.

And Afghanistan found itself literally in the middle.

Amir Abdur Rahman Khan even compared his country to a poor goat being watched at the same time by a lion and a bear - Britain and Russia.

As far as I am concerned, that is a very accurate image.

How the “Tail” Appeared

The first important step came in 1872-1873, when London and St Petersburg were negotiating Afghanistan’s northern boundaries.

The British insisted that Badakhshan and Wakhan should belong to the Afghan sphere.

Russia eventually agreed.

But farther east, in the Pamirs, the border still remained uncertain.

The final shape of that same “tail” appeared in 1895, when the Russian and British empires agreed on the division of their spheres of influence in the Pamirs.

The logic was very simple:

to the north - Russian possessions;
to the south - British India;
between them - a narrow strip of Afghanistan.

In this way, Wakhan became a kind of geopolitical “buffer”, preventing the Russian Empire and British India from sharing a direct border.

And that is why Afghanistan still has this strange, long “tail” on the map today.

Interestingly, the Afghan emir himself was not particularly excited about this territorial gift.

Wakhan was incredibly remote, poor, mountainous and difficult to defend.

For Kabul, it was more of a responsibility than a valuable acquisition.

And at the End - China

The story becomes even more interesting if you follow this “tail” all the way to its end.

There, Afghanistan suddenly runs into China.

The Afghan-Chinese border is very short - about 90 kilometres. It passes through the high Pamirs, including the area around the Wakhjir Pass at an altitude of almost 5,000 metres.

And this is where one of my favourite geographical oddities begins.

There is a border between Afghanistan and China.
But there is no normal international border crossing.

In other words, the two countries are neighbours on the map, but you cannot simply get into a car, drive to the border, show your passport and continue into China.

Between them lie mountains, glaciers, extreme altitude and almost no transport infrastructure.

A Three-and-a-Half-Hour “Jump”

And now for the best detail.

Afghanistan uses UTC+4:30.

China, despite its enormous size, officially uses a single time zone - UTC+8.

So if the Wakhjir crossing were open and you could simply walk across the border, you would immediately have to move your clock:

3 hours and 30 minutes forward!

12:00 in Afghanistan - and already 15:30 in China.

This is the largest official time difference across a land border between two countries anywhere in the world.

It feels especially strange here - in almost uninhabited mountains where there is, in practice, no normal border crossing at all.

A Buffer They Now Want to Turn into a Corridor

There is one more nice irony in this story.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Wakhan was left between the great powers so that it would separate them.

Today, Afghanistan is trying to use it for exactly the opposite purpose - to connect with China.

In recent years, a road has been actively developed through Wakhan towards the Chinese border.

But a road reaching the border and an open international transport corridor are still very different things.

China has not opened an ordinary crossing through Wakhjir.

So the geopolitical “buffer” of the nineteenth century may theoretically one day become a trade corridor of the twenty-first.

What I like most about this story is that you can first simply see it.

You do not need to know any dates, treaties or names of diplomats.

You only need to look at a map of Afghanistan and ask:

why does it have such a strange “tail”?

And behind this small geographical oddity, the Great Game suddenly opens up before you: the rivalry of two empires, the high Pamirs, a short border with China without a normal crossing - and three and a half hours that could theoretically be jumped in a single step.

British India is long gone. So is the Russian Empire.

But the geopolitical buffer created between them remains - a narrow Afghan “tail” that still stretches all the way to China.

William Dalrymple’s Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan was probably one of the most gripping books I have read recently.

And this despite the fact that it is classic historical nonfiction, based on primary sources and other historical material.

Dalrymple manages to turn the events surrounding the First Anglo-Afghan War in the first half of the nineteenth century into such an extraordinary detective-like narrative that I simply could not put the book down and devoured it in just a few days.

Again and again drawing parallels with future conflicts in the country, the book tells the story of the first large-scale British invasion of Afghanistan: a military attempt to install a puppet - and essentially occupation - regime there in order to create a buffer zone protecting the British Empire’s most valuable colony, India, from the potential, and to a large extent imagined, ambitions of the Russian tsar.

The so-called Army of the Indus, “fulfilling its international duty” and “responding to the appeals of the oppressed Afghan people,” invaded the Kingdom of Kabul under the pretext of restoring a previously deposed shah to the throne.

At first, everything went surprisingly smoothly.

The British forced the ruling Amir Dost Mohammad Khan out of power, placed their protégé Shah Shuja on the throne, and established military control over Kabul and key parts of the country.

Does any of this sound familiar?

In principle, the Soviet Union followed a very similar pattern in 1979, as did the United States and its allies in 2001.

But the British made a fatal mistake that their unsuccessful successors would repeat again and again:

having entered Afghanistan relatively easily, they had absolutely no idea how they were going to get out.

The British ran Kabul for more than two years, and during that time their incompetent policies and the disgraceful behaviour of some senior representatives turned the local population and tribal leaders so strongly against them that it all ended in a powerful and extremely violent uprising.

With their tails between their legs, the Army of the Indus was forced to abandon Kabul with enormous losses and attempt to escape through the snow-covered mountain passes of the “conquered” Afghanistan.

Throughout this inglorious retreat, Afghan tribes tore the British column apart, carrying out a real massacre and repeatedly ambushing their enemy in the mountains.

The Last Stand of the 44th Regiment at Gandamak, an 1898 painting by British artist William Barnes Wollen

According to the popular version of this story, the result of this humiliating fiasco was that, out of a column of more than 16,000 people, only one man reached the fortress at Jalalabad, which remained under British control: the wounded army surgeon William Brydon.

It is this episode that is depicted in Lady Butler’s famous painting Remnants of an Army.

Of course, the real story was somewhat more complicated: some people were taken prisoner and later survived.

But the symbolic image of a single exhausted horseman reaching Jalalabad after the catastrophic retreat from Kabul proved so powerful that it effectively came to represent the entire British disaster.

So, as a result of its Afghan adventure, Britain lost an enormous amount of money, resources, and human lives, while Afghanistan eventually returned more or less to the same situation - including politically - that it had been in before the foreign invasion.

And the most interesting thing is that a remarkably similar scenario would repeat itself during the Soviet intervention in the 1980s and again after the apparently successful US-led operation that overthrew the Taliban in 2001.

Foreign powers kept stepping on the same historical rake again and again.

They invaded the country, became drawn into a conflict far deeper and more complicated than they had expected, encountered the extraordinary difficulty of governing Afghanistan, gradually realised that the resources being spent no longer matched the objectives they were trying to achieve - and eventually found themselves forced to withdraw.

There is a reason Afghanistan is so often called “the graveyard of empires.”

Some of the most powerful empires and superpowers in the world have tested their strength there - and none of them has ever managed to sit comfortably on this “anthill” for very long.

I am currently reading a rather extraordinary book - Niʿmat Allah’s History of the Afghans.

It is an early seventeenth-century Persian-language chronicle compiled in India, in which the author attempts something almost impossible: to bring together into a single history the origins of the Afghans, their tribes, genealogies, rulers, saints, and legends.

One thing should be clarified from the start: when this book speaks of “Afghans,” it primarily means Pashtuns.

And Niʿmat Allah explains their origins in a way that makes a modern reader instinctively stop and ask:

Niʿmat, come on! Seriously?

Because according to one of the best-known Pashtun genealogical traditions, they are descended from... the ancient Israelites.

Not metaphorically. Quite literally.

If we simplify the genealogy as much as possible, it looks something like this:

Jacob / Israel → King Saul → Afghana → ... → Qais → the Pashtun tribes.

The appearance of an ancestor named Afghana is particularly wonderful.

According to the legend, he was descended from the biblical King Saul - Talut in the Muslim tradition - and became the ancestor of the people who would later be known as Afghans.

Almost too convenient and logical.

And then an even more important figure enters the story: Qais Abd al-Rashid.

According to tradition, he lived during the time of the Prophet Muhammad, travelled to Medina, converted to Islam, and then returned to his people.

Qais had three sons - Sarban, Batan, and Gurgusht - from whom traditional genealogies derive a vast number of Pashtun tribes and clans.

So no matter how distant two Pashtun tribes may be from one another, if you climb far enough up the family tree, eventually you are supposed to arrive at Qais.

And above him - Afghana.

And still higher - Israel.

And this is where the story becomes even more interesting.

Several centuries after genealogies of this kind appeared, European travellers began arriving in Afghan lands, and some of them suddenly started finding confirmation of the legend... in the appearance of the Pashtuns themselves.

The traveller and missionary Joseph Wolff, for example, wrote that although he did not generally consider Afghan appearance to be “Jewish,” he was struck by the resemblance to Jews among some Yusufzais and inhabitants of the Khyber region.

Other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors also described what they called “Jewish facial features” among some Afghans.

Today, of course, such physiognomic arguments prove absolutely nothing.

But for the history of the legend itself, this is a fascinating detail:

the tradition already existed, and people who knew it began to see confirmation of it right in front of their eyes.

From our modern perspective, the idea may seem particularly paradoxical.

The Pashtuns are one of the peoples most strongly associated with Muslim Afghanistan, and yet an old tradition places them directly within the history of Bani Israel - the Children of Israel.

But it is important not to look at the seventeenth century through the eyes of the twenty-first.

For a Muslim author, Jacob, Saul, David, and Solomon were not “foreign” Jewish figures. They were also part of Islamic sacred history.

So a genealogy of this kind did not distance the Pashtuns from Islam.

Quite the opposite: it placed them within a great sacred history that began long before Muhammad and ultimately led to him.

Although, if you already think the question of Afghan origins is finally settled, do not be too quick.

The Israelites were far from the only theory.

At different times, writers attempted to trace the Afghans back to Armenians, Persians, Turks, Tatars, Mughals, and even the ancient Caucasian Albanians.

Caucasian Albanians, that is - not the modern Albanians of the Balkans.

Some authors were particularly attracted by the resemblance between names such as Aghvan and Afghan, and from that similarity grew entire theories of migration through the Caucasus and Armenia.

But perhaps the most interesting question here is not even which of these authors was right.

I find myself increasingly interested in something else:

why does a people need an ancestor like Qais in the first place?

Perhaps because a myth of origin does not so much explain the past as create a sense of common identity in the present.

Tribes may fight one another, live in different valleys, speak different dialects, follow different customs, and maintain their own genealogies.

But if you climb high enough up the family tree, eventually they all meet.

At Qais. And then they are all one family.

That is probably why it may not matter all that much whether Qais Abd al-Rashid really existed.

The much more interesting question is:

WHY was it important for people, for centuries, to believe that he did?

In my “literary introduction” to Afghanistan, I try to “hear” - meaning, to read - as many voices as possible: people from different social groups, political camps, ethnic communities, and religious backgrounds.

Whenever I encounter one particular position, I almost immediately try to find what I think of as a counterpoint - an opposing view or simply another perspective on the same situation.

It seems to me that this is one way, at least, to reduce the risk of seeing events from only one side: to look at them in turn through the eyes of opponents, participants, or witnesses, while trying to preserve a position of my own that remains, in a sense, “above” the conflict of ideas.

That is exactly why I was drawn to the memoir by Afghan author Maiwand Banayee, Delusions of Paradise: How I Almost Became a Taliban Fighter.

By this point, I had already read quite a lot about the Taliban - from the testimonies of persecuted and deprived women, to the analytical reflections of military advisers and politicians, to the memoirs of leaders and supporters of the radical movement itself, as well as literary reconstructions of those events.

But here was an opportunity to see yet another angle - the perspective of someone who himself began moving towards radicalism, and then turned away from that path.

The book’s description promised a candid story of a man who grew up amid war in Afghanistan and, as a young man, fell under the influence of religious radicalism, nearly becoming a Taliban fighter.

A story about fanaticism, gradual disillusionment with its promises, and the painful return to one’s own life and freedom of choice.

I should add that this is not the first time I have read memoirs by ordinary people from Afghanistan.

Some of these books are partly “written” in partnership with Western journalists or authors, who help shape and edit them for a particular audience.

To be frank, books of this kind rarely impress me primarily because of their literary value.

But for me, their greatest appeal lies elsewhere.

They allow us to witness the life of an ordinary person - not a ruler, political leader, or recognised authority connected to major historical events, but someone who experiences the everyday consequences of those same great upheavals.

It is a completely different cross-section of reality.

You do not always see it in news reports or historical chronicles.

Because this kind of life - not particularly romantic, but brutally real - often remains outside the attention of journalists, photographers, and historians.

Maiwand begins his story with his childhood in one of the poor outskirts of Kabul, where he witnessed the horrors of the civil war that unfolded after the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the collapse of the pro-communist state.

Kabul turned into a battlefield between different mujahideen factions which, once they had lost their common enemy, quickly remembered their political, ethnic, tribal, and personal differences and began a ruthless struggle for power.

The city was effectively divided into zones controlled by different warlords, with the borders between them running literally through its streets.

One thing immediately caught my attention: the main character’s name.

Maiwand is a small Afghan village near Kandahar, close to the site of one of the most famous battles of the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1880.

There, Afghan forces inflicted a serious defeat on the British, and the battle later became one of the symbols of Afghan resistance.

So Maiwand was named after this important victory.

According to him, the name always placed a certain pressure on him: he felt a moral responsibility to live up to it.

But as a child, he felt anything but heroic.

Maiwand was severely bullied by boys in his neighbourhood, while his father regularly reproached him for being timid and unable to defend himself.

At first, this detail seems secondary.

But gradually it becomes important: the desire to stop being weak, to prove his masculinity, and finally to live up to what others expected of him would later combine with very different circumstances.

Fleeing the war, Maiwand’s family ended up in a camp for Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

It was there that religious radicals gradually began influencing him and other boys already traumatised by war.

They were taught to see the meaning of life in jihad, prepared for self-sacrifice, and persuaded that death in a religious war opened a direct path to paradise.

For a teenager who had grown up surrounded by violence, humiliation, and a constant sense of helplessness, this worldview suddenly offered simple answers: who was to blame, what he should fight for, who he should become, and even what was worth dying for.

This part of Maiwand’s story was perhaps the most interesting to me.

Radicalisation here does not appear as some incomprehensible transformation of a “normal” person into a fanatic.

On the contrary, step by step, you begin to see how personal experience, war, trauma, the need to belong to a community, the desire to feel strong, and the attraction of a simple system for explaining a complicated world can come together in a very dangerous combination.

But in the end, Maiwand managed to escape that trap.

After leaving Afghanistan, he went through a deep crisis of faith, belief, and identity.

He had to search again for meaning in his life and, in effect, rebuild the basic points of reference through which he understood himself.

And interestingly, one of the important tools in this process became knowledge, education, and exposure to other ways of seeing the world.

Perhaps that is why, toward the end of his journey, Maiwand formulates an idea that resonated particularly strongly with me in the context of my own “literary introduction” to Afghanistan:

“The state should invest in translating scientific and Western literature, because when people read only books about their own culture, they become xenophobic and ethnocentric.”

Of course, this idea can be understood much more broadly than simply as a call to translate Western books for Afghan readers.

It is about the danger of any closed cultural space in which a person reads only about “their own,” listens only to “their own,” and gradually begins to see their own experience, culture, and value system as the only possible point of reference.

That is precisely why we need translations - of fiction, memoirs, historical studies, scientific works, and books on society and politics.

Reading “the other” does not mean agreeing with them.

It is, rather, an opportunity to spend a few hundred pages looking at the world through someone else’s eyes, and then return to your own picture of the world with the awareness that it is not the only one.

And perhaps that, for me, is the real meaning of this “literary introduction” to Afghanistan: not to find one correct version of the country, but gradually to piece it together from as many different, contradictory, and sometimes mutually exclusive human voices as possible.

The photograph has even been called the “Afghan Mona Lisa” - probably because of the girl’s mysterious expression, her direct gaze, somehow both vulnerable and hostile, the ambiguity of the emotion in her face, and the extraordinary recognisability of the image.

But behind this famous portrait lies more than the story of how one of the world’s best-known photographs was created.

It is also a story about how a real person can gradually disappear behind an image created and interpreted by others.

A Portrait Taken in a Refugee Camp

The photograph was taken by American photojournalist Steve McCurry in December 1984.

Importantly, it was not taken in Afghanistan itself, but in the Nasir Bagh Afghan refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan.

The girl and her family had ended up there after fleeing the war that followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

There was an improvised school for girls in the camp. According to McCurry, he heard children’s voices coming from a tent, went inside and asked permission to take several photographs.

Among the pupils, he noticed a girl in a red head covering sitting slightly apart from the others.

She was around ten to twelve years old. She had probably never been photographed before.

The session lasted only a few minutes. McCurry took a series of portraits, and then the girl left.

He did not even write down her name.

At the time, the photographer had no idea that this particular frame would become the defining image of his career - or that the face of this unknown child would appear on the cover of one of the world’s most famous magazines.

A Gaze That Was Immediately Given a Meaning

When the portrait appeared on the cover of National Geographic in June 1985, it quickly became one of the most famous images in the magazine’s history.

McCurry later said that the magazine received thousands of letters. People wanted to send the girl money, clothes and other forms of help, while some men even offered to marry her.

But one small line printed directly on the cover is especially revealing:

Haunted eyes tell of an Afghan refugee’s fears.

This caption did more than describe the photograph.

It quite literally told the reader what they were supposed to see in the girl’s eyes:

fear;

war;

trauma;

the suffering of the Afghan people.

Viewers read into her gaze a mixture of pain, dignity, defiance, vulnerability and inner strength.

For millions of people, this girl became the embodiment of Afghanistan - a country devastated by war, yet at the same time proud and unbroken.

But it is important to understand that all of these were interpretations made by outside observers.

Who She Was Actually Looking At

At that particular moment, the girl was not looking at the war or into the future of her country.

She was looking at the photographer - an unfamiliar adult man - and into the lens of a camera she may never have seen so closely before.

She was in an unusual situation in which she might have felt uncomfortable, wary or even angry.

So at least some of the tension in her gaze may have been directed at the photographer himself.

The world saw Afghanistan in her eyes.
But she herself may simply have seen a stranger with a camera.

This is one of the central contradictions of the photograph.

The image seemed to allow millions of people to come closer to the lives of Afghan refugees, yet at the same time it told them almost nothing about the actual person in the picture.

Her name was unknown.

No one had heard her voice.

No one had asked what she thought about the photograph.

For seventeen years, the world knew her simply as “the Afghan girl.”

The real person effectively disappeared behind a universal image of a refugee, a child of war and a symbol of an entire country.

How the “Afghan Girl” Got Her Name Back

It was only in 2002 that a National Geographic team returned to Pakistan to search for the woman from the famous cover.

It was not an easy task.

There was no name, no address and no precise information about her family. Several women appeared claiming to be the girl in the photograph.

Eventually, the researchers found Sharbat Gula, who by then was an adult woman with a husband and children.

Her identity was confirmed through comparisons of facial features, distinctive scars and iris-recognition technology.

There is an almost symbolic irony in this:

the very eyes that had turned her into a world-famous image helped, seventeen years later, to give that image a name.

But Sharbat Gula’s life looked nothing like the triumphant story of a global celebrity.

Two Biographies

While her photograph travelled around the world, appeared in books, hung in galleries and was sold as a fine-art print, Sharbat herself lived a modest life between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

She married young, raised children, lived through illness, loss and repeated displacement.

The photograph acquired a biography of its own.

It became famous, influential and commercially successful.

Sharbat Gula had a very different biography - the biography of a woman surviving war, poverty, illness, political upheaval and the unstable status of a refugee.

This does not mean that the photograph brought only harm.

It drew attention to the situation of Afghan refugees, encouraged people to help and later contributed to educational and humanitarian initiatives. After Sharbat was identified, she also received some financial and medical assistance.

But none of this removes the central question:

Who has the right to explain what her gaze means?

The photographer?

The magazine’s editors?

The Western viewer?

Historians, journalists and art critics?

Or Sharbat Gula herself?

When a Person Disappears Behind a Symbol

This story shows very clearly how symbolic - and sometimes manipulative - images are created.

We interpret what we see through our own experience, beliefs and emotions, as well as through assumptions and stereotypes imposed by society or the media.

In this way, a real person gradually disappears behind a label, while their actual experiences are replaced by meanings assigned to them by others.

Afghanistan is often presented to the outside world through exactly these kinds of images:

an armed man,

a woman in a burqa,

a refugee child,

a ruined city,

a mountain landscape.

Each of these images may be true.

But none of them is the whole truth about the country.

It is precisely this distance between the image of a country and the real people who live there that I am trying to bridge in my World on Bookshelf project.

I want to hear the voices, thoughts, experiences, pain and dreams of real people; to compare the way a country and its people are seen by outsiders with the way those people understand and describe themselves.

For decades, the world looked into the eyes of the “Afghan Girl” - but almost never heard the voice of Sharbat Gula.

Perhaps truly getting to know a country begins at the moment when we stop merely looking at images created by others - and finally allow people to speak for themselves.

I continue almost obsessively to unravel this tangle woven from deeply rooted patriarchal traditions, ancient religious beliefs, and archaic ideas about honour and shame.

After the book by Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad about the Kabul bookseller, I came across another extremely interesting work of investigative journalism - this time by Swedish journalist Jenny Nordberg, The Underground Girls of Kabul.

It is a story about girls known as bacha posh, which literally means “dressed like a boy” in Dari.

Nordberg’s investigation begins with an unexpected encounter with a strange practice in one Kabul family: the parents dress one of their four daughters in boys’ clothes, cut her hair short, give her a male name, and publicly present her as their son.

The explanation is, unfortunately, obvious.

In a deeply patriarchal society, a family in which no boys are born may be seen as incomplete, almost “defective.” So by creating this artificial appearance of having a son, the parents try to raise the status of their family.

As the Swedish journalist discovered, although the practice remains largely hidden, it has been quite widespread among Afghans for centuries.

Dressing a girl as a boy immediately gives her a completely different quality of life.

A bacha posh girl can move around more freely, go to school, help her parents by working as a messenger or assistant in shops and small businesses. She can also accompany her sisters, or even her mother, if they want to go to the bazaar.

Otherwise, women and girls are often not allowed to move around outside without a male companion.

Interestingly, some Afghan women firmly believe that dressing a daughter as a boy and presenting her as one in society can help the family finally have a real boy - the long-awaited male heir and future protector.

For this reason, families in which only girls continue to be born may even be secretly advised by Islamic mullahs to temporarily turn one of their daughters into a bacha posh.

Nordberg found families who sincerely believed that this very practice had “helped” them have a boy as their next child.

And so the “chosen” girl-boy has the opportunity to enjoy male rights and privileges until puberty.

But only until puberty makes it impossible to continue the game of disguise.

Then the bacha posh is expected to become a woman again.

Yet, as Jenny Nordberg shows in her book, some girls do not want to return to the status of an oppressed and largely powerless person.

They try to resist their parents’ will and even the physiological changes happening to their bodies, continuing this gender role that gradually becomes far less innocent.

Because sometimes it can permanently affect the child’s social and gender identity.

The book is extremely interesting and keeps you in constant tension, almost like a psychological thriller.

But in essence, it tells a much broader and much older story.

Afghanistan, where for centuries men have tried to control not only land and wealth but also the very continuation of the family line through control over women’s bodies, marriages, sexuality and the birth of sons, still preserves and cultivates an archaic code of honour, power and ownership.

An old formula widespread in Afghan and Pashtun society - zan, zar wa zamin, “women, wealth and land” - captures this logic very concisely.

Within it, a woman appears not as an autonomous individual, but as part of a man’s so-called namus: the honour, reputation, property and power of the family.

And yet, even in such a restrictive and oppressive environment, a person finds ways to get a taste of freedom.

Even if, in order to do so, she has to change her gender - at least in the eyes of society.

The book sits somewhere between literary journalism and narrative nonfiction. Seierstad tells a real family’s story using many of the techniques of fiction: sharply drawn characters, dramatic scenes and an extremely close, almost intimate view of everyday life inside an Afghan household.

The basic story is this.

After the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, Seierstad accepted the hospitality of a bookseller in Kabul and lived with his family for around five months. During that time, she spoke to family members, observed their daily lives and recorded what she considered revealing or important.

The result was an unforgettable portrait of a man who had fought for freedom of expression in Afghanistan while, at the same time, exercising considerable control over the women in his own family.

And yes, it is a fascinating book to read.

Seierstad takes the reader into family dramas and private spaces that an outsider would normally never see. You walk through Kabul’s bazaars, schools, prisons and small shops. You enter cramped rooms where ten people sleep on the floor. You witness traditional engagements and weddings, negotiations over daughters’ marriages, and children being expected to work for the family.

The book opens up Afghanistan at the level of everyday life: family, tradition, hierarchy, duty and survival.

It is also extremely readable. You quickly become emotionally involved in the lives of the people Seierstad describes.

But The Bookseller of Kabul became famous for more than its literary success.

It also provoked outrage from its central character - the head of the family who had once welcomed the Norwegian journalist into his home.

Kabul bookseller Shah Muhammad Rais argued that Seierstad had distorted the facts of his life, misunderstood much of what she had witnessed and failed to appreciate the deeply rooted customs and traditional roles that shape Afghan family life. The legal dispute surrounding the book continued for years and eventually became part of the book’s own story.

Seierstad, for her part, repeatedly defended her work. She maintained that she stood behind what she had written and that she could not simply ignore the private cruelties and injustices she believed she had witnessed.

Rais did not leave the matter there.

He eventually published his own literary response - a slim English-language book, Once Upon a Time There Was a Bookseller in Kabul, in which he presented his version of events.

Naturally, I found that one too and read it.

I have a weakness for literary duels like this.

In his book, Rais is deeply offended by what he sees as an abuse of his hospitality - something he regards as a sacred principle in Afghan society. He argues that Seierstad fundamentally misunderstood Afghan family dynamics: the dense network of obligations, hierarchies and responsibilities in which individual happiness is often expected to give way to the interests of the family.

He writes that Seierstad arrived in Afghanistan with a picture already formed in her mind and simply fitted him and his family into it.

His broader accusation is even more interesting: outsiders come to Afghanistan convinced that they understand what they are seeing.

But they do not.

And I think there is something worth considering in that criticism.

I am always cautious about looking at another society and immediately judging it by rules imported from somewhere else. There is an old temptation to assume that our own cultural framework is universal - and that anything that does not fit inside it must simply be backward or wrong.

That is one reason I did not want to choose an easy side in this literary and cultural dispute.

But I also think there is a point beyond which cultural relativism stops being convincing.

For me, there remains a more universal test: injustice, humiliation and the suppression of another person’s will and dignity.

And after reading many books about the lives of women in Afghanistan - including books written by Afghan women themselves - I find myself giving greater weight to their voices.

Because again and again, across very different books and very different lives, I hear something painfully similar.

And it sounds remarkably close to what the Norwegian journalist described.

Most of the women in this anthology are not internationally famous writers. But perhaps that is exactly what makes the book so important.

Given the position women have traditionally occupied in Afghanistan’s social and cultural life, speaking publicly - let alone publishing your writing - can be far more than unusual. In some circumstances, it can be physically dangerous.

The simple fact that these women chose to put their thoughts into words and make them public is therefore remarkable in itself. Some had to write under pseudonyms. That alone tells you something about the conditions in which these stories came into being.

And it makes me admire and respect their authors all the more.

I do not particularly want to judge each story here by conventional measures of literary craftsmanship. For me, that was not the most important part of reading this book.

What mattered much more was hearing - and trying, however imperfectly, to understand - the voices of people whom social tradition has so often denied even the most basic right to have a voice of their own.

There is so much pain, grief, anxiety and helplessness in these stories that at times I found them difficult to read.

Some feel like a scream. Others like a stifled moan.

And many remain in your mind like sharp fragments long after you have finished reading.

What makes them especially disturbing is the feeling that these stories may not be entirely fictional at all. They often read less like invented narratives and more like reflections of real events, real experiences and very real human lives.

That awareness can make the reading almost physically uncomfortable.

Because behind a few pages of fiction, you begin to imagine a woman whose life may have looked very much like this. A girl who may have experienced something similar. A family in which such suffering was not exceptional, but simply part of everyday life.

Reading these deeply personal stories of people who have been hurt, silenced and deprived of so much was painful for me.

But it was also an important experience.

A book like this makes you realise more clearly how immense human suffering can be - and, perhaps even more frighteningly, how ordinary it can become.

And at the same time, it reminds you how much strength it can take simply to continue living.

To endure pain.

To hold on to your dignity.

To keep some hope alive.

And to believe that even in the darkest circumstances, your voice still matters.

As part of my literary journey through Afghanistan, I came across a fascinating little book almost by accident: I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan.

It is a collection of Pashtun landays - short, two-line poems traditionally sung or recited, especially by women in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan.

I have to admit: I had never heard of this poetic tradition before. Discovering it was one of those unexpected moments that make a reading journey worthwhile.

The book itself is quite small, but remarkably concentrated. A landay is not quite poetry in the form most of us are used to. It is more like a sudden flash of a voice.

Two lines in which someone tries to fit love, shame, desire, pain, anger, loss, war, homeland, humour - and herself.

A traditional landay has only two lines and 22 syllables: nine in the first line and thirteen in the second. In Pashto, it often ends with the sound -ma or -na.

In English translation, that formal structure is extremely difficult to preserve. So what usually survives is not the exact metre, but the blow of the line - its image, rhythm and emotional force.

Landays are especially associated with women’s voices. For Pashtun women, they have long offered a way to say things that may be difficult, dangerous or impossible to say openly: about love, the body, sexuality, forced marriage, war, men, God, homeland, family and their own fate.

And once you realise this, the form begins to feel very different.

On the one hand, there is something deeply painful about it. You start thinking about what it means for a woman if the only space available for her thoughts, grief, humour, joy or desire is a short anonymous verse.

But there is another side to it as well.

Landays also show how fundamental the human need for expression really is. The need to put something into words. To be heard. To leave some trace of yourself behind.

Even when the entire space available for freedom is only two lines.

Here are a few landays from the book that stayed with me:

My body belongs to me; to others its mastery.

It is difficult to imagine a more compressed description of unfreedom: the body is yours, but the right to decide what happens to it belongs to someone else.

Dear homeland, I bring good news:
the infidels flee from your brutal embrace.

Here the voice moves beyond private life to Afghanistan itself - a wounded homeland that is loved even as its embrace becomes almost unbearable.

Your eyes aren’t eyes. They’re bees.
I can find no cure for their sting.

This one sounds like a love poem. But even here, there is a sting. Tenderness that hurts.

For me, I Am the Beggar of the World is not simply a book about an unfamiliar culture or an unusual poetic form.

It is a book about how difficult it is to completely silence a human voice.

You can push it out of public life. You can forbid it. You can force it to whisper. You can take away the speaker’s name.

But then the voice finds another form.

Shorter.

Sharper.

Anonymous.

And sometimes dangerous.