Friday, October 26, 2012

Opium Nation: Child Brides, Drug Lords, and One Woman's Journey Through Afghanistan

Opium Nation is a portrait of Afghanistan today - corrupt, impoverished, clannish, and teeming with life. The author, Fariba Nawa, an Afghan by birth whose family fled during the Soviet war in the early 1980s, returns to her beloved homeland post-2001 and finds a war-ravaged land and people. She also finds opium, lots and lots of opium, in nearly every province and in every form. As I read the last pages, I couldn't help but feel a sense of disappointment that what had begun as a promising look at the roots of the drug trade and the implications of the drug trade on foreign policy around the world had devolved into so many incohesive stories. By the end, Opium Nation seemed to be experiencing a real identity crisis: part serious work of research with real potential and real life, part graduate thesis that read more like it was made for an academic journal than a global audience, part autobiography, and part a defense of Afghanistan and its people. For example, Ms. Nawa's quest to find the girl Darya became the story because of her personal importance to the author, when from the perspective of the drug trade and economy she was no more than a blip on the radar screen.

Every few pages Ms. Nawa would drop tantalizing pieces of information about the global drug trade, for example Thailand's decades of work to reduce the quantity of drugs produced in that country, but then the trail went cold. The book - and therefore its readers - might have been better served had Ms. Nawa focused on a single narrative (for example, the underpinnings of the drug trade and opium/heroin market) and then examined that narrative from so many viewpoints - traveling to Thailand and speaking with officials there, traveling to the final consumer countries and examining demand drivers, treatments, even distribution networks, comparing Afghan opium, smuggling, and distribution networks to those of South American countries. I was frustrated because the topic had great potential and yet too often the real story was interrupted by a familial anecdote or some other sentimentally important story that served no larger purpose than for the author to weave her own history into this book.

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