Christopher Kremmer: The Carpet Wars

By PAT BASKETT

If ever a book was timely, it's this one. Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir and northern Pakistan are places where, even before colonial interference by Britain, and more recently the United States, the ethnic mix made war endemic - violent places with an exotic allure for Western viewers.

Sydney-based Kremmer is the archetypal intrepid journalist. But he writes with a novelist's flair for imagery and, I suspect, an irresistible urge to enliven his characters so that they jump off the page. There's Habib, the roguish Pashtun carpet seller in Islamabad; Rasoul, forlorn Hazaras student of English literature who emigrates to Australia, then returns to Afghanistan to marry; Zhala, one of the few women in the book, a smart, coquettish 21-year-old student who wrote to Kremmer: "The trouble of Afghan people, especially women, is too much that I can't write it down ... We are the miserable sex."

And yet, writes Kremmer, Islam is not a misogynistic religion, although its more fundamentalist manifestations are certainly among the things for which we Westerners would hold it to account.

Kremmer doesn't analyse or pretend to explain the tenets of Islam. But the histories of the places he visits are helpful in understanding current conflicts, particularly the United States' contentious 1998 bombing of Iraq; the mess that is Pakistan ("a nuclear bomb in one hand and a begging bowl in the other"); and the iniquitous Durand Line, which separates Afghanistan from Pakistani Pashtuns.

People who, before September 11, would have remained relatively unknown in the West - Osama bin Laden, Mohammed Omar, General Abdul Rashid Dostum - are part of Afghanistan's terrible history.

That country, Kremmer says, "has always been a curious mixture of medieval custom and bold stabs at reform".

In the early 1990s 40 per cent of students at Balkh University were women, yet in 1998 tens of thousands of spectators would crowd into Kabul's National Stadium on most Fridays to watch public executions. Kremmer devotes a page or two to the unloveliest aspects of Sharia law.

And the carpets? They're a fairly tenuous thread linking the more important elements of the book. But if you collect them, as Kremmer does, you'll be interested in the histories and descriptions of techniques and designs. And he has some salutary information about how these beautiful, hand-made objects are aged, which shortens their life but increases their price.

Then there are the child-weavers, some 3.6 million of them according to a joint Pakistan Government and International Labour Organisation survey of 1998.

We meet Bashir, aged 12, a recent arrival from Istalif, a village north of Kabul, and the only member of his family with a job. His prospects are deformed fingers, damaged eyesight and a possibly stunted intellect.

So good is The Carpet Wars that I predict it will outlive its timeliness and join the ranks of those other two classics, Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, and V.S. Naipaul's Among the Believers.* Pat Baskett is an Auckland journalist.

HarperCollins
$39.95