Born into poverty in Kabul, Maiwand Banayee has written a memoir of Taliban radicalisation and his subsequent escape to Europe (including time spent in direct provision in Ireland) that sheds light on the immensity of the chaos caused in his nation by western interference. As Banayee’s father states, “When elephants fight, frogs get trampled”.
Banayee is brought up in a patriarchal Pashtun community where the pride of ancestors comes before all. His insights into the tribal divisions of 1980s and 1990s Afghanistan are enlightening, with neighbours from Hazara and Pashtun backgrounds sheltering each other even as their leaders call for mutual slaughter.
After fleeing a war-torn Kabul, belonging comes in the form of Taliban teachers who insist that life is only an illusion, and fulfilment comes in the next world. Denied access to formal education as a refugee in Pakistan, Banayee must study at local madrasas that use textbooks originally developed by the University of Nebraska, initially intended to train Afghanis to resist the Soviets: “Through this curriculum, children as young as four or five learnt jihad along with their alphabet: A is for Ahmad, J is for jihad, G is for gun [ ...] Instead of teaching us to live, they were teaching us to die.”
Over the course of the memoir, the complex decisions that families must make in order to survive, and the dehumanising effects of warfare, are illuminated for the reader. Every page of this book offers new insights, while also feeling distressingly familiar to anyone following the genocide in Gaza.
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While searching through Russian and Mujahideen shrapnel for metal to sell to Pakistani merchants, Banayee finds what looks like a toy, only for his friend to pull him away from the disguised bomb just in time: “How could scientists in white coats, enlightened by science and reason, spend time inside a lab to invent a bomb that could deceive and kill a child? When did children become part of their war?”
The answer that the book offers, convincingly, is that children are always a pawn of war, but that with empathy and support even the most radicalised can turn towards peace. But this can only happen if we can find the small shred of generosity it takes to offer that support.
