Afghanistan Experiences Books Boom
KABUL, Afghanistan — Nuts come in from Iran and fresh fruit from Pakistan, although Afghanistan grows both in abundance. Years of bloated foreign aid budgets have produced high salaries, destroying local industries. About the only thing the country does not import is opium. And books. At a time when book publishers in many countries are struggling, book publishers in Afghanistan have been flourishing, despite the country’s low literacy rates. Only two out of five Afghan adults can read. But those who can seem to be doing it with remarkable regularity, both in spite and because of the cyclonic violence.
“I think in any environment, but perhaps especially places at war, book reading creates a pause from day-to- day life and isolates a reader from their surroundings while they’re buried in a book,” said Jamshid Hashimi, who is a co-founder of the Book Club of Afghanistan. “This is powerful anywhere, but in a place like Afghanistan, it can be a means of emotional survival.”
Book publishers have capitalized on this without foreign aid or foreign advisers. “It’s an Afghan- owned and Afghan-led process,” said Safiullah Nasiri, one of the four brothers who run Aksos, a book publisher that also has bookstores in Kabul, the capital. With a population of over five million, Kabul now has 22 book publishers, many with their own presses, or using the presses at local printing hous- es. Scores of others are scattered throughout the 34 Afghan provinces.
In the past year, many publishers have opened up distribution centers and underwritten either their own bookstores or provided consignments to independent bookstores. Kabul has 60 registered bookstores, according to the government.
During the Taliban reign from 1996 to 2001, only two publishers survived: the state publisher and a private company, Aazem Publishing. By the end of 2001, the only independent bookstore was in the Intercontinental Hotel, the site of a deadly attack in January.
In the years after the American- led invasion, cheaply printed and brazenly pirated books from Pakistan became dominant. Afghanistan’s new government faced the task of rebuilding the educational system, which had been savaged by decades of civil war, followed by a Taliban regime that closed schools and destroyed foreign- language books. Millions of new textbooks were printed, initially in Pakistan. But as relations with Pakistan soured, the government turned to Afghan publishers.
Because millions of textbooks had to be printed in a short time, Aazem and other companies invested in their own presses, which went largely idle once the school publishing season was over. Then the publishers began translating Western books from English into Dari and Pashto, the country’s two main languages.
“There was such a curiosity and thirst to know about the world and how people think about Afghanistan,” said Davood Moradian, director general of the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies, a research organization whose ancient campus, the Fort of Nine Towers, is a venue for book parties. “The book industry is a growing phenomenon to try to satisfy that thirst.”
Books like “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C. I. A., Afghanistan and Bin Laden From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001,” by Steve Coll, and “The Envoy: From Kabul to the White House, My Journey Through a Turbulent World,” by Zalmay Khalilzad, hit the best-seller lists here.
“The Envoy” was the 2016 memoir by Mr. Khalilzad, the Afghan-American who was United States ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq.
In 2017-18, Aazem’s goal is to print three new titles a day, 1,100 a year. And Aksos has started selling books through its Facebook page, then delivering them the same day in Kabul.
Piracy remains endemic, although government officials have started enforcing copyright laws, said Sayed Fazel Hossain Sancharaki, who is in charge of publishing at the Ministry of Information and Culture. One photocopy shop was closed recently for running off copies of printed books.
The most recent publishing sensation in Kabul also became its biggest piracy scandal: “Afghan Politics: The Inside Story,” a two-volume set by Rangin Dadfar Spanta, former President Hamid Karzai’s national security adviser. Aazem sold thousands of copies in its first few weeks in print.
“Afghan Politics” was out for about a month, however, when an electronic file of the book began circulating on Afghan social media accounts. Furious, the publishers at Aazem closed their doors in protest, hanging black curtains in all the windows and idling the presses until the government promised to pursue book pirates. They’re still waiting.