The Afghan tapestry

CPW Gammell’s moving commentary on Herat and its cultural wealth (“Upfront,” October) put me in mind of a plane journey I took in 2009: Kabul-Kandahar-Herat-Bamiyan. We flew over Helmand, and between Herat and Bamiyan we tracked the spine of the Hindu Kush: I looked hard for the Minaret of Jam, but didn’t spot it.

One thing that flight brought home to me was the size of Afghanistan, and its ethnic and cultural complexity. In Kandahar Air Base everyone was speaking Pashtu, while in Herat and Bamiyan it was Persian. Bamiyan, furthermore, is the spiritual home of a long-persecuted ethnic minority, the Hazaras, who have used the peace and freedoms of the last two decades to assert their civil rights, gaining a prominence especially in education and the media.

The return of the Taliban to power amounts, among many other things, to the reestablishment of Pashtun dominance in a country that can only hope to function if its diversity is acknowledged—if Herat and Bamiyan feel as represented as Kandahar. I thus regret to say that I share Gammell’s pessimism regarding Afghanistan’s future.

Llewelyn Morgan, classicist