Wir waren glücklich hier

The gripping Afghanistan reportage by the award-winning war reporter - with 16-page picture section

"Beyond their fighting ethos and obsession with control, the Taliban have no concrete ideas on how to make a state structure work that was already dysfunctional before, despite billions from abroad. Afghanistan is a kind of North Korea with a beard and a claim to politeness, but without a plan." Christoph ReuterFor twenty years, SPIEGEL correspondent Christoph Reuter has been reporting from Afghanistan, and hardly any other reporter knows the country as well as he does. Reuter was in Kabul when the Taliban took power in August 2021 and stayed in the country when Western aid workers, soldiers and journalists left in a hurry. More than that, he decided to travel to regions where foreigners had sometimes not been allowed to set foot for decades, and stayed for months. The stories Reuter brought back with him on his road trip through the country shaken by the change of power tell of dramatic changes and hopeless standstill, of overtaxed Taliban and self-confident provincial governors, of farmers ploughing dust and women fearing for their safety. In this impressively narrated, very personal book, Christoph Reuter delves deep into Afghanistan's past and present and asks what future the country can have under its new rulers.
Features: colour illustrations / 16 pages of colour pictures / endpaper map.