True telling of would-be king

It would not be fair to say that Ben Macintyre has written an opportunistic book about Afghanistan. Yet his biography of the Pennsylvania Quaker, Josiah Harlan, whose exploits in that country during the early 1800s were said to have inspired Rudyard Kipling’s story “A Man Who Would Be King” and the 1975 John Huston film of the same title can be seen that way.

Kabul. Kandahar. Peshawar. The very names of the outposts that shape Harlan’s 20-year escapade signify war and danger to those of us who know little more about Afghanistan than that it is a country possessed of a treacherous terrain, creased with mountains and caves that may be hiding terrorists still — including Osama bin Laden, the grandaddy of them all.

So a book that offers readers the opportunity to penetrate the darkest places and mystery of Afghanistan, with an engaging story besides, could not be more welcome — or timely.

Mr. Macintyre, a columnist at the Times of London, went to Afghanistan in 1989 “as an aspiring war correspondent” in order to cover the last stages of war between the Soviet army and the Mujahideen guerillas. As he relates in a prologue to his book, “The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan,” at that time, he spent much of the day with other journalists lounging around the pool, “relaxed by swimming, planning and Kipling.”

Later visits were less bucolic. After the defeat of the Soviet army by the Mujahideen, “Afghanistan fractured into civil war, the country was left to slide toward fundamentalism, eventually producing Islam’s most mutant form, the extremist, terrorist Taliban.”

However, during the pyrotechnics of Tora-Bora, Mr. Macintrye, safely back home in England, spent his days combing the stacks of the British Library. There, the “impossibly romantic and strangely familiar” story of Josiah Harlan caught his eye.

The would-be war correspondent yielded to the natural storyteller and he began his research, roving from the Punjab to Harlan’s birthplace in Pennsylvania, to San Francisco, where the adventurer died, and back to Kabul. Gradually Harlan’s life began to take shape.

In one of those lucky breaks that descend on writers ready for such luck, Mr. Macintyre uncovered Harlan’s “lost voice” in a museum in Chester, Pa. There the biographer found “a tattered manuscript handwritten in curling copperplate, most of Harlan’s missing autobiography, unnoticed and unread since his death, along with letters, poems and drawings.”

Since Harlan’s contemporaries were either indifferent or downright hostile to his enterprise, the journal entries became Mr. Macintyre’s most valuable resource and, in the end, it is Harlan’s own words strung together that provide the scaffolding for this book.

Readers familiar with Mr. Macintyre’s work will recognize the quiet and exacting writing, the intense sympathy with time and place. Though the most vivid descriptions found in the book belong to Harlan, it is Mr. Macintyre’s pacing and shaping of the story that make it engaging and suspenseful.

Along the way and throughout the narrative, Mr. Macintyre pads that story with smart observations and entertaining facts, such as this one about Kabul, a city as crucial to Harlan’s improbable ascent as it is to Afghanistan’s turbulent history:

“Kabul was named, it is said, after the founders of the Afghan race, Cakool and Habul, the sons of Noah. Beginning the Afghan traditions of sibling rivalry, Cakul and Habul could not agree on a name for the city, and so, like a pantomime horse, one took the back, the other the front: Ca-bul.”

There are tugs and duels and signs of unrest on virtually every page of this fine book, and properly, since this is a biography, Mr. Macintyre manages to portray those same forces at work within the man himself — a simple man who started out on a farm in Chester but by 1838 was seated on an elephant, surrounded by native troops, raising the American flag on the summit of the Hindu Kush in the wilds of Afghanistan. Along the way, he was a soldier, a spy, an intrepid traveler, a doctor and writer. Though he left his native Pennsylvania to mend a broken heart, Mr. Macintyre demonstrates that something more than failed romance led Harlan to the ends of the earth and facilitated his survival there.

Harlan’s struggles with the natives, who accepted his posturings — modeled as they were on his idol Alexander the Great — and his less successful dealings with the British who booted him out of Afghanistan, show him to have been a creative, resourceful, stubborn, passionate man.

That he found himself in the middle of Afghanistan’s Great Game with all its intrigues and shifting alliances makes the story even more remarkable, though for this reader, keeping up with Ranjit Singh, Dost Muhammad Khan and Shah Shujah al-Moolk — good, not good, good again, trustworthy, not trustworthy, maybe trustworthy, watch your back — was often more than a little difficult.

And it was easy to get sidetracked by interesting digressions, like this one on camels:

“The camel is a great eater of fresh forage, with which he swells himself out thoroughly. He browses throughout the day, resting during the noon heat, and ruminates immediately after he ceases to feed … When his food is digested he has a habit of gritting his teeth. Nothing can be more vociferous than the camel in his intercourse with man; he never allows his person to be touched either to load or unload without roaring louder and not unlike a tiger.” And that’s only one-third of the Harlan passage.

Others, like the exchange Harlan recorded in his journal after performing cataract surgery on an aging Afghan woman, underscore the story’s human dimension and give a dynamic glimpse at Harlan in one of his many dubious occupations. From Harlan’s journal:

“An elderly woman came to me who had been totally blind many years. When I alluded to the precarious nature of remedial measures and told her the painful nature of the means by which she could hope for relief, she promptly replied, with a firmness of invincible decision: ’Why should I fear? Am I not an Avghaun?’”

Harlan’s escapades did not end with his time in Afghanistan — he went on to pursue a number of ill-conceived maneuvers during the Civil War and outlandish schemes, including the introduction of the camel as a means of travel in the American West.

There is no doubt that Mr. Macintyre uses Harlan’s story in the end to indulge in some anti-imperialist cautioning. He notes that “Harlan had been right: The Afghans fought tirelessly among themselves, but when a foreign invader threatened, they united to drive him out. Even Alexander’s hold had been fleeting.”

Movie stars Michael Caine and Sean Connery may have been easier to care about and luxuriate with, but Mr. Macintyre — agree with him or not — gives Harlan’s story its political edge and context.