Before Taliban

1 Introduction
Into Forbidden Afghanistan
Lowell Thomas needed another adventure. At age twenty-eight, the ambitious
showman from Cripple Creek, Colorado, had become an international
celebrity through his immensely popular lecture tour “With Allenby in
Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia.” Charming appreciative audiences and
collecting handsome receipts, Thomas had spent most of 1920 and 1921
traveling the length and breadth of the British Commonwealth—from
Scotland to India to Malaya to Australia—and his show had been seen by
several million people. Two years into it, however, he was feeling the need
for an encore, and Edmund Allenby and T. E. Lawrence were a hard act to
follow—Lawrence in particular. Before Thomas had transformed him into a
household name, Lawrence had been a somewhat reclusive figure whose
story was well known to only a small number of military and diplomatic
insiders. Thomas had changed that picture with his richly embroidered tales
of the handsome archaeologist, garbed in the robes of “a prince of Mecca,”
who blew up Turkish trains and inspired a fierce devotion among the
Bedouin tribesmen who followed him. 1
In casting about for his encore, Thomas had originally traveled to India
but quickly realized that while yogis and snake charmers could generate
some interest in their exoticism, they were unlikely to produce the kind of
palpable excitement his earlier show had achieved. For Thomas’s tastes,
India was altogether too tame; however, adventure beckoned just over the
border to the west in “forbidden Afghanistan.” Remote (“In fact, their
country is still as isolated as Japan was at the time when . . . Commodore
Perry went over there and convinced the people of the Land of the Rising
Sun that they ought to be more neighborly”), rugged (“If there is a wilder
country anywhere on earth today than Afghanistan, I know not of it”), and
inhabited by tribesmen reputed to be as ferocious as any on earth (“So deep
1