'The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan,' by Gregory Feifer

"In early January 1988, 39 Soviet paratroopers were positioned on a cliff overlooking the Gardez-Khost road in southeastern Afghanistan. Their job was to protect the soldiers below, who were trying to open up the dangerous, heavily mined route. All around waited Islamic fundamentalists who had spent the last eight years fighting the Red Army and the government it had installed in Kabul just after Christmas 1979.



Soon, groups of black-clad mujahedeen, probably from Pakistan, were crawling toward the Soviets from all directions, machine guns blazing. The Soviets fought back valiantly. A helicopter soared in daringly through heavy fog to deliver ammunition. One soldier died while trying to wire together weak spare batteries to make a radio work.

For all their courage, though, the Soviets were adrift. They were outsiders, fighting outsiders, in a third country — and they didn’t really understand why. The Pakistanis believed they were on a mission from God and screamed “Allah Akbar!” as they headed toward battle. The Soviets could think to respond only with the names of their faraway hometowns. “For Borisov!” one hollered as he threw a grenade.

The scene sums up much of the folly of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The Russians held off the attackers and got the road open. But the paratroopers soon left their position, the tanks below moved on, and the mujahedeen quickly retook it all. The fight was won, but the battle was lost — and of course the war would be too. Three and a half years later, Borisov became part of a newly independent Belarus.

Gregory Feifer relates these events in his fascinating new book, “The Great Gamble.” It’s a highly readable history of the conflict, which began with so haphazard a decision to intervene that Feifer gives credence to the assertion of one general staff officer that “no one ever actually ordered the invasion of Afghanistan.” It just happened through inertia and confusion under the sclerotic Soviet leadership of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

The author, NPR’s Moscow correspondent, tells the story mainly through the eyes of Soviet veterans and spies. The results are vivid and original — even though there are limitations to basing so much of the book on individual, self-serving recollections. For example, Feifer describes in detail how the K.G.B. hustled four Afghan ministers out of the country in ammunition boxes. It’s a great story, but Feifer appears to rely on one K.G.B. intelligence operator for most of the dialogue and drama. And two pages after it ends, Feifer reveals that one of the allegedly smuggled ministers denies the whole thing.

The book’s structure and style mean that Feifer adds little specifically to the question that will draw many readers: What can the United States learn for its own wars today? Feifer flicks at the topic, but the grim answers he offers have already been absorbed: don’t shoot up wedding parties, never underestimate fanatics who know the terrain, and remember that all politics in Afghanistan are messy. Remember, too: Fighting these guys is hard. According to Feifer, the mujahedeen were canny enough to smuggle heroin into Soviet barracks to get their adversaries hooked.

Even if Feifer fails to offer what his publisher calls “striking lessons for the 21st century,” he succeeds in his main goal: presenting a new side of a long, sorry war that would leave an estimated 1.3 million Afghans dead and the Taliban surging through the ravaged countryside toward Kabul. It’s “a tragic human story,” Feifer writes — and one that he recounts with skill."




THE GREAT GAMBLE
The Soviet War in Afghanistan
By Gregory Feifer
Illustrated. 326 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99

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'Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East,' by Rashid Khalidi

"Had the White House aides who scripted Barack Obama’s remarks to Al Arabiya television in January consulted Rashid Khalidi’s latest work beforehand, the president might not have so blithely vowed to restore the “respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.” In “Sowing Crisis,” Khalidi, who holds the Edward Said chair of Arab studies at Columbia and is a major pro-Palestinian voice in American scholarship, argues that Washington’s drive for hegemonic control over the geostrategic and oil-rich axis of the Middle East stretches back three-quarters of a century, and has continued unabated to this day.



Khalidi’s central argument is that the Bush administration’s interventionist posture toward the Middle East is no mere post-9/11 aberration, but represents an especially bellicose expression of a longstanding campaign. Today’s enemy is terrorism; yesterday’s was Communism. And just as the threat of Communism was wildly exaggerated 50 years ago, so, these days, “the global war on terror is in practice an American war in the Middle East against a largely imaginary set of enemies.” ­Khalidi’s point is not that American policy toward the Middle East has been consistently hys­terical; rather, he says, it has been consis­tently cynical, exploiting an apocalyptic sense of threat in order to achieve the kind of dominance to which great powers, what­ever their rhetoric, aspire.

Most histories of America’s role in the Middle East, like Michael B. Oren’s Power, Faith and Fantasy,” focus on the naïveté and misguided idealism of a nation much given to moral crusades. Khalidi ­looks to interests rather than principles. His ­story of America’s active role in the Middle East begins in 1933, when the consortium known as Aramco signed an exclusive oil deal with Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia. Khalidi reminds us of familiar if ­squalid acts of American intervention, like the role of the C.I.A. in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran, who had championed the nationalization of his ­country’s oil industry. Khalidi also describes lesser-known ones, including the delivery of “briefcases full of cash” to Lebanon’s pro-Western president Camille Chamoun in order to help Chamoun rig the 1957 parliamentary election.

This brute meddling, Khalidi argues, not only kept the pot of civil conflict ­boiling in many already weak states, but also “profoundly undermined whatever limited pos­sibility there might have been of estab­lishing any kind of democratic govern­ance in a range of Middle Eastern countries.” That carefully hedged sentence shows that Khalidi is no conspiracy theorist, and recognizes the complicity of Arab regimes in their own predicament. And the Soviets occasionally play the ­heavy as well, ­though Khalidi sees the cold war as a very un­equal battle between a world-girdling United ­States and a defensive and fearful Russia.

“Sowing Crisis” vividly reminds us what it is like to be on the receiving end of American power. But it often reads like a polemic rather than a work of history. Khalidi’s sense of American motives and strategy seems flattened by his own preconceptions. God knows the United States has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East. But is it true, as Khalidi al­leges, that President Truman favored Israel, and ultimately agreed to recognize the country, because he had more pro-­Jewish than Arab voters to answer to? Only by check­ing a footnote does the reader learn that this comment, which Khalidi quotes twice, comes from an American diplomat who may not have been in the room when Truman is said to have uttered it.

But the most pressing question “Sowing Crisis raises is not whether American behavior in the Middle East has been consistently self-serving and expansionist. It is whether Arab failure is, at bottom, a consequence of that behavior. Another way of putting this is: can the problems of the region be reversed by a fundamental change in American policy?

If American policy were chiefly responsible for the Middle East’s difficulties, then the Arab world would scarcely be the only victim. It is hard to argue that the proxy battles of the cold war did more damage to the Middle East than to, say, Southeast Asia. Yet Vietnam is a stable auto­cracy experiencing rapid growth, and Thailand is a shaky and semiprosperous democracy. American policy makers were far more cavalier about the sovereignty of Latin American states than of Arab ones, yet Latin America is a largely democratic zone with both deeply impoverished and middle-range countries.

Why has the Arab world remained ­largely on the sidelines of globalization? There are, of course, many explanations offered. One of the most striking comes from the United Nations’ Arab Human Development Report, written by a group of Arab scholars in 2002. They concluded that Arab nations suffer from a “freedom deficit,” from pervasive gender inequality, from a weak commitment to education and from the widespread denial of human rights. They might have added that the experiences of colonialism and of the cold war have left much of the Arab world with the deeply ingrained habit of blaming its problems on outsiders.

Since Khalidi inadvertently caused Barack Obama some grief during the presidential campaign when it came out that Obama attended a party in 2003 for a man some Republicans called a “ter­rorist professor,”the president is un­likely to dis­play this book in public. But he ­should read it, not so much to chasten his sunny view of our recent past in the Middle East as to be reminded how very hard it is to make progress in a region where memories are long, and practically everything is blamed on the United States (or Israel). "




SOWING CRISIS
The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East
By Rashid Khalidi
308 pp. Beacon Press. $25.95

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'We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work,' by Jimmy Carter

“You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste,” the new White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has said, exuberantly defining the economic meltdown as an opportunity for grand new domestic policies. The war in Gaza raises the question of whether Emanuel’s boss will apply the same approach overseas. Will President Obama regard the latest Israeli-Palestinian bleeding as a symptom of an untreatable chronic disease, or as an acute crisis that proves the need for a dramatic American diplomatic initiative?

Jimmy Carter’s advice on answering that question is clear from his title, even if he dashed this book off before the most recent war. In fact, “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land” is really a short op-ed article disguised as a book. The argument, which might easily have been put in 900 words, is that Obama should follow ­Carter’s own example, defy political calculations and throw himself into Arab-Israeli peacemaking.

The goal, Carter says, should be reaching a two-state solution, with the borders between Israel and the Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 armistice lines, along with minor territorial exchanges. Obama should get to work at the start of his term, put his own peace proposals on the table and persuade both parties to accept them. Carter implies that Obama must separate support for Israel from support for Israel’s policies. In short, he should do what Carter says he did to bring peace between Israel and Egypt.

Achieving peace, Carter argues, also requires reversing two elements of George W. Bush’s policy: his coldness toward negotiations between Israel and Syria, and his effort to isolate Hamas. Again, he presents himself as a model for Obama, since he met with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and with Hamas leaders during his Middle East tour last year. Carter describes, albeit altogether too briefly, Hamas’s terror campaign against Israeli civilians. (In general, he has an easier time talking about Israeli obstacles to peace than Palestinian ones.) But without Hamas’s involvement, he argues, there will be no agreement. And with no agreement in sight, even moderate Palestinians are beginning to consider the one-state alternative: demanding full political rights in Israel, which would lose its Jewish majority and become a binational state.

Carter’s counsel lacks a couple of critical elements. Nonetheless, it has much to recommend it. The Gaza crisis is a reminder, as if another were needed, that ignoring this conflict is equivalent to waiting for it to explode again, with shock waves felt across the entire region. While a peace initiative may look risky, it might actually be the most prudent course the new administration could pursue.

Unfortunately, Carter’s book reads as if it had first been spoken into a recorder for a couple of weeks, with the author working mainly from memory and his diary. Much of “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land” is a listing of events, usually meetings held by Carter with important people. It’s strange that a former president of the United States feels such a need to name-drop.

A beginning student of the Middle East should not learn diplomatic history from this text. In Carter’s telling, the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem at his prodding. More objective accounts portray Sadat as making an end run around Carter’s stubborn intent to reconvene the Geneva peace conference.

Yet it was Carter who convinced Sadat that he would have to recognize Israel to get the Sinai back. And at Camp David in 1978, Carter succeeded in reaching the goal that eluded Bill Clinton at Camp David 22 years later — cajoling an Israeli and an Arab leader to make peace. This required deep American involvement, driven by the president. The curious thing about Carter’s history is that he can be wrong on the details and right about the conclusions.

The agreement with Egypt arguably improved Israel’s security as much as any other single event in its history. Yet a portion of American Jewry has never forgiven Carter for his success. This hints at a key lacuna in Carter’s agenda: though he got into the peacemaking business as a politician, he gives too little attention to the need for building political support for a diplomatic initiative — among voters at home as much as among Israelis and ­Palestinians.

Indirectly, Carter’s title also hints at a second lacuna. Looking for a neutral name for the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, he chooses “Holy Land,” a phrase from Christian tradition. Carter’s perspective is explicitly religious. Though that can irritate secular observers, it has served him well. His faith helped him build personal connections both to Sadat and to the Israeli ­leader Menachem Begin, despite Begin’s intransigence. Yet when he finally presents his outline of a peace agreement here, he makes no new, creative proposal for the future of the holy place claimed by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as Haram al-Sharif. Given Carter’s sensitivity to religious issues, this is surprising and disappointing.

Then again, an op-ed article can’t answer every question, even an article stretched as long as this one. Not accidentally, the publication date for “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land” was Jan. 20. Its most important intended reader should take seriously Carter’s advice to pursue peace, while applying his own considerably greater skills to building a constituency for that effort."

WE CAN HAVE PEACE IN THE HOLY LAND

A Plan That Will Work

By Jimmy Carter

Illustrated. 228 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27

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'A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East - From the Cold War to the War on Terror,' by Patrick Tyler

"Viewed through realpolitik’s disinterested prism, the central place that the protection of Israeli interests occupies in American foreign policy priorities seems counterproductive, even a liability. Smaller than New Hampshire, with fewer inhabitants than New Jersey, ringed by mostly hostile neighbors, fighting repeated wars like the latest bloody conflagration in Gaza, entangled in an apparently unsolvable territorial dispute, Israel consumes vast amounts of manpower, expertise, and diplomatic and intelligence resources, if not whole presidential careers, as Patrick Tyler demonstrates in “A World of Trouble,” an authoritative, richly detailed account of American policy in the Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio warps the United States’ relations with the Arab (and wider Muslim) world, Arab leaders faithfully tell every new occupant of the White House. Midwife a meaningful Palestinian state, they claim, and all would be sweetness and light from Rabat to Riyadh.

If only the Middle East, as so many American presidents chronicled here seem to believe, were that simple; indeed, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a most useful alibi for the region’s creaking dynasties and dictators, diverting domestic attention from their own sclerotic economies and dismal human rights rec­ords. A democratic Palestine, plugged into the global economy, is the last thing they want, for fear their restive populations will demand the same.

George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, also blamed the Jews for many of his troubles, if the extraordinary scene Tyler describes in the book’s prologue is to be believed. He recounts how in 2004 a furious Tenet, dressed in his underwear, drank half a bottle of Scotch, supplied by Prince Bandar bin Sultan at his palace in Saudi Arabia, in a few minutes, while raging at the Bush administration’s duplicity. “They’re setting me up,” he said, but “I am not going to take the hit.” The hit that needed to be taken was for the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, over which the United States had gone to war. The White House, Tyler writes, expected Tenet “to fall on his sword to protect the president.” ­Tenet raged against the “bastards” in the administration and mocked the neoconservatives who supported Israel’s right-wingers as “the Jews.” He then jumped into the swimming pool and did impressions of Yasir Arafat and Omar Suleiman, the chief of Egyptian intelligence. (Tyler’s report is based on the recollections of three witnesses, but Tenet denies making the comments.)

“A World of Trouble” covers 10 American presidencies, from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s to George W. Bush’s. An experienced foreign correspondent who has reported from across the Middle East for The New York Times and The Washington Post, Tyler draws on decades’ worth of notebooks, numerous interviews and declassified documents. The Israeli-­Palestinian conflict runs like a thread through the narrative, but Tyler also ranges much wider, to Suez, the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq conflict and both Iraq wars. He writes vividly, allowing the reader access to White House meetings, huddles in the corridors of power, seats at international summits.

There are finely drawn pen portraits of the key players. Few of the presidents impress: Jimmy Carter dithers, Ronald Reagan and his advisers are clueless, Bill Clinton is distracted by the Lewinsky scandal. The local leaders seem more serious: Menachem Begin, who equated Arafat with Hitler; Yitzhak Rabin, who made peace with Arafat; and Benjamin Netanyahu, who — along with Hamas suicide bombers — helped destroy any chance of a peace agreement. Here too are crucial Arab figures: the party-loving Prince Bandar, confidant of numerous presidents; the brave but doomed Anwar Sadat; King Hussein of Jordan; and Saddam Hussein, the onetime ally against whom America eventually went to war.

It may not be a surprise to learn that the White House — like every government in history — is always riven by factions, duplicitous advisers pushing their own agendas and secret cabals plotting in the washrooms. But it still makes for delicious reading to discover, for instance, the ­power of Mathilde Krim, a fiercely pro-Israel Swiss Calvinist who was a former member of Begin’s right-wing underground, the Irgun. Krim, along with her husband, Arthur, had the ear of Lyndon B. Johnson, apparently more so than did Dean Rusk, his secretary of state, and Robert McNamara, his defense secretary. On Memorial Day in 1967, while Israel and Arab countries were preparing for imminent war, President Johnson was “cavorting” at his Texas ranch with the Krims and other friends.

Tyler is especially good on America’s relationship with Iran. He dissects President Carter’s tortured pusillanimity as he tried to reconcile his Christian beliefs with the need to prop up an American ally, the shah, whose regime was kept in place by secret-police torturers. Not surprisingly, the mix soon turned rancid, especially when the United States backed Iraq in its war against Iran. In March 1988, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja. Tyler, along with other foreign correspondents, was flown there by the Iranians on a risky mission inside Iraqi airspace. As many as 5,000 civilians perished. Tyler remains haunted by what he saw that day: “the bodies of a dozen or so small girls who had been playing the day of the attack. They lay like dolls splayed randomly on the gravel bed, eyes open in some cases, staring skyward. The faces seemed to beckon, as if impatient for the living to gather them in.” At the time, Hussein was an American ally. The Defense Intelligence Agency sent two officers to Baghdad with comprehensive plans for an air war, showing Iranian air defenses and fortifications. The agency knew Iraq was using chemical weapons, but still the intelligence flowed. When Congress protested the Halabja gassing, Republican leaders, including Dick Cheney, blocked the calls for sanctions against Hussein.

Despite its 600-odd pages, “A World of Trouble” feels unbalanced in places. The chapter on George W. Bush’s presidency, which covers the rising threat of Al Qaeda, 9/11, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, is compressed into 30 pages, while the American entanglement in Lebanon gets almost double that number. When the subject is not the Middle East, Tyler is less confident and makes several errors. He writes that during the Yugoslav wars, President George H. W. Bush was unwilling to commit American troops to Bosnia partly because he feared humiliating “Gorbachev” in “the heart of what the Soviets saw as their sphere of influence.” In fact, when the Bosnian war started, ­Boris Yeltsin was the president of Russia and the Soviet Union no longer existed. Tyler also writes that “a quarter-million” were slaughtered in Rwanda; the usually accepted figure is 800,000.

“A World of Trouble” is an important account of the White House’s interaction with a volatile and strategically vital region, but it stops too suddenly in 2008. Its episodic structure would have benefited from a thoughtful concluding chapter on the obsessive, self-contradictory relationship between the United States and its friends-turned-enemies-turned-potential-friends-again across the Middle East. Tyler briefly touches on this in the prologue, arguing that the United States’ Middle East policy has been consistently inconsistent, “as if the hallmark of American diplomacy were discontinuity,” but policy zigzags are common to all newly elected democratic governments. Perhaps the armed, bearded Revolutionary Guard who stopped Tyler at a Tehran roadblock in 1989 said it best: “Excuse me, sir, but if you were going to select the best American university to study electrical engineering, which one would you choose?”

A WORLD OF TROUBLE

The White House and the Middle East — From the Cold War to the War on Terror

By Patrick Tyler

Illustrated. 628 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30

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'Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East,' by Martin Indyk

"With “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East,” Martin Indykhas written a timely and valuable history of his years as one of the Clinton administration’s top Middle East specialists. Indyk managed regional policy in the White House and State Department and twice served as ambassador to Israel. He worked closely with Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak in their unsuccessful efforts to negotiate peace treaties with the Palestinians and Syria. He had a chillier relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu, whose tenure as prime minister in the late 1990s he sees as a negative turning point in which the peace momentum set in motion by Rabin was deliberately brought to a halt.

Indyk also helped design the Clinton administration’s dual containment policy against Iran and Iraq, a policy whose results look better today than they did eight years ago, thanks to the disastrous mistakes made by the Bush administration in both ­arenas. But Indyk isn’t looking for historical vindication. That would have made for a less interesting and useful book. His main interest is drawing the right lessons from the Clinton administration’s failures and frustrations in order to design wiser regional policies for the future.

Thanks to the November election results and the multiple Middle East crises the Obama administration now must confront, that future may be said to have arrived. And Indyk’s reassessments have been rendered even more relevant by the return of Clinton administration veterans to key jobs in the Obama administration, including the appointment of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

Many of Bill Clinton’s Middle East policy goals now look exceedingly optimistic, perhaps unrealistically so. Israel reached no overall peace agreements with the Palestinians or with Syria. Iran’s weak, embattled re­formers spurned the Clinton administration’s tentative offers of re-engagement. Saddam Hussein continued playing cat and mouse with United Nations weapons inspectors — although, it later turned out, Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs were more effectively contained than Washington realized.

For all the disappointments, American prestige and influence in the region were far higher when Clinton left office than they are today. One main reason, Indyk notes, is that Clinton and his diplomats understood the crucial links between progress in ­Israeli-Arab peacemaking and the strength of America’s bargaining position with the countries in the Persian Gulf. Those connections are even more powerful today than they were in 2001.

But while the Clintonians got the big picture largely right, Indyk reports that they often tripped themselves up by mistakes of tactics or timing. For example, Clinton failed to grasp when Hafez ­al-Assad, then the Syrian president, was and was not serious about peacemaking, leading to botched summits and the failure to clinch an agreement that seemed within reach. Washington was often surprised and angered by the diplomatic thrusts and retreats of Ehud Barak, some of them, Indyk tells us, driven by advice from Clinton’s own pollsters, sent to help Barak shore up his domestic political support. And in the crucial months after the Camp David summit broke down, Clinton took too literally the multilayered messages and coded assurances he got from Yasir Arafat.

These mistakes flowed from a more basic problem — a failure to grasp that the Middle Eastern leaders the Clinton team was dealing with, Arab, Israeli and Ira­nian, had their own political needs and motives, which did not always coincide with Washington’s expectations or with the requirements of successful peacemaking. That is why Indyk titled his book “Innocent Abroad.” Indyk sees virtue in what he (too naïvely) characterizes as America’s innocence of ulterior motives. But he rightly sees the need to temper this innocence with a more realistic understanding of how Middle Eastern politics actually work.

Indyk’s own grasp of these ­larger Middle Eastern realities sometimes falters. He is too quick to reduce complex Arab societies to trite historical stereotypes about pharaonic traditions and desert kingdoms. He considers it legitimate for Israel to modify peace proposals to satisfy domestic constituencies but rarely thinks it legitimate for Arabs to do the same. Israel is a democracy, and the Arab societies it negotiates with are not. But no Arab leader is free to disregard public opinion on the fate of Palestinian refugees, sovereignty over Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem or the return of territories conquered by Israel in 1967.

Given the deep hole the United States has dug for itself over the past eight years, it will not be easy to reclaim the role of honest broker necessary for successful Middle East peacemaking. No one expects Washington to be strictly neutral between Israel and the Arabs, but it must again be perceived as reasonable and balanced in its expectations and demands. Following Indyk’s advice in “Innocent Abroad” would be a good place to start."

INNOCENT ABROAD

An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East

By Martin Indyk

Illustrated. 494 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30

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'Things I've Been Silent About: Memories,' by Azar Nafisi

"When Azar Nafisi was a professor of Western literature in Tehran in the 1980s and ’90s, she told her best stories anonymously, sometimes to visiting foreign journalists seeking guidance about Iran’s Islamic Republic. In 1997 she settled for good in the United States and discovered her public voice, turning the volume up high in her 2003 memoir, "Reading Lolita in Tehran."

That memoir wove her personal stories with those of her former students, using as a touchstone their two years of shared experiences in a reading group at her home focused on banned authors like Nabokov and Fitzgerald. “Reading Lolita” became an international best seller; Nafisi, who is a visiting fellow and lecturer at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, became famous.

Now she has written a second memoir, much more intimate than the first, a dissection of her often difficult family life, recounted against the dramatic sweep and turbulence of recent Iranian history. The idea for the book sprang from a list that she began compiling in her diary sometime after the 1979 Islamic revolution, entitled “Things I Have Been Silent About.” It draws on other sources as well, including diaries her father, a former mayor of Tehran, started when she was 4, and addressed to her; his sanitized published memoirs and his unvarnished unpublished version; and family photographs, some of which she said she took from her mother and which appear in the book. Much of the time she relies on memory, a powerful tool that can distort as well as enlighten.

Nafisi uses the new memoir to flesh out stories left untold or half-told in her earlier work: her upbringing in a prominent family; her education in Switzerland, England and the United States; her impulsive first marriage to a man she didn’t love (for reasons she never fully explains); her return to Iran in the late 1970s, as the Islamic revolution was unfolding; her teaching career under clerical rule; and her second marriage and her two children.

Writing the book was a very un-Iranian thing to do. Most of my Iranian friends were raised never to reveal family secrets to outsiders, certainly not strangers. We don’t air our dirty linen in public, Nafisi’s mother would tell her. But after her parents’ deaths, she found herself determined to erase “the fictions my parents told us — fictions about themselves as well as others.” The memoir, she writes, is “a response to my own inner censor and inquisitor.” The revolution, which destroyed the certainties of her family’s lives, made remembrance more critical. “If the present was fragile and fickle, the past could become a surrogate home,” she writes.

A gifted storyteller with a mastery of Western literature, Nafisi knows how to use language both to settle scores and to seduce. Her family secrets pour forth in a flood of revelations of anger, humiliation and deceit. “Most men cheat on their wives to have mistresses,” she writes in the opening line of the book, with a nod to Tolstoy. “My father cheated on my mother to have a happy life.”

The main target of Nafisi’s literary revenge is her mother, who spun fictions about herself as intricate as any Persian miniature. Nezhat Nafisi had wanted to be a doctor and felt cheated because she had not been allowed to finish her education. She clung to the memory of her dead first husband, enveloping him in a web of beautiful lies. Even when she became one of the first women members of the Iranian Parliament in 1963, it was not enough. She decided that her marriage to Ahmad Nafisi had been a mistake, and pushed him away and into the arms of other women and, eventually, a divorce.

Mother and daughter waged a battle of wills from the time Azar was 4. “She did not want rivals,” Nafisi writes. She told Azar how “unnatural” it was for a young girl to spend her time reading. When Nafisi halfheartedly mimicked a suicide she had heard about by trying to slash her wrists, her mother, “unimpressed,” banished her to her room for the rest of the day. Her mother read her diaries and letters and listened in to her phone conversations. Even as Nafisi was heading into exile in the United States and said goodbye to her mother for what would be the last time, her mother turned away from her kiss. “You share the same rotten genes” as your father, her mother would tell Nafisi and her younger brother, a line that recurs throughout the narrative.

To protect herself, Nafisi took her father’s side, developing a “secret language” to communicate their feelings and deceive her mother. He introduced her to Persian classics like Ferdowsi’s epic “Shahnameh,” the Book of Kings, and, later, the Western classics. Thrown into jail as mayor of Tehran in 1963 on trumped-up charges, he used the time to learn new languages, to paint, and to write three children’s books and 1,500 pages of diaries. This was not one of the shah’s torture chambers. There was always a vase of fresh flowers in the room.

So on another level, Nafisi’s memoir is an attempt to pay homage to her father, by bringing his own life story into the open.

Unintentionally, perhaps, the most painful facet of the memoir is Nafisi’s self-revelations. She describes being groped at the age of 6 by a family friend, a man who was considered holy, and the shame she felt afterward. Victims can feel guilty, she writes, both because they keep silent and because they feel "some vague sense of sexual pleasure out of an act that is imposed and feels reprehensible."

Nafisi deeply missed her father when she and her family moved to the United States, but did not initiate contact with him and at first did not even send him a copy of "Reading Lolita." At the book’s end, Nafisi remains restless, relentlessly hard on herself for not being a better daughter, for not returning to Iran before her parents died, even though it would have been dangerous for her. In the end, she is grateful to them, not for bringing her happiness, but for arming her for the battle of life. "It was only after their deaths," she writes," that I came to realize that they each in their own way had given me a portable home that safeguards memory and is a constant resistance against the tyranny of time and of man.”

I cannot say that I came away from “Things I Have Been Silent About” with a fuller understanding of Iran. But it gave me a fuller understanding of Nafisi. Shortly after she came to the United States, we met over breakfast in a shopping mall outside Washington. We were brought together by a mutual friend and her distant relation, Haleh Esfandiari, a Washington-­based scholar who spent nearly four months in prison after she was arrested in Iran in 2007 during a visit to her elderly mother.

Nafisi and I disagreed about the shape of Iranian politics. A fierce opponent of the Islamic Republic, she was scathing in her criticism of President Mohammad Khatami and his efforts to open up the political system. I was surprised more by her intellectual absolutism and unedited fury than by the substance of her political views. Esfandiari tried in vain to bridge the divide. I now understand why she failed. Perhaps because of who she is and what she experienced, Nafisi cannot ­imagine compromise.

“To this day having fun, just plain enjoying myself, comes at the cost of a conviction that I have committed an undetected crime,” she writes, describing the enduring effects of her mother’s rages. There seems to be little joy or laughter in the story she has told so far. Perhaps that will be the subject of her next book."


THINGS I’VE BEEN SILENT ABOUT
Memories
By Azar Nafisi
Illustrated. 336 pp. Random House. $27

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