The Afghan – Frederick Forsyth, 2006 ★

A Thriller Out of Time

Frederick Forsyth has owned me for over 30 years, since The Day Of The Jackal held me hostage for a sleepless week in boarding school. Forsyth has put me ringside while World War III is averted, powerful bad guys are chastened with vigor, and the value of committed individualism is repeatedly, gloriously affirmed.

But the Cold War verities which spawned Forsyth’s career have given way. 9/11 showed you don’t need a Politburo to direct large-scale destruction upon the West. Simple good/evil binaries between freedom and Communism have been replaced by self-loathing democracies fed up with their own capitalist excess.

New technology, like drones and instantaneous eavesdropping, has made Forsyth’s dependency on isolated men of action seem almost quaint, not to mention sexist and possibly homophobic.

Long story short: It doesn’t appear the 21^st century is shaping up as Forsyth’s time. This leads into my disappointment with this 2006 novel, a rather torpid, disengaged, and unrealistic attempt at bringing the Forsyth formula into the post-9/11 world.

Mike Martin is a retired British Special Air Service commando whose dark complexion and upbringing in the Arab world make him the only man who can infiltrate al-Qaeda and discover what new catastrophic attack they are planning. Martin assumes the identity of an imprisoned Taliban commander and, after staging a jailbreak, finds his way into the highest levels of al-Qaeda’s command structure. As time runs out, will Martin find out what al-Qaeda is up to, or be found out himself?

As a British intelligence officer puts it: “If they ever find out who he really is, may Allah have mercy on him.”

The problems with The Afghan are many. To begin with, the premise is unbelievable: a retired officer is tasked to grow out his beard, brush up on his Pashtu, and study the Koran in the hopes he might connect up with the al-Qaeda hierarchy in a matter of days and find out what the code name “al-Isra” means. If things were so desperate, wouldn’t it make more sense to capture a high-level operative and just torture the story from him? Forsyth had the French do that in one of Day Of The Jackal’s most effective scenes. I can appreciate that he doesn’t want to portray the war on terror that way, but depending on this sort of Bondian derring-do makes less sense, on top of being absurdly gormless by Forsyth’s ruthless standards.

Laziness also crops up, both in structure and in execution. Forsyth’s constant use of coincidence in this story is mind-boggling. Even one of the al-Qaeda operatives is moved to comment:

“You must be the only Afghan for whom no family member remains alive to vouch for you,” he tells Martin while the latter is pretending to be Izmat Khan, the imprisoned Taliban commander. “It is a remarkable coincidence, and as a scientist I hate coincidences.”

In addition to the coincidence the operative references, that a stray American missile would just happen to have wiped out Izmat’s home village and left not a single survivor, we are asked to accept that Izmat had his life saved by Martin on two unrelated occasions decades apart, even though the two men remained total strangers in between.

Later on, we get another coincidence: Cooped up by the CIA in a cabin near the Canadian border while Martin uses his identity, Izmat is sprung when a fighter plane actually crash-lands on his safe house. Izmat is then able to get ahold of weapons and money that just happen to be in a nearby cabin his security-conscious captors overlooked.

The most bizarre thing about these Izmat-related coincidences is that they wind up meaning nothing to the overall plot or The Afghan’s final resolution. They are just there apparently to take up space as Forsyth fills pages detailing these story detours. Sometimes I wondered if Forsyth was having a snort at us readers. But the tone throughout is too serious for that; no, he is just being lazy and padding his book with dead ends.

An LNG [Liquefied Natural Gas] tanker figures heavily in The Afghan as it develops. This is another example of a good idea that gets fumbled in the execution, as these tankers move very slowly, and so does the plot. [Image from www.abc.net.au]

The laziness is evident too in how Forsyth presents Martin’s infiltration exploits, exhibiting a minimum of the sort of painstakingly researched detail that marked Forsyth’s fiction in the past. Those who read The ODESSA File will remember how the intrepid German reporter Miller had to playact at being an older SS veteran among suspicious German veterans, with every casual conversation having the potential of being his last.

Not here. Instead of stretching out Martin’s dealings with al-Qaeda for maximum suspense, presenting lengthy passages of dialogue and letting us wonder if our boy has stepped in it somewhere, Forsyth just assures us Martin is doing a good job and that no one suspects a thing…

With his dark looks, full black beard and the repeated references to Allah of the truly devout, Martin convinced his host that he was also a true believer.

From what al-Khattab could discover, his prisoner had not slipped up once.

There are also some howlers. Forsyth has Martin reflect: “In a career in Special Forces, he had never actually met a suicide bomber before the act.” That seems less noteworthy than meeting one after the act, I would think.

The core issue may be that in addition to being an overall kick in the nuts for freedom lovers everywhere, 9/11 changed the game for thriller writers, too. This was only Forsyth’s second post-9/11 novel, after Avenger, a satisfying potboiler which actually deals with the subject fairly well, albeit as a subplot. Here, though, it’s the whole thing. Getting inside the heads of people who kill not for political or strategic gain but over quasi-religious abstractions seems beyond Forsyth’s ken.

The challenge of explaining al-Qaeda’s purposes makes for some awkward moments. Forsyth repeatedly attempts to set us straight on why Muslims, even more zealous Muslims, should not be automatically labelled as terrorists. He often throws in a character to speak to this point, whether or not it happens to be germane to the situation at hand.

“I would term them ‘the New Jihadis,’ because they have invented an unholy war outside the laws of the holy Koran and thus of true Islam,” says one professor whom Forsyth introduces more or less just to make this point about al-Qaeda during a college lecture. “True jihad is not savage, but what they practice is.”

This desire to separate the practice of terrorism from that of a religious faith is too obviously tacked on to placate readers’ sensibilities, something Forsyth didn’t strain so hard at once upon a time when he let his situations speak for themselves. In the same way, he presents British and American intelligence leaders as always on the same page, because who wants to think of a War on Terror conducted by people at loggerheads with one another, however more realistic and/or suspenseful such a situation might be? Compare this to the internecine bureaucratic conflicts with which both East and West struggle in The Fourth Protocol, perhaps Forsyth’s most underrated thriller, and a spy-fiction classic.

Forsyth does start the novel with some promise, when a high-level al-Qaeda operative is undone by an underling’s use of a hot cell phone and an exciting apartment raid ensues. Good exposition occurs throughout, with Forsyth explaining such matters as the battle of Qala-i-Janga and the seven entities which make up the United Arab Emirates with his usual crisp authority. I like Forsyth here as an analyst on current events more than I do as a yarn-spinner. The whole al-Isra plot is introduced in a way that’s both unnerving and intriguing. Alas, Forsyth keeps the exact nature of this plot under wraps so long he doesn’t give himself much time to explain it once we reach the climax.

The climax is one of The Afghan’s more egregious failures, a catawampus scenario in which we are asked to believe a long-dead al-Qaeda leader could have plotted out an attack on a G-8 summit that for some reason is being set on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. The Western powers know by this time to look for an attack from the sea, but go ahead with the ocean summit anyway. Forsyth seems at a loss for how to bring off a satisfying resolution. His answer, it seems, is not to try. The Afghan instead presents one of the most shapeless and depressing endings you will find in a thriller, its bleak tone somewhat alleviated by the fact it is rather nonsensical.

The challenge of writing a good geopolitical thriller in a time when anything goes, and anyone might be a target, seems beyond Forsyth’s capabilities, shaped as they are by more conventional wars and loyalties, and developed around 20^th-century sensibilities which seem tame today. I can’t say I blame the guy for being behind the times; they are rotten times enough even when you aren’t trying to spin a zippy action yarn around them. But I still can't help feeling an earlier Forsyth would have done it better.