Has there ever been more destructive advice than that doled out by the “creative” writing courses—“write what you know”? You ought to know something about your subject, of course: it’s no good writing a novel about a guy who works for the highway department and saying, “He climbed into that big thing that looks like a sort of long tractor …” But Shakespeare didn’t know much about court life in Denmark or the problems of minority communities in Venice, and he didn’t do a lot of on-site research, either. And one thing I’ve noticed since 9/11 is that knowing too much about one particular thing gives you a kind of tunnel vision.

The folks who predicted the Yanks would be bogged down in an Afghan quagmire were all the ones who were the biggest experts on the place, had spent years in Kabul and Kandahar and Jalalabad and knew the differences between Pushtuns and Uzbeks and Tajiks and all the rest. Chaps like Jason Burke, who reminisced fondly in The Observer about “Mohammed Ghaffar, the white-bearded waiter at Kabul’s battered Intercontinental Hotel who grimly counted off the regimes that have successively run and ruined his country on his fingers.” Burke confidently declared that “the Afghans are now falling in behind the Taliban. The strikes are swiftly radicalizing what was an essentially moderate country. You cannot bomb these men into submission.” Kabul fell two days later—as those of us who’d skimmed the intro of The Dummy’s Guide to the