Many foreigners also have an impression that the Afghanistani women are an oppressed lot with no independent ideas on romance, passion, and sex. It may not be completely true. Try listening to landay, illicit love poems composed by Pashtuni women. Sample this:

May you turn into a riverside flower
So that I may come on the excuse of taking water and smell you.

The next one is raunchier:

Call it romance, call it love, you did it I am tired now, pull up the blanket for I want to sleep.

We never get to know about these facets of Afghanistan's culture even though there have been a splurge in books on this newsy region. Could it be because these books are so predictable? After all, every U.S. or Europe-based Saira, Khaled, or Yasmina, lucky to have even a tiny Afghan strain flowing in their blood, gets a book contract. Not surprisingly, the scope of their memoirs (or fiction) is usually limited to the ‘trauma’ of growing up in a violence-ridden Kabul or Kandahar where mothers are chattels, fathers are tyrants, and everyone else is a Muslim fundamentalist. Of course, these are attractive themes custom-made to satisfy a westerner's cherished idea of Afghanistan.

Lonely Planet Afghanistan is an exception. Real and biting, the book hits you with its immediacy. Like a poetry collection which spares you the nonessential prose, it goes straight to the vivid beauty of this haunting land - the Ka Faroshi Bird Market of Kabul with its narrow lane lined with stalls selling birds, the stunning minaret of Jam looming up in the mountains, the 800-year-old tile-mosaic mosque of Herat, the orchards of Panjshir valley, the blue domes of Hazrat Ali’s shrine at Mazar-e-Sharif, and the dilapidated cafes of Kandahar decked with posters of Indian film stars. There are also snappy and succulent accounts of Afghanistan experience by authors and journalists like Christina Lamb and Tamim Ansary.

However, the most poignant Afghanistan destination, other than the ruins of Bamiyan Buddhas (and Kabul's newly-opened Coca Cola bottling plant), must be the OMAR Landmine museum. Exhibiting more than 60 types of landmines littering the Afghani countryside, a visit to this museum in Kabul provides a context to the hundreds of amputees any traveler would see during the course of her Afghanistan travel.

The travel to this unstable nation obviously entails risk. The sweet person talking to you could be a Taliban kidnapper; the road barrier could be the work of bandits; the next step in the hike to the Nuristan mountains could trigger a landmine blast. Life is always on edge in Afghanistan. This book, like any responsible Lonely Planet guide, clearly warns:

Only you are responsible for your safety, so it's absolutely essential that before considering a visit you assess the security situation from reliable, up-to-date sources.

Perhaps it is too tough a calling. Perhaps you may just want to use the book for armchair traveling. Perhaps that’s not a bad idea.