Colin Thubron chooses five of the best books on Afghanistan Before the rash of books written since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, some of the most potent accounts were those by journalists and travel writers rather than politicians or soldiers. Robert Byron's classic The Road to Oxiana (1937) remains the richest and most readable portrait of a country still precariously accessible in 1933-34, and celebrates the beauty of its architecture as no other book has done. More than 60 years ago George Kennan wrote famously that "the ways by which people advance toward dignity and enlightenment in government are things that constitute the deepest and most intimate processes of national life. There is nothing less understandable to foreigners, nothing in which foreign interference can do less good. Each of these books, in its different way, might give politicians pause before becoming mired further in a land of which they know almost nothing.