The Poetry of The Taliban

Stephen Marche reads the controversial new anthology, and finds himself unexpectedly moved:

At least one senior American military observer has suggested a war of “counterpoetry,” which would have sounded insane to me before reading this collection but now seems both reasonable and completely impossible. What does it matter if we control the cities and the battlefields, so long as they control the narrative? The narrative is all they need to win. And their story is in the hands of brilliant, often anonymous storytellers.