Abdul Salam Zaeef, barely thirty years old, was the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan just before and after the September 11th attacks. The Taliban regime he served was so isolated that Zaeef became its youthful, thickly bearded international face while American bombs were falling on Taliban lines and Northern Alliance troops swept down toward Kabul. A few weeks after the fall of Kandahar, Zaeef disappeared in Pakistan. It turned out that Pakistani intelligence had handed him over to American agents, who held him in various prisons in Afghanistan before transferring him to Guantánamo, where he endured three years of detention without charge. At the end of 2005, after agreeing to refrain from “anti-American activities or military actions,” he was released and returned to Afghanistan. He now lives a quiet life in Kabul, and occasionally speaks to Western diplomats and reporters (including Steve Coll, for his piece in this week’s magazine) who want a read on Taliban thinking of the moment.

Earlier this year, Columbia University Press published Zaeef’s memoirs under the title “My Life with the Taliban,” translated into English by two graduates of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, who somehow manage to survive as foreigners living in Kandahar. It’s a book with an obvious interest for Americans, since so little has been published in English from the point of view of the insurgents who are the reason a hundred thousand American troops are fighting in Afghanistan. There’s no easily available Taliban equivalent of the writings of Ho Chi Minh, let alone “Mein Kampf.” Zaeef’s memoir is perhaps the best, and maybe even the only, way for readers here to begin to grasp the world view of this xenophobic and opaque movement.

In one way, it’s also a book that American readers will immediately understand: a kind of Pashtun Horatio Alger story, about a poor village boy from southern Afghanistan, the son of a holy man, who suffers deprivations, studies hard, survives the calamities of exile and war, develops intense loyalties with his brothers in arms, and, through perseverance and intelligence, rises early and fast through his country’s government to positions of great importance (which he claims never to have wanted), before suffering more calamities at the hands of his enemies—but there is no obstacle too great for Zaeef to overcome, because of his courage and unshakable piety. I’ve been reading the autobiographies of recent U.S. senators (a lot less absorbing than “My Life with the Taliban”), and the atmosphere is about the same. Zaeef’s tale has the moral simplicity and lack of reflection of rags-to-riches literature by public men, even if this narrator ends up somewhere beneath the top of the heap.

What does this book tell us about the Taliban? That they are, or would like to believe they are, earnest and idealistic—relentlessly, boringly so. There isn’t an ounce of selfish calculation or complex motivation in Zaeef’s account. He’s at his most interesting as a small boy, and the scenes from his early childhood are vivid and affecting—the early loss of his mother, his attachment to his sister—but once he starts to grow up (which is to say, once he receives his religious education), the script is written for him. When, as a fifteen-year-old refugee in Pakistan, he makes the fateful decision to cross back into Afghanistan and fight in the anti-Soviet jihad, there isn’t a quiver of thought: “Like most young men at the time, I was eager to join in. We all wanted to fight the Russians. I often talked about it with my friends when we saw the mujahedeen leaving. I wanted to fulfil my obligation to Allah and free my homeland from the godless Soviet soldiers.”

Zaeef is generally considered a moderate, but he himself warns against any attempt to divide the Taliban into moderates and hard-liners. And, in fact, readers looking for a thoughtful reconsideration of their disastrous rule in the nineteen-nineties won’t find a trace in Zaeef’s memoir. Here is his version of how the Taliban imposed a reign of terror after the fall of Kabul in 1996: “Women were no longer working in government departments and the men throughout the city had started to grow beards. Life in the city was returning to normal.” Zaeef complains about U.N. sanctions on Afghanistan, but he doesn’t mention the cause—Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda terrorism. When the regime blows up two ancient and enormous statues of Buddha carved into a mountain, Zaeef finds it inconvenient because of all the diplomatic outrage, but can’t bring himself to disapprove: “While I agreed that the destruction was within the boundaries of shari’a law, I considered the issue of the statues to be more than just a religious matter, and that the destruction was unnecessary and a case of bad timing.” His job as an ambassador is made onerous by the constant harangues of other diplomats: “The ambassadors of Germany and Belgium were impolite, ruthless and arrogant. Both were tall, broad-shouldered and full of prejudice; they always wanted to discuss the position of women.”

As for the Americans, they won his bitter enmity. By Zaeef’s account—which aligns with those of numerous other prisoners who fell into U.S. hands in the wars that followed September 11th—he was treated barbarically: stripped naked, beaten, interrogated endlessly to no purpose, always kept isolated and ignorant of his situation, made to endure years of physical and mental torture in a condition of legal blackout. In a way, even worse than the loss of his rights is the sheer gratuitous ugliness of his treatment at the hands of American soldiers: “Every day all prisoners were lined up outside and made to stand in the sun. There were about twenty tents that held eight hundred prisoners. Not all soldiers were the same, but some would command us to stand there for half-an-hour before they took the attendance register and almost two hours afterwards. No one was allowed to sit down or stand in the shade, no matter what his condition.” Zaeef adds: “May Allah punish those soldiers!”

In Zaeef’s telling, He surely will. The Americans have won the hatred of all Afghans, he concludes, and will lose the war as the Soviets lost theirs: the whole world is turning away from the U.S. and coming to see the justice of the Islamic cause. Like any religious revolutionary, Zaeef is certain that history and faith will soon rhyme. His entire story is saturated in righteousness; all the hardships he endures are redeemed by the solidarity of the faithful, whose superiority to non-Muslims is taken for granted. Zaeef doesn’t even pay lip service to the notion of equal rights for all: the only outrage is what’s done to Muslims, because they are Muslims and better than the rest of humanity. This world view is founded on such chauvinism that Americans, with our automatic assumptions about equality, might fail to notice it. “My Life with the Taliban” shows that, while all wars are foolish, some wars are not a matter of mere misunderstanding—that beneath the superficial differences of clothing and facial hair lie more profound differences that can’t be reconciled.