In his 4 December talk at Chatham House in London on "Fixing Failed States: From Theory to Practice", Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani referred to Frederick Starr's recent book, Lost Enlightenment. In the video below, the remark comes two minutes into the video clip.

"The dissolution of the Soviet Union, the takeoff of Central Asia now, is opening up a set of possibilities regarding resources that previously just were not there. We are reconnecting to our remote pasts. There's a fantastic book by Fred Starr, let me plug it, it's called "Lost Enlightenment." It's about Central Asia from the third century before the common era, to the twelfth century. Ant it shows how connected the area was. How the connectivities, the culture and the economy, interplayed. So with very deep structures, in Braudel's sense, that allow us no to resume, the story we are saying about the roundabout is not new. It is being realized, and it gives us opportunity to connect."