Hirsh states that the author "has brought all his skills to bear, blending considerable scholarship with raw experience, and passion with a Sufi's love of paradox. The result is a book as remarkable as the country it portrays, and she likens its structure to the classic The Canterbury Tales." Though generally positive about the Kara Kush, Hirsh does point out what she perceives as three flaws in the work: Firstly, that Shah writes with the benefit of hindsight; that he simplifies and dismisses pressures that led up to the war and the Russian invasion. Secondly, that action scenes suffer due to Shah presenting too much information about the munitions involved. Thirdly, that individual characters are "dwarfed" due to the epic scale of the book. Finally, Hirsh concludes that "Kara Kush is not a story, it is the whole story – magnificently written in the blood of a courageous people. The overwhelming sense, after reading Shah's great testament, is that their story matters. So precious a nation must not lose this war." Kirkus Review is less complimentary about Kara Kush, opining that it is "a disjointed, sprawling, rather nonpoetic tome about the Russian invasion of Afghanistan." The reviewer adds that Kara Kush is "wonderful on Afghan atmosphere, less successful as a novel", with too many characters and too little interplay between them, and concludes that the book is "a breezy read: impassioned, action-packed, and information-stuffed." In The New York Times, author and retired columnist, C. L. Sulzberger expresses his difficulty as a reader in separating his literary judgement of the work, which he describes as "a bad novel", from the plight and "flamboyant heroism" of the Afghan people which the book presents. The reviewer goes on to say that Shah clearly knows his country, its dialects, and the tribal traditions well, and has gone to great lengths to make himself familiar with the struggles of the Afghan rebels, the mujahideen, in their fight against the Soviet Union's occupation forces and their allies in the Afghan Government, based in Kabul. He adds that there is plenty of "action and movement" in the novel, and that the work presents a "rich tapestry", but concludes that the language employed is not up to the task, and that although it may be "a compendium of Pathan tales suitable to the storyteller's bazaar at Peshawar [...] it is not a novel." Writing for the Pakistani Dawn