Afghanistan is an ongoing disaster right now and here in America everyone has an opinion that appears to have been molded a couple weeks ago based on information received earlier that day and limited to news events of the last four months. Too many in the US have neither a sense of historical scope nor international context, and thus the inane arguments people are having. How I wish our major media did a better job of educating people about the important topics of the day.
From the British in the late 19th century to the Russians in the late 20th, Afghanistan has been a battleground for proxy wars between colonial powers. It remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with high levels of terrorism, low childhood health and nutrition, and oodles of corruption. In per-capita gross domestic product it ranks 169th out of 186 countries. It’s a disaster right now, a disaster imposed on its people by far more powerful countries attempting to enact their will there for a couple hundred years.
“The modern state of Afghanistan began with the Hotak and Durrani dynasties in the 18th century. In the late 19th century, Afghanistan became a buffer state in the ‘Great Game’ between British India and the Russian Empire. Following the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919, the country became free of foreign dominance, eventually becoming the Kingdom of Afghanistan in June 1926 under King Amanullah. This kingdom lasted almost fifty years, until King Zahir was overthrown and a republic was established in July 1973. In 1978, after a second coup, Afghanistan became a socialist state, provoking the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s against mujahideen rebels. By 1996 most of Afghanistan was captured by the Islamic fundamentalist group, the Taliban, who ruled most of the country as a totalitarian regime for over five years. The Taliban were removed from power after the US invasion in 2001 but still controlled a significant portion of the country. The twenty-year-long war between the government and the Taliban reached a climax with the 2021 Taliban offensive and the resulting fall of Kabul which returned the Taliban to power.” ― Wikipedia
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.” ― Rudyard Kipling, The Young British Soldier (1890), first published in the Scots Observer.
“I saw houses burned by the Mujahadeen, as well as disfigured bodies of prisoners they’d taken. But I saw other things too: villages destroyed by our shelling and bodies of women, killed by mistake. When you shoot at every rustling in the bushes, there’s no time to think about who’s there. But for an Afghan, it didn’t matter if his wife had been killed intentionally or accidentally. He went into the mountains to see revenge.” ― Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier’s Story (1984)