A very good story from back in April about Biden's first trip to Afghanistan in 2002, and what he and the NYTimes reporter Thomas Friedman who accompanied him were seeing and experiencing:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/opinion/joe-biden-afghanistan-2002.htmlQuote
Back in 2002 it was reasonable to hope that our invasion there to topple Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies could be extended to help make that country a more stable, tolerant and decent place for its citizens — and less likely to host jihadist groups. But it was also reasonable to fear from the start that trying to graft a Western political culture onto such a deeply tribalized, male-dominated and Islamic fundamentalist culture like Afghanistan’s was a fool’s errand
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My heart told me to write that America must remain here, for however long it takes, with however many troops it takes, to repair this country, and provide a minimum level of security so it can get on its feet again. It was the least we owed the place, having already abandoned it once after the Soviet withdrawal. [...]
“But while my heart kept pulling me in one direction, my head, and my eyes, kept encountering things that were deeply troubling. It started when I went along with Biden to meet the Minister of the Interior for the Interim Government, Yunus Qanooni, who is a Tajik. Behind his desk, where a minister should be hanging the picture of his president (Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun), he had a picture of Ahmed Shah Massoud (an ethnic Tajik), the leader of the Northern Alliance who was assassinated just before September 11.
“Tom Friedman’s first rule of politics: Never trust a country where a new minister has the picture of his favorite dead militia leader, not the country’s (interim) president, over his desk. It seemed to me that the tribal warrior culture ran so deep in this place, it would be hard for any neutral central government to sink real roots. As I contemplated that militia leader’s picture, I wondered to myself: ‘When were the good old days for government in Afghanistan? Before Genghis Khan? Before gunpowder?’”
Indeed, I wrote in my column that week that I lingered one evening in the famous bookstore of the Intercontinental Hotel, which had an amazing collection of books on Afghan history. As I perused the shelves, I wrote, “I was struck by how many books had ‘Afghan wars’ in the title. I picked up one called ‘A History of the War in Afghanistan’ and discovered it was part of a thick two-volume set that covered only the years 1800 to 1842.” I was also struck by the collection of postcards offered in that bookstore — one in particular. It was a two-part picture; one part was of a shell-ravaged building, and the other part of a damaged hallway, with the roof collapsed and rubble strewn all over the floor. The caption read: “Afghanistan, the looted and destroyed Kabul Museum.”
That is the sign of a country too long at war — when it is producing postcards of the rubble. And that was the question that Biden and I wrestled with throughout that trip: What were the foundations — physical, cultural, political, economic, religious and social — from which Afghans, with American and NATO help, might build a more decent, less corrupt, modern political system? Could the future bury the past there or would the past always bury the future?
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Aug 16 2021 05:18pm