This poster is meant to be funny, but it is tragic.
These pictures tell a thousand word tale of utter destruction.
I hope the next 40 years go better than the last 40 for the people of Afghanistan.
(Hat tip to Michael Antoniewicz II.)
4 thoughts on “Afghanistan: 40 years is a long time”
Comments are closed.
Is the first picture really from Afghanistan?
These are.
Who knows? Could be. It really did sink that low.
I knew a retired Army NCO who had been assigned to the embassy in Kabul in the late 1960s and he remembered it very fondly. It was a bit out of the way, but the mountains were spectacular. His most vivid memory was how there were orchards of almond trees all around, and how lovely the smelled when in bloom.
The pic may be of Barbur’s garden. I had a book about Middle-Eastern Gardens, and there were several chapters about (formerly magnificent) gardens in Afghanistan, including this one – link here: http://archnet.org/library/sites/one-site.jsp?site_id=12541
It looks like they are trying to restore it.
It is easier to destroy than it is to build. It takes a few men only a few minutes to destroy a bridge that took 5 years to build and the efforts of thousands.
Civilization cannot exist without buildings. Men who live in caves need to know how to hunt and how to find food and water. They do not need to know how to build skyscrapers except to plan how to destroy them.
We cannot win in Afganistan until we know what victory looks like. We cannot win unless we can adjust our morality to accept the terms we must impose in order to win.
For example, victory will require forcing the Afgans to change some very important Afgan cultural ideas – a clear violation of our dedication to multi-culturalism.