More than half a century ago I was training to go to Afghanistan as a Peace Corps volunteer. Happily, as it turned out, I was deselected the day before my group left for Kabul. This spared me the gamma globulin shots and a long-term relationship with amoebic dysentery.
Our Farsi instructors were all Afghan university students—male and female. Very pleasant. It was interesting trying to explain the jokes on ‘Laugh In’ to them. No way to pause the show, so by the time they ‘got it’, a dozen jokes had flown by them. There are pictures showing Afghan women attending Kabul U. at the time—wearing Western clothes and smiles.
We were told that our biggest problem teaching in Afghanistan—most of us were going to teach Afghans English—would be the mullahs in the rural areas where most of us were going. The mullahs held that the only education necessary was for boys to memorize the Koran. Girls, of course, didn’t need school.
I realize that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires and that it is not our circus and not our monkeys, but the was a time in living memory when the Afghan people wanted better for themselves and seemed to be on the road of achieving it.
Like Iran
“I realize that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires...”
Oddly true and one without any global significance except perhaps the poppies.
“...but [it] was a time in living memory when the Afghan people wanted better for themselves and seemed to be on the road of achieving it.”
“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” - Mao Zedong