Why should we care about Afgh­anistan? It’s a valid ques­tion. You prob­ably haven’t heard any good news from that place for a long time. It’s been at war since 1979. That’s as long as some of us have been alive. Maybe even longer.

I read a lot of stor­ies from the golden age of trav­el­ling, when you could still get from Lon­don to Kath­mandu on a red double-decker bus for a few quid. Ok, prob­ably more than that, but you know what I’m try­ing to say. Not so long ago Afgh­anistan was a high­light on the infam­ous Hippy Trail. The hos­pit­al­ity in this far away coun­try was unpre­ced­en­ted and now here we are. The coun­try is at war. A war that offi­cially doesn’t exist. Yet every day civil­ians and sol­diers die. What happened?

The Rus­si­ans happened, that’s what. In all fair­ness, it wasn’t all their fault. They kind of got sucked into that war much the same way as the Amer­ic­ans a few years earlier in Viet­nam. They should have known bet­ter, though. Learned from their enemies mis­take. You can’t win a war like that. Nobody’s ever conquered Afgh­anistan suc­cess­fully. You could ask Alex­an­der the Great what he had to say on the mat­ter if he were still alive.

Any­ways, in the begin­ning, the Rus­si­ans were win­ning on all fronts. The muja­hed­din, still free­dom fight­ers, not yet ter­ror­ists, were los­ing across the board. Even then air superi­or­ity was the name of the game and the Hind, a Rus­sian attack heli­copter, was mak­ing mince meat of any oppos­i­tion. Then some­thing happened. The free­dom fight­ers got hold of some Stinger mis­siles thanks to the Amer­ic­ans, and the table slowly star­ted to turn. After all, the cold war was still raging on, des­pite of its name, and it’s always bet­ter if someone else’s sol­diers die on the battlefield.

The United States was pump­ing mil­lions of dol­lars into that war. The Saudi king­dom didn’t want to be left out, so they matched the Amer­ic­ans dol­lar by dol­lar. All of this obvi­ously had to be done cov­ert, so the Pakistani gov­ern­ment volun­teered as the middle­man. It was a win-win situ­ation for every­body. Except for the Rus­si­ans. They star­ted dying.

The Amer­ic­ans got someone to fight their war for them. The Pakistanis were hop­ing to get some kind of con­trol over their law­less neigh­bour. Maybe it was even pos­sible to chan­nel some of these free­dom fight­ers across the coun­try to destabil­ize the Indian held part of Kash­mir and Jammu. The Indi­ans were, and still are, after all their primary enemies. That leaves us with the Saudis. Well, they did a good deed by help­ing out their Muslim broth­ers fight the Infi­dels. As a nice little side effect, some say it was their main reason, they were also export­ing their own extreme ver­sion of Islam, called Wah­h­a­bism, into the poverty-stricken tri­bal areas of Pakistan and the bor­der­ing Afghan territories.

Now, what hap­pens if you couple extreme poverty with reli­gious zeal and then point them towards an enemy where they can vent their anger? You get your­self an army. People now have a chan­nel to vent their anger. Guess what! It worked bet­ter than any­one could have anti­cip­ated. 10 years after the war star­ted the Rus­si­ans were leav­ing Afgh­anistan, utterly defeated. Now should have come the time to rebuild Afgh­anistan and restore it to its former glory. All that was needed was a bit more invest­ment into the infra­struc­ture and the edu­ca­tion sys­tem. But of course that didn’t happen.

The bor­der areas between Afgh­anistan and Pakistan have always been blurry. The people there con­sider them­selves first Pash­tuns and then, well, noth­ing really. The Pash­tuns are one of the largest (and poorest) tribes on our planet and their once work­ing code of con­duct and hon­our had been utterly cor­rup­ted by 10 years of wah­h­abistic influ­ence. The war was over, but the Pash­tuns, and the rest of the Afghan tribes, still had a lot of pent-up anger. They turned on each other and even­tu­ally 7 years after the Rus­si­ans left, a formerly little known organ­iz­a­tion called the Taliban emerged as the win­ner. They promptly formed a gov­ern­ment that was only recog­nized by the Pakistani gov­ern­ment. They were obvi­ously still hop­ing for some Kash­mir action, although that was never gonna happen.

The rest is kind of his­tory. 9/11 happened, Afgh­anistan got bombed once again, the Talibs got their arses kicked and now sol­diers and ter­ror­ists from all over the world are locked in a deadly cat and mouse game in the Hindukush, while inno­cent civil­ians keep dying. Will there ever be peace again? Will there be, once again, come a time when Afgh­anistan is the place to go trav­el­ling in?

I sure hope so. While I was in Pakistan I was think­ing of cross­ing the Kyber Pass into Afgh­anistan, travel north-west to Kabul and then across the coun­try to Herat. It was just too dan­ger­ous then (plus the bor­der had been closed for all nation­al­it­ies while I was in Peshawar) and I didn’t have the funds for flights. A friend of mine flew to Kabul, though (and sur­vived to tell the tale), so it is pos­sible to travel Afgh­anistan. One day, in the near future, I will go there, des­pite all the dangers. I want to see what it’s like…

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I gathered lots of the above inform­a­tion from talk­ing to fel­low trav­el­lers, journ­al­ists and loc­als and read­ing the local news­pa­pers while in Pakistan. I also dug around the bends of my brain to see what was left from my school his­tory les­sons. We didn’t learn much. I hope this has changed, although I ser­i­ously doubt it…