I visited Afghanistan when I took the hippy trail in 1971. It was what we used to call "mind blowing". When the bus rolled into Herat the town looked like it was preserved from 1400 AD.
Contrary to modern belief the hippy trail was a dribble of western students who could scarcely fill Ciggy's Cafe in the centre of Kabul. Incidently, Ciggy's was a wooden construction around a lawn with a kitchen off to one side where Scotts porridge oats was brewed in a huge cauldron over an open fire by three men in rags. They served the porridge with hubble bubbles and Pink Floyd music.
Quite a number of those on the trail died. They got dysentery, got addicted, got botulism etc. and died. One of the lads I was travelling with died and the Marine from the US Embassy who came to take away the body said it was the fifth Junky he had sent home that week*. The lad was not a junky but there was no point in remonstrating.
Shortly before I arrived in Kabul the local tribesmen had swept through town on horses and shot any woman who was exposing skin. A day or two before I arrived one of the buses that had a few Westerners on board had been robbed, burnt and all the passengers shot. There was no internet and even telephones were hard to find and prohibitively expensive. Posh hippys took the plane from Teheran to New Delhi.
I didnt care about much of this, the hashish was very cheap and legal and an afternoon on a hooker blunts the mind. It was only after my travelling companion got ill that I stopped the smoking and swore I would cut my hair when I got back to the UK. Incidently, the American students in our group all fled to Lahore the moment they saw their pal had got ill, leaving me and a couple of Canadians to get medical treatment and deal with the death.
So what do I think about Afghanistan? Once the aching heart goes away I remember that it was "mind blowing". So I say leave the place alone, different cultures have a strange beauty. I see the current globalizing interventionism as exactly the same as Victorian Imperialism. The gawky Victorian civil servant who set out from London to teach the savages civilisation is no different from the modern youngsters who all want to teach the world to sing the same tune for Coca Cola or Microsoft. The creepy western youngsters who want to globalize the world are no different from the gawky lads who were the vanguard of British Imperialism. They talk of "diversity" and "anti-racism" but mean having pet cultures, they cannot take actually living in a world with entirely different and even threatening cultures.
Afghanistan was a preserved Islamic Warrior culture and no one would leave them alone. Strangely I will feel slightly elated and proud of them if they beat Nato although what they believe is an absolute anathema to me.
Fence em off and leave them alone. Get them to sign non-aggression/anti-terrorism pacts in return for our leaving. Bomb them if they violate these pacts by attacking us or sponsoring attacks on us. Don't have hundreds of thousands of them over here, it will obviously cause trouble.
* Five a week must have been an exaggeration. Or maybe I didn't hear him right. God knows after all this time.Source URL: http://indahrahmadewi.blogspot.com/2011/10/future-of-afghanistan.html
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Contrary to modern belief the hippy trail was a dribble of western students who could scarcely fill Ciggy's Cafe in the centre of Kabul. Incidently, Ciggy's was a wooden construction around a lawn with a kitchen off to one side where Scotts porridge oats was brewed in a huge cauldron over an open fire by three men in rags. They served the porridge with hubble bubbles and Pink Floyd music.
Quite a number of those on the trail died. They got dysentery, got addicted, got botulism etc. and died. One of the lads I was travelling with died and the Marine from the US Embassy who came to take away the body said it was the fifth Junky he had sent home that week*. The lad was not a junky but there was no point in remonstrating.
Shortly before I arrived in Kabul the local tribesmen had swept through town on horses and shot any woman who was exposing skin. A day or two before I arrived one of the buses that had a few Westerners on board had been robbed, burnt and all the passengers shot. There was no internet and even telephones were hard to find and prohibitively expensive. Posh hippys took the plane from Teheran to New Delhi.
I didnt care about much of this, the hashish was very cheap and legal and an afternoon on a hooker blunts the mind. It was only after my travelling companion got ill that I stopped the smoking and swore I would cut my hair when I got back to the UK. Incidently, the American students in our group all fled to Lahore the moment they saw their pal had got ill, leaving me and a couple of Canadians to get medical treatment and deal with the death.
So what do I think about Afghanistan? Once the aching heart goes away I remember that it was "mind blowing". So I say leave the place alone, different cultures have a strange beauty. I see the current globalizing interventionism as exactly the same as Victorian Imperialism. The gawky Victorian civil servant who set out from London to teach the savages civilisation is no different from the modern youngsters who all want to teach the world to sing the same tune for Coca Cola or Microsoft. The creepy western youngsters who want to globalize the world are no different from the gawky lads who were the vanguard of British Imperialism. They talk of "diversity" and "anti-racism" but mean having pet cultures, they cannot take actually living in a world with entirely different and even threatening cultures.
Afghanistan was a preserved Islamic Warrior culture and no one would leave them alone. Strangely I will feel slightly elated and proud of them if they beat Nato although what they believe is an absolute anathema to me.
Fence em off and leave them alone. Get them to sign non-aggression/anti-terrorism pacts in return for our leaving. Bomb them if they violate these pacts by attacking us or sponsoring attacks on us. Don't have hundreds of thousands of them over here, it will obviously cause trouble.
* Five a week must have been an exaggeration. Or maybe I didn't hear him right. God knows after all this time.Source URL: http://indahrahmadewi.blogspot.com/2011/10/future-of-afghanistan.html
Visit Indah Rahma Dewi for Daily Updated Hairstyles Collection
