Share what you know about the year you were born.
On December 19, 1979, two things happened: the secretary general of the Communist Party of the USSR, Leonid Brezhnev, ordered the Red Army to invade Afghanistan, and I came into this world.
Not many people know that the Afghani people are a historical melange of East and West.
When Alexander the Great went on a ten-year binge to conquer the known world, he invaded, overrun and colonized with Macedonian-Greek settlers what is today known as Afghanistan (330 B.C.). In fact, as part of his Legacy several cities in Afghanistan are named for Alexander, including Alexandria Arachosia, now called Kandahar (a contraction of Iskandahar).
Fast forward to 1979, Brezhnev decided to lend a helping hand to the beleaguered comrades of the Communist Party of Afghanistan. In doing this, he condemned the Soviet Union to a 9-year long war, that they did not win. Afghanistan proved to be USSR’s Vietnam.
It turns out that Alexander the Great was the first and the last invader that truly subdued Afghanistan. The secret of their resilience to invasion is in the nature of their land which has forged their character. They are as robust and hardy as the shrubs growing in their mountains.
That’s why these people are so goddamn intransigent with all invaders because the natural bellicose attitude of the rough mountaineer goat shepherds was allied / alloyed with the warlike nature of the Ancient Greek.
They are also by the nature of their climate and resources, close to the land, and while not very poor, most of them cannot lay claims to riches, especially since the vast majority continue to live off the land in the countryside.
If we add Islam to the mix, then we have the makings of hardy, warlike people, infused with the doctrine of predestination that the Prophet’s teachings instills in them. They are clansmen, like the Scots of aulde, but still penetrated by the moral code of Old Time. They live and die by the Word of Allah. And they never submit to any invader.
How Alexander managed to defeat them eludes me still. Perhaps the people inhabiting Afghanistan 2,353 years ago were different. They must have been. Because Alexander wouldn’t have stood a chance in Hell if he had come face to face with the Ancient version of the Taliban.
Götterdämmerung 