Reddit reviews Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics)
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> These are some of the signs of stagnation, as it were.
it's not stagnation, it's Afghanistan going back to what it was. If we can work with the Taliban, laying aside all principle, we have a chance at affecting it positively.
The following is based on a book by a us anthropologist/afghanistan expert that I read about 8 years ago
Afghanistan is one of the worlds very few remaining pre-industrial societies (not the whole of it but the larger part), meaning that its people aren't as economically dependent on a small group of institutions as most of the rest of the world is. The regions sustain themself with small scale agriculture and the only technology higher than that is the odd AK (and by now probably a few cellphones originally used to set off IEDs). Outside the major cities the regions barely communicate. This means that there isn't a central hub in the infrastructure that you can take over to gain control and influence over all afghan life. Most afghans have no direct dealings with the central government in their lifetimes (compare that to the amount of taxes you pay and paperwork you're supposed to keep track of, the loans you're likely taken or will take, etc). The central government has no reach in most of Afghanistan. Afghanistan has not had a centralised monopoly on violence for a very, very long time (probably since its inception in the 1700s), meaning its government doesn't really govern large parts of the country in any sense of the word we're used to.
This is doubly true now, when the central government is arguably losing a civil war against the Taliban.
Any aid to the afghan countryside would have to be organized on a per-village basis, security could never be guaranteed for more than maybe 3 days at a time, and when the villages fall the Taliban will start on their curriculum either way.
Unfortunately, the most efficient way to become knowledgable about the Middle East is to read. A lot. The Middle East is a far more complex place than most people imagine and understanding the region requires a great deal of knowledge. I have been studying the Middle East for nearly a decade and I still feel like there is so much that I do not know. I would start by reading reputable news sources every day. Places like The Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BBC, Financial Times, are the Los Angeles Times are good English language news sources that you should look at. Additionally, I have written up a suggested reading list for learning about the Middle East, though it is a bit more security-related since that's my area of expertise. I hope it helps. And feel free to ask any questions if you have them.
Books - General History of the Middle East
Books - Middle East Military History
Books - Middle East Terrorism and Substate Violence
Books - U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East
Think Tanks
Below is a list of several different think tanks, which frequently publish everything from extension research and analysis to quick and succinct blog posts about the issues in the Middle East. Some of these think tanks specifically focus on the Middle East, while for others it is only one area of their research.
Journals, Blogs, Podcasts, and other Publications
I actually feel ok today. I have been in a bad rut for most of this year, and I'm not out of it, but I think I may have found the ladder and am starting to climb.
Also, I started reading this book,Afghanistan is a fascinating country.
It's only one, but I've recently read one of /r/askhistorian's recommendations, Afghanistan A Cultural and Political History which completely changed my view on the Afghan people. This little country is actually incredibly interesting and its people are among the most diverse imaginable for the size of their nation.
Several external empires have successfully conquered and held the territory that would become Afghanistan. Pre-historic archaeological evidence shows that the Indus Valley Civilization had outposts as far northwest as modern Afghanistan, and the ancient nomadic Indo-Europeans conquered the region, probably coming from the north before moving on to India - beginning a trend of nomads of various stripes conquering the region and then moving on.
The first significant historical empire to conquer and hold Afghanistan was Archaemenid Persia, which controlled the region for around 200 years before the conquests of Alexander the Great. After Alexander's brief rule, the region passed through the control of several Hellenistic successor states, punctuated by invasion by the India Maurya Empire before reverting to the rule of the Persian (or Persianized Central Asian) successor Parthian, Indo-Parthian, Kushan, Sassanid, and Indo-Sassanid states.
After the mid-7th Century CE the region was conquered, lost, and reconquered by a variety of Muslim rulers/states of Arab, Iranian, and Turkic origin, with imperial dynasties indigenous to what would become Afghanistan themselves emerging at this time from the regions around Balkh, Herat, and - most notably - Ghazna.
The Mongols first took the region in 1219 CE, and for the next 500 years the Mongols and their successor (including the Timurids and Mughals) controlled portions of modern Afghanistan, often alongside Persian (Safavid, etc) and other (Turkic, etc) Central Asian rulers.
The modern idea of an Afghan state arguably began with the Durrani Empire after Nadir Shah threw an invading Afghan dynasty out of Iran and then invaded Afghanistan, only to be driven out by a coalition led by Ahmad Shah Durrani, who would go on to conquer large portions of Iran, Central Asia, and Mughal North India. The Duranni Empire was the high-point of Afghan expansion in modern times, and though it would quickly lose much of its overseas territories Afghanistan has not been successfully invaded and held by a foreign power for a prolonged period since.
I found this book to be a good introduction to the topic, though its scope is limited by its national focus.
Hahaha, my pleasure! I've been reading up on language and culture in Afghanistan for a few years now, so I love it when people ask questions like yours. Afghanistan is one of the most interesting countries in the world when it comes to languages--Persian is an incredibly diverse language in this country, so much so that individual valleys (and even towns within them!) have their own dialects.
Hazaragi is especially interesting as it has a substantial inventory of Mongolic loanwords. This makes some sense when you see what the Hazara (3rd largest ethnic group in Afghanistan) look like. Linguists and historians speculate that the etymology of Hazara comes from the Persian word for 1,000 (hezar) as these folks are thought to be descendants of garrisons Ghengis Khan left in Bamyan after he wrecked shit there--his forces were divided into groups of 1,000 soldiers. Many Afghans are still salty about the devastation brought by the Mongols, a fact not helped by the fact that the majority of Hazara are Twelver Shia'a in a country more rooted in Sunni tradition--life ain't easy for the Hazara nowadays.
Besides Persian (an Indo-European language in the Indo-Iranian >> Western Iranian >> Southwestern Iranian family), Afghanistan has a shit ton of other languages. You mentioned Pashto, which is an Eastern Iranian language (so not mutually intelligible with Persian--no data to back this up, but I'd hazard the difference is like English and Norwegian or something like that). There's also the Pamiri languages (pretty sparse, also Eastern Iranian but of the northern subset), Balochi (Northwestern), and a whole independent group of Indo-Iranian languages called Nuristani, which is spoken in the very last area of Afghanistan to have been converted to Islam (late 18th century, I think!). Outside the Indo-Euro family, there are large groups of Turkic speakers, particularly Uzbek and Turkmen in the northern parts of the country, though there are some Kirghiz speakers way up in the Wakhan (the little panhandle stickin out to China).
Not on the list is Arabic--contrary to what a lot of people here in the West think, Arabic is spoken by hardly anybody in Afghanistan! It is a Semetic language of the Afro-Asiatic family and the last of its native speakers in this area of the world were Persianized quite some time ago (though Persian and Pashto both have a large number of Arabic loanwords on account of the Arab conquests and the spread of Islam). This is interesting as, especially in more conservative areas, there is still a massive reverence towards those who earn the title "Guardian" or Hafez (not the poet, though people love him too) by memorizing the Quran in its entirety, even if they don't understand 95% of what's being said in it! If you're into recent history in this area of the world, there's plenty of food for thought in how fundamentalism and extremism took such strong roots in a country that doesn't have the language or educational infrastructure in place to "home grow" such interpretations of religion.
Woah holy shit /rant. Didn't mean to type this much! Probably way more than you wanted to read! In the offchance it isn't, I recommend reading The Places In Between by Rory Stewart to wet your appetite. Homeboy walked across Afghanistan (Herat --> Kabul) in December 2001 and documented his adventure pretty well. No bias, no sugarcoating, no demonizing--he really does a good job showing the humanity of the place. If you're like me and want to dive more deeply into this fascinating country, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History is a bone dry but informationally rich textbook on the country. Land Beyond the River provides a great collection of well-researched anecdotes dealing with recent history in the areas directly north of Afghanistan and provides great light on how the Russian conquests of the Khanates and city-states to the north impacted Afghanistan, culminating in the Soviet invasion in the late 70s.
Alright, now I'm done.
Koran Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan 2002-2007 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199326355/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_Pw6rzbGW39TW2
War, Politics and Society in Afghanistan, 1978-1992 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0878407588/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_lx6rzb509WDTW
Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 https://www.amazon.com/dp/019983265X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_dz6rzbDMP6KG2
No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GVRVAXM/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_VB6rzbJ0EBR87
The Afghan Campaign: A Novel https://www.amazon.com/dp/0767922387/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_WC6rzbEDZ3B3Z
Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691154414/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_jD6rzb6MQ4J2N
I'm in the middle of the book Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History by Thomas Barfield, and from what I can gather, the country is most valued for it's 'buffer zone' status. Sure, There are a few cities worth ruling (Herat, Kandahar, Kabul), but most of the rest of the country is not worth the cost of central administration.
While there may be a vast quantity of metals and other valuable commodities underground, is it profitable to extract and export (security for facility, security transporting to regional hub, building/maintaining roads, bribes at checkpoints, bribes to gov't officials, etc)?
ETA: Here's a fun Ethnic Groups Map of Afghanistan from the Gulf 2000 Project. More Maps Here