Good News From Afghanistan

Posted By Blackfive

Arthur Chrenkoff has a round up of Good News From Afghanistan - Part 5. Here's a bit from it:

On Saturday, 9 October, for the fifth time in my life I went into a polling station and cast a vote in Australian federal election. The same day, but several hours later and on the other side of the globe, millions of people were exercising their democratic right to vote for the first time in their lives.

In my earliest political memory my father and I are hunching over a radio set, listening with the sound turned down to Radio Free Europe and the news of armed resistance against the Soviet invaders springing up around Afghanistan. The year is 1979, I am 7 years old, and this is the first time I'm hearing about the mysterious and romantic mudjahedin and their struggle against the Red Army - the topic not surprisingly absent from Poland's communist media. Over the next few years we would continue to follow the events in Afghanistan with somewhat mixed feelings; the unspoken support and sympathy for the brave Afghans fighting against communist occupation, but at the same time sadness for the fate of the Red Army troops, most of them unwilling conscripts forced to fight somebody else's war in a faraway country. There but for the grace of God goes I, thought my friends' older brothers of the draft age.

Recalling this story as I came out of my Australian polling station made me realize that for most of my life, and certainly all the time I have been conscious of world events, Afghanistan has been what many would colloquially - and unkindly - call a basketcase; a harsh and impoverished land, forever doomed to be riven by war and suffocate under foreign or domestic oppression.

Yet finally, after a quarter of a century, Afghanistan is getting better...

Go read the whole post.

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Good News From Afghanistan

Arthur Chrenkoff has a round up of Good News From Afghanistan - Part 5. Here's a bit from it:

On Saturday, 9 October, for the fifth time in my life I went into a polling station and cast a vote in Australian federal election. The same day, but several hours later and on the other side of the globe, millions of people were exercising their democratic right to vote for the first time in their lives.

In my earliest political memory my father and I are hunching over a radio set, listening with the sound turned down to Radio Free Europe and the news of armed resistance against the Soviet invaders springing up around Afghanistan. The year is 1979, I am 7 years old, and this is the first time I'm hearing about the mysterious and romantic mudjahedin and their struggle against the Red Army - the topic not surprisingly absent from Poland's communist media. Over the next few years we would continue to follow the events in Afghanistan with somewhat mixed feelings; the unspoken support and sympathy for the brave Afghans fighting against communist occupation, but at the same time sadness for the fate of the Red Army troops, most of them unwilling conscripts forced to fight somebody else's war in a faraway country. There but for the grace of God goes I, thought my friends' older brothers of the draft age.

Recalling this story as I came out of my Australian polling station made me realize that for most of my life, and certainly all the time I have been conscious of world events, Afghanistan has been what many would colloquially - and unkindly - call a basketcase; a harsh and impoverished land, forever doomed to be riven by war and suffocate under foreign or domestic oppression.

Yet finally, after a quarter of a century, Afghanistan is getting better...

Go read the whole post.

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