After ten years of the UK being at war in Afghanistan, how much do we the British people know about that country and its people. At a guess, I'd say practically nothing, except what our biased media spew out from time to time in an attempt to justify that illegal slaughter. This might not be the empirical answer, but it helps.
AFGHANISTAN: A Potted Social History
I. If the history of Afghanistan is about any one thing, it is about playing hard to get when capital turns on the charm: a mainly small-holding peasantry and artisanal population that spurns the joys of wage-slavery; saturated carpet bombings by external foes (sometimes in conjunction with the Afghani government) that fail to crush the smuggling operations of the mountain people; civil wars and the restricted nature of export crops making (non-drug related) industrial agriculture untenable; mountain bandits collecting taxes from all sides in return for protection, making the state’s tax collectors green with envy; meticulous social engineering plans to divide the country into northern (oil, gas, and minerals) and southern (cheap labour) spheres of influence, overwhelmed by ethnic/tribal/religious complications.Like the Columbian communeros (common land), minga (festive labour and reciprocal labour exchange) and the Russian obshchina, the self-subsistence Afghani local jirga (now devoid of all its communitarian village structures) proves a formidable obstacle to ‘progress’. Its strength is in inverse correlation to the power of the central government. In any case, the small amount of surplus secured by the state makes the seizure of power a dubious victory. Capital has almost given up creating modern structures of domination in Afghanistan, instead it tries to implant itself onto ‘communitarian’ traditions
Read more here; Revolt Against Plenty.
