Afghan culture and people
POSTED BY: dreamtrove
UPDATED: Sunday, August 30, 2026 16:20
VIEWED: 13932
PAGE 1 of 9
Niki,
This is for you. It's time for me to shut up and listen. Tell us about Afganistan. I mean, what it's really like, not the political ping pong the US is playing. I want to get to know the area, and I think that everyone here does, or should. If you can, tell us what you know, and include any links to any information that tells it how it actually is, and I mean, real world not political.
When I talk to foreigners about American, it's very strange. They think the US is politically driven, and yet, really, most of US politics is just theater for us. What the govt. does doesn't affect our day to day lives. Occasionally it does, but just as an obstacle. MSM probably has more effect than the govt. I'm just curious about knowing the real Afghanistan.
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>>Crickets<<
Bump
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That was a shock: Thank you. Thank you for your civility, I expected you to lay into me (or maybe you haven't read my last response over there...) And thank you for wanting to know. I'd have to think about it to do a decent job, and I spent so much time on the last post that now it's dark, and, and...
But I can never resist, so I'll make a small start. Hopefully small. Apologies for the size of some of the pix, I just haven't got the energy to resize them. At least I resized the ones that would cause folks to scroll for the text.
My dad was sent to Afghanistan to help build Ariana Afghan Airways in 1958. They had tried to educate engineers here, but those brought here refused to go home. Not surprising. Ariana still exists, to my surprise; when we got there, their idea of "maintenance" was to fly the planes until they fell down in the desert, then walk away. Literally.
Because they did then, and many of them still do now, live in the age of Christ. That's the quickest and best picture I can give you. Driving in from the airport we passed a man leading a donkey with a woman and child on it. Mom cried "My gawd, it's Mary, Joseph and Jesus!"
There were no roads then...I doubt there are many good ones even now. The desert moves; it's a country where the northern half has 140-degree Summers, six-foot-snow Winters. Rivers flood, wash out bridges, and the desert never stops moving.
What isn't desert is rock. Now there is much more vegetation I see, but it became a desert in part because the Kuchis (nomadic tribes: camel caravans) used it as a trade route between Russia and everywhere else, and chopped down trees as they went through for campfires, etc. They helped create a desert.
Kabul is at 6,000 feet; the highest peak is 25,557 above sea level. It's a high desert. The mountain range is the Hindu Kush..."Hindu Killer"...an impentrable length of crags covered in snow that make the Alps look like gentle, rolling hills. Life is harsher than about any place on earth, except maybe the deserts of Africa or the North Pole. Survival is difficult at best, and poverty is the order of the day. Even the lakes were surrounded by desert and little else:
This is NOT a painting:
The houses were made of a combination of mud, donkey dung and straw...the floors dirt. If it was a bad rainy season, they just "melted".
In Kabul at the time (bear in mind that was 50 years ago, now it is much Westernized) there were "sewers", called Jui Ditches...upstream a horse might be relieving himself, downstream a woman washing clothes, further a child bathing or someone drinking. The disease rate was so bad (and I doubt THAT has changed much) that the saying was if a child lived to the age of ten, all that could kill him was a knife or a bullet.
And there were plenty of those. On Ramadan and other Muslim holidays, everyone stayed well within their compound walls...if they had compounds (which all non-natives did). Also when the Kuchis came through. The Kuchis didn’t veil their women; back then the men drove the sheep down from the high pasture, the women took the camels (loaded with goods and nets full of lambs) along the rivers (I imagine they stick closer together now, judging from the photos) and they’d meet up at night and strike huge, black tents.
http://i25.photob
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I realize it's the weekend and not many are here, but given the total lack of response to (seeming to represent a total lack of interest in) this topic, I am not going to take it any further.
Given my personal feelings, I can't help saying that it seems like people here, and probably most of America, are more interested in discussing Afghanistan as a basis for debating the political and military aspects, rather than leaning about the people we are killing.
Okay, so I'm bitter. It's like that with every country we invade, and I find that inexplicably sad. I spent hours, until late in the night, trying to give people a taste of what it's like where we send our men and what the people and culture of the country we've invaded and occupied for eight years are like.
I'm not really surprised at the lack of interest. When we came back from Afghanistan and people asked where we'd been, the inevitable response was "Isn't that some place in Africa or something?" Nobody would care about or even know about Afghanistan now if we weren't at war there, and most don't care about AFGHANISTAN even now, much less the Afghans.
It's human, but sad; if we bothered to learn anything about the culture and people of places like Vietnam, Iraq, Korea, etc., maybe we'd make better decisions.
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Niki
Thanks for posting the info.
It's a lot to absorb. And it's like finding out about any different culture. You go from, "Yeah, I get this." to "Why in the world would folks ever do that?", and back again - over and over. Pretty extreme "over and over" with the Afganis, it seems to me.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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I'm just back from a long trip, so I wasn't around for the orginal postings. I AM interested, but I don't have much to say.
The picture of the legless man did stand out to me, though.
***************************************************************
Silence is consent.
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Sorry, Nik...
I was waiting to see other peoples responses, since I most of this already from my working with RAWA.
Unfortuntely, it is pretty true that most americans are quite blind to anything outside their own borders - the Pashtun folk I know north of here find that immensely irritating.
-F
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Sorry Nikki,
I'm very interested...
just haven't been at the computer until now today...
Either your with the terrorists, or ... your with the terrorists 
Lets party like its 1939
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can't imagine how I missed this thread , since Wednesday 'till now.
Fascinating.
As to a reaction: We have almost nothing in common with them. I can't see any way that our presence there can help them. The scale of the problems there is so extreme, it would take a minimum of 50 years, and tons of money, to start making a real change there, and as a nation, we can't guarantee anything for more than 4 years, most things beyond 2-- the Presidency and the Congress change that fast.
( I had more to write, but I can't get my head around it, so I'll just close here.)
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Interesting stuff.
Of course it prompts more questions, So I'm writing these in a second window, while I'm reading, so here's my running commentary thoughts...
If you check the time stamp, it was before your vitriolic post, but then I bumped this afterwords, because I thought it was a better thread. Mostly what bothered me about the other is it was degenerating into partisanship. And *yes* people on the right have the same frustrating experience that people on the left do: The other side endlessly defending the stupid war of their party, as well as other pointless actions. I think we could make a lot of headway by just admitting that both major parties are wrong, even if they are on our political side. But I digress... Afghanistan.
"Ariana" Probably ironically a derivation of Aryan. (for those with their irony sensors off, These are people who would also name something Hindu Kush.) Sorry, I find these contradictions humorous and at the same time very telling.
The society you describe is not dissimilar to that of early christian societies, but some north african nomadic behavior.
Just curious: Do these people graze animals? This is a very desolate landscape, the sort that grazing and herding might create over a couple thousand years.
Also, language/culture. Are they all muslims? or do you find animism in remote areas, or trace aryan beliefs?
There's a level of dysfunction here that you don't find across the border in western China, where the culture is Altaic, rather than Aryan or Semitic.
We eat naan here to, as I suppose they do in most of the world. I see a quick search reveals that it is persian in origin, like Paneer, though both are things you would be more likely to find I think now in India than Iran.
Sharia law is always a death sentence. 80% of all Sharia amputees die from complications. In our own early history, a man sentenced to be shot, could be shot, and survive, and the sentence was considered to be carried out. This is probably the reason for hangings.
Quote:
The childhood death rate you wouldn't believe, and the lifespan was about 40 back then--and a 40-year-old looked about like an 80-year-old here.
Yes, I would. I have wondered about the aging. I noticed this several times with Afghans. Is it the opium? Or something else in the diet? You don't see this so much with indo-aryans or with iranians.
Okay, animals: I'm guessing there was extensive grazing in the past which we part of the ecological collapse.
The roaches are a nice apocalyptic image, reminiscent of HG Wells. I imagine that's how it goes: The most resilient life form continues to feed off of everything else when life dies. The altitudes here point to a water table collapse, which meets with the deforestation, similar to the sahara, SW US, and similar situations. Fragile ecosystems at higher altitudes, though you can kill any: IIRC, parts of Xinjiang are below sea level.
"The Afghans were all convinced all Americans were rich"
Most of the world is. In the case of the Afghans, they're right. What's weirder is that Czechs have this image, when actually, we're no richer than Czechs. Conversely, lots of Americans think of countries like Mexico and Korea (maybe not anymore, but say even 5 years ago) as poor, though they are no poorer than the US. Not to mention western stereotypes about Sub-Saharan Africa...
Sheep, that's worse than cattle, environmentally speaking...
Obviously there's some pretty severe Sunni extremism in this. My Iranian friends didn't believe this existed outside of Saudi Arabia. So far my experience has been that the Shiia have no tolerance for this sort of thing. It gives more of an insight into why the two are not going to get along anytime soon.
But back to the people and land.
Another quick search reveals that the environmental collapse is pretty similar to africa, and not surprisingly, is more likely to kill the present inhabitants than anything else (the logical fallacy often used is: But we've lived this way for 1000s of years. The realit
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