19 Soldiers Who Fought In Afghanistan Reveal Their Preconceptions That Turned Out To Be Completely Wrong
1. That Afghanistan was an actual country. It’s only so on a map; the people (in some of the more rural places, at least) have no concept of Afghanistan.
We were in a village in northern Kandahar province, talking to some people who of course had no idea who we were or why we were there. This was in 2004; not only had they not heard about 9/11, they hadn’t heard Americans had come over. Talking to them further, they hadn’t heard about that one time the Russians were in Afghanistan either.
We then asked if they knew where the city of Kandahar was, which is a rather large and important city some 30 miles to the south. They’d heard of it, but no one had ever been there, and they didn’t know when it was.
For them, there was no Afghanistan. The concept just didn’t exist.
Who Are The Taliban?
The Taliban is an insurgent group that was created in the aftermath of the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan and the Afghan Civil War.
After the Soviets left Afghanistan, the central government fell and the various mujahideen forces began to battle each other for control of the country.
It was during this period when the Taliban made its debut, when a group of Pashtun-Afghan students who had taken refugee in Pakistan decided that they were going to end the fighting and establish order.
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