Afghanistan Project CMS

<p>After 40 years of peace in Afghanistan, in 1979 the Soviet Union sent troops across the border to provide support to the Marxist government.</p> <p>At that point or shortly after that period, the Pakistan government, and with the assistance of the Americans, the Saudis and other foreign interests, began to funnel money, weapons and other kinds of support to mujahideen, to Resistance Fighters who were opposed to the Marxist government in Afghanistan and to their Soviet sponsors.</p> <p>And from that period on, new forms of wealth and new forms of power began to pour into Afghanistan in the form, for example, of AK-47 machine guns and RPG shoulder-launched rockets that were used to take out armored personnel carriers and tanks and that sort of thing.</p> <p>Particularly in Pashour in the &lsquo;80s there was, if not a romanticism about the war, at least it was put in a positive light. And the Afghans at least for public consumption were not unhappy to be portrayed as you know a warrior culture so to speak.<br /> <br /> Traditional Afghan carpets showing images of war have been little studied, but they can provide insights into how Afghans portray themselves&hellip; and how outsiders often view the people of Afghanistan.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s sort of now been you know close to 25 or 30 years you know that various varieties of these carpets have been made.&nbsp;In 1988 when I wanted to pick up one of these carpets to bring home I went to a carpet dealer and he had quite a number of them.&nbsp;They all came directly essentially out of observations from the Soviet War. That is it&rsquo;s not just helicopters, these are you know particular types of armored personnel carriers with the number of wheels, the type of guns, and particularly the Kolishnokoff which they were most familiar with having all of its little parts available.</p> <p>You know that the person that did the design knows the weapons.</p> <p>And it&rsquo;s a tradition that still continues to some extent today and also for the tourist trade is that as soon as the Americans invaded there became World Trade Center war carpets with planes flying into the Twin Towers and what not.<br /> <br /> Historically, there was no relationship between the people who made carpets and the people who obtained them.</p> <p>Afghanistan is a major exporter of carpets which even centuries ago tended to move very, very long distances. We&rsquo;d see them in Dutch paintings and obviously the Dutch have no idea where these come from but we can look at the tribal patterns that are indicated by the carpets and know they pretty much came from this part of Central Asia. And the people who made them had no idea where they ended up either.</p> <p>In more modern times, carpet weavers and sellers in Afghanistan have learned to produce the kind of carpets that foreign buyers want to buy.</p> <p>But what are the dangers associated with Afghans portraying themselves as a warrior culture&hellip; and with others seeing them in this way?</p> <p>In October of 2001, there was an article that appeared in <em>The New York Times </em>about the archive. And when that article appeared, that morning when I got to my office, I think I had close to 70 voicemails from different programs, from different media outlets and 60 Minutes and Good Morning America and every other program that you could imagine. Because at that point they knew, the producers of those shows, knew that within a week or so, probably in all likelihood, America was gonna be at war, and we were gonna be fighting in Afghanistan. So they wanted this material desperately.</p> <p>I did not want, at that moment in history, for us to be contributing pictures of Afghans killing Afghans, anything that would dehumanize Afghans, [to] make it easier to imagine them as savage and barbaric and not to fully understand the nature of that society and the ways in which they themselves had been manipulated, the ways in which they themselves had been taken advantage of by Osama Bin Laden and other people. So we resisted efforts to use those pictures, and in fact did not allow people to use the pictures immediately because we were very worried about how they might be misused.</p>

<p>&quot;Just as the heavens would not tolerate two suns, nor would the earth two masters.&quot; -Alexander the Great</p> <p>Before Tamerlane and Babur, before Chinghis Khan, and Ashokha before him, there was one man who built empires unlike any other. His name was Alexander, and he extended the Greek city state of Athens to become an empire that stemmed from the Nile to the Indus. He did all this before his 25th birthday.</p> <p>The Greek historian Plutarch wrote a biography of Alexander in the centuries following his rule. According to the book The Life of Alexander, the young Macedonian was said to be a descendent of Hercules, and was educated by Aristotle. Alexander famously said that he was indebted to his father for living, but was indebted to his teachers for living well.</p> <p>Perhaps it was his sense of birthright power, or perhaps a pursuit of riches, that compelled the young Alexander to conquer vast stretches of land to the east.</p> <p>He as he moved through the Middle East, into Peria, he pursued in battle various Shahs in the region&ndash;including Darius III, King of Persia.</p> <p>Darius died in battle. Although Alexander did not kill him, Alexander claimed victory and took the title Shahanshah, or the King of Kings.</p> <p>&quot;In the 4th century BC Alexander the Great, one of the greatest conquerors in world history began to move eastward from Greece and was extraordinarily successful occupying a vast domain stretching from Greece all the way to Afghanistan. He actually occupied and took over Afghanistan within six months and began a process of bringing Afghanistan into the Greek world. Alexander the Great&rsquo;s conquests brought Afghanistan new cultural developments in many aspects of life and society that reflected Greek traditions.&quot;</p> <p>Although Greek influence was heavily felt, a native Persian style persisted. What resulted was a hybrid of Greek and native traditions.</p> <p>&quot;That&rsquo;s one of Afghanistan&rsquo;s glories, hybrids: the integration of a variety of different cultural motifs. The Greeks, when they arrived with the invasion from Alexander did stay in Afghanistan and intermarried with the local people creating a fusion.</p> <p>&quot;The local people who were subjugated by the Greeks, of course, were influenced by the Greeks but a lot of their traditional Iranian culture persisted. Whatever accommodations they made to the Greeks and whatever they borrowed from the Greeks had to fit in with their traditional beliefs, their traditional values, and their traditional lifestyle. They would choose what they wanted from Greek civilization and would opt out of certain aspects of Greek civilization that didn&rsquo;t jive or fit in with their culture. That would happen repeatedly throughout Afghan history.&quot;</p> <p>Alexander went on to conquer parts of India and was on his way to Arabia when he died. The Greek influence in the region persisted, however, for centuries to come.</p>