One of the key facts about Afghanistan is that it is one of the least urbanized countries on the planet. Sorry the link went dead, but a calculation based on UN stats put Afghanistan about 5-10 from the very bottom of all countries, with another score or so too chaotic to generate any data. Also, no surprise, low in literacy, electricity, communications tech, roads and all that.
Theirs is a very different reality than the one we experience. And so they, in very many ways, are not like us. Not less human, as many would have you believe, but even more human.
Their thousands of years of culture has been based on a mutually supportive collection of very old and very successful subsistence based small communities that have survived and occasionally even thrived under the harshest of environmental conditions. It's not like they live in Eden. Nothing there is easy. But the interdependencies that make survival possible are very real and form the very basis of their value system, their reality-based sense of simple right and wrong.
They, like most sane people, understand that "we ae all in this together."
Or, in another variant, "an injury to one is an injury to all,"
Under living conditions like that, loyalties and dependencies extend outward from immediate family to relatives and communities and extemded families in other communities to tribes and so on. "I will help them; they will help me. You hurt them; you hurt me." At every level there is some actual structure, the family patriarch, the village chief, and so on. The next step in this is tribes.
So the very first thing to understand about Afghanistan is that it is a tribal society. This, of itself, says nothing about the degree of wellness or hardship or justice in that land. It a description of how things actually work in terms of managing production and the ethos that supports/reflects that economy.
It does not mean primitive, backwards, ignorant, superstitious and all that, and it does not mean that their society deserves to be destroyed. It means, in the most practical of terms, that they form themselves as communities.
It describes a form of interconnectedness, interdependencies, loyalties, trust and honor. We in the US, most of us, being thoroughly proletarianized, have only the barest hints of what that means. Understanding this type of society is the key to understanding why increasing the amount of force, intimidation, bribery, coercion, noble gestures, beads and trinkets, and whatever else will never force or induce these people to capitulate and become subservient to a foreign imperialist occupation.
Genocide might seem to work for a while. But even that strategy is doomed to fail, as it, in its "Shock and Awe" variant, failed in Iraq. The invaders are just one more tribe, maybe heavily armed. But every death they cause means one more family, one more clan or village, one whole tribe, has been hurt and disgraced. That presents the survivors with the option of living as a "dog." with no dignity. or exacting justice by striking back. That is not a choice, any more than breathing, or going extinct.
Just a needed note: The values and cultural norms they are now enslaved by may be as reprehensible to you as those of the Puritans or Nazis or the genocidal Catholic invaders of South America or the Christian Talibornagains, but remember they never attacked or invaded any other country to impose these beliefs on others. And, for those who have been so indoctrinated as to think these nasty beliefs and the actions associated with the Taliban are somehow "Afghan" values, remember that the Taliban extremists, like Pol Pot in Cambodia, or Pinochet in Chile, only came to power through the actions of the US. I tell you first-hand, before the US intervention, Afghanistan was as hospitable to outsiders/unbelievers as Turkey or Iran or Greece or Romania or Finland or any other country.
See the photos here to get an idea of what I am trying to convey:
http://www.lukepowell.com/(Edit minor typo and add link)
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