The Lost History of Helmand (2009) | Hacker News Reader

The Lost History of Helmand (2009)

bbc.co.uk

46 pointsdredmorbius6 comments

I also spent a few months deployed in Helmand and Farah provinces in 2008. My platoon didn't go to Kajaki Dam in particular.. we saw a few little signs of what this article talks about everywhere. The guys in the line company that served in Lashkar Gah and Kajaki remarked about how bizarre the history was. I'm blown away.

The whole concept of "Technocracy" interests me to no end. Eisenhower warned not just of the Military Industrial Complex in his famous speech at the end of his presidency - he also warned of the repercussions of state-sponsored research and of those who were conducting it, and for what purposes (check out page 10): http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents...

"..there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

Eisenhower knew that we were learning so, so much about the world. Our ability to reason was, and is, unlocking so many secrets to the nature of nature itself, that there was a never-ending pressure for top-down, ambitious projects - especially just following the dropping of the bomb and the ending of WWII.

Its interesting how the Apollo Program, starting just a few short years after that speech, has become a driving force for the technocrats to push such projects. How many times has the something like the phrase, "we put a man on the moon, we can do this" been uttered in relation to some omnibus R&D project?

It's also about this time that the awareness started to develop that there were problems with no technical solution. This was a key point of many of Garrett Hardin's writings. Nuclear weapons and supersonic transport were two of these. Another concept of his was that "just because we've got the technological capability to do something doesn't mean that we should do it".

It's bizarre to watch that video. I spent a year there in Helmand. I recognize Kajaki dam and the streets of Lashkar Gah. I must've driven those roads hundreds of times.

One of our interpreters actually grew up there in Lashkar Gah and told us stories of the Taliban and how they would rape boys. He said things had become much better, but we still saw some pretty miserable stuff, even outside of the typical violence, particularly the treatment of women.

There are some fascinating pictures of Afghanistan in the fifties and sixties at [1]. While I'm sure not all of the country was like that, they do seem show people trying to participate in the modern world. Modern buildings, women working, education, industrial activities, etc.

More pictures at [2] and [3].

[1] http://www.retronaut.co/2010/10/once-upon-a-time-in-afghanis...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/07/afghanistan-in-th...

[3] http://englishrussia.com/2011/07/21/the-afghanistan-of-the-5...

NB: This is a resubmission of the original link rather than the blogspam I happened to have been forwarded myself earlier.

Thanks to teh_klev and dmix for pointing me straight: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7209366

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